Candida is associated with craving simple carbs (white foods -pasta, bread, rice, and all sugars) which feed the yeast. Candida develops for many reasons. Basically, it is a 'helper' attempting to create balance in the gut, generally due to antibiotics, preservatives, heavy metal toxins and sterile foods.

We can make candida obsolete and unnecessary by rebalancing gut microbials. Antibiotics for mother or baby during pregnancy and birth (intrapartum antibiotics) are the most common sources of microbial imbalance leading to candida in children (and mother). The mother's exposures to mercury through (silver) amalgam fillings and vaccinations herself, and HER mother's mercury toxin exposures are other variables leading to candida overgrowth.

Our foods have "preservatives", which means chemicals that retard microbial and bacterial growth in the food product. Live foods have enzymes and microbials and spoil. If a food doesn't spoil at room temperature within a week, it has preservatives, essentially.

Repeat food safety violations are just the tip of the iceberg.

Two weeks ago, the USDA's Office of the Inspector General released a report that, once again, proves that our food system is broken: First, the Food Safety and Inspection Service doesn't meaningfully attempt to stop repeat violations of food safety laws. Second, it has allowed a 15-year-old pilot program with faster slaughter and fewer inspectors to proceed without review. Third, it all but ignores its humane slaughter mandate. Remarkably, unless you read Food Safety News or the agricultural media, you will have missed this extremely damning report.

If you were told to ingest a biologically alien synthetic chemical whose presence on this planet did not predate 1976,and whose structure is only a few atoms away from the deadly pesticide DDT, and you knew that not only were there no long term human safety studies performed on it, but that it had been already proven in tests to have following adverse health effects:

• Shrunken thymus glands (up to 40% shrinkage)
• Enlarged liver and kidneys.
• Abnormal histopathological changes in spleen and thymus
• Increased cecal weight
• Reduced growth rate
• DNA Damage
• Adverse changes to gastrointestinal bacteria
• Abnormal Pelvic Mineralization
• Decreased red blood cell count
• Hyperplasia of the pelvis
• Aborted pregnancy (Maternal & Fetal Toxicity)
• Decreased fetal body weights and placental weights
• Bowel inflammation/Crohn's Disease
• Triggering migraine
• Increase glycosylation of hemoglobin (HbA1c) for diabetics
  
  ...would you still consume it?

Yesterday, Connecticut passed a law requiring foods with genetically engineered ingredients to be labeled - and it's all thanks to your grassroots activism!

Connecticut has taken a first important step. The House version of its Label GMO bill (which ANH-USA helped draft) passed the Connecticut Senate unanimously on Saturday, and passed the legislature 134 to 3 on Monday. Our hope is that this bill will inspire neighboring states to take similar action so the trigger can come into effect as quickly as possible.

Many dismiss childhood stomach aches as a normal part of growing up. However research shows that chronic childhood stomach aches could result in anxiety and depression later in life.

A Stanford University researcher found that gastric irritation early in life could pave the way for lifelong psychological problems. Of course, not all childhood stomach aches will lead to adult depression and anxiety; genetic makeup and when the stomach aches occur developmentally are also important factors.

Researcher Pankaj Pasricha, MD, notes that 15 to 20 percent of people experience chronic pain in the upper abdomen, and are more likely to suffer from anxiety or depression than their peers.

Gut and brain hardwired together

Dr. Pasricha points to the connection between the gut and brain as an explanation for psychological issues related to childhood stomach aches. The gut has its own nervous system - similar to that of the brain - and is hardwired to the brain by the vagus nerve, a nerve that runs from the brain to the internal organs. As a result of signals transferred back and forth, disturbances in the gut can impact the brain.

To test whether chronic childhood gut problems could lead to adult anxiety and depression, researchers performed experiments on baby rats, irritating their stomachs for six days.

Email is supposed to make modern life easier, but it is making workers more stressed than ever as they struggle to stay on top of hundreds of messages per day, according to researchers.
Reading and sending emails prompts telltale signs of stress including elevated blood pressure, heart rate and levels of the hormone cortisol, a study found.

Researchers who followed a group of 30 government employees found that 83 per cent became more stressed while using email, rising to 92 per cent when speaking on the phone and using email at the same time.

Although receiving a single message was no more stressful than answering one phone call or talking to someone face-to-face, emails had a stronger effect overall because people received so many each day.

Stress levels, analysed by saliva samples as well as heart rate and blood pressure monitors over a 24-hour period, peaked at points in the day when people's inboxes were fullest, the study found.

Emails which were irrelevant, which interrupted work or demanded an immediate response were particularly taxing, while those which arrived in response to completed work had a calming effect.

I can tell you the exact date that I began to think of myself in the first-person plural - as a superorganism, that is, rather than a plain old individual human being. It happened on March 7. That's when I opened my e-mail to find a huge, processor-choking file of charts and raw data from a laboratory located at the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. As part of a new citizen-science initiative called the American Gut project, the lab sequenced my microbiome - that is, the genes not of "me," exactly, but of the several hundred microbial species with whom I share this body. These bacteria, which number around 100 trillion, are living (and dying) right now on the surface of my skin, on my tongue and deep in the coils of my intestines, where the largest contingent of them will be found, a pound or two of microbes together forming a vast, largely uncharted interior wilderness that scientists are just beginning to map.

I clicked open a file called Taxa Tables, and a colorful bar chart popped up on my screen. Each bar represented a sample taken (with a swab) from my skin, mouth and feces. For purposes of comparison, these were juxtaposed with bars representing the microbiomes of about 100 "average" Americans previously sequenced.

Here were the names of the hundreds of bacterial species that call me home. In sheer numbers, these microbes and their genes dwarf us. It turns out that we are only 10 percent human: for every human cell that is intrinsic to our body, there are about 10 resident microbes - including commensals (generally harmless freeloaders) and mutualists (favor traders) and, in only a tiny number of cases, pathogens. To the extent that we are bearers of genetic information, more than 99 percent of it is microbial. And it appears increasingly likely that this "second genome," as it is sometimes called, exerts an influence on our health as great and possibly even greater than the genes we inherit from our parents. But while your inherited genes are more or less fixed, it may be possible to reshape, even cultivate, your second genome.

Does high fructose corn syrup make some of us behave like drug-addicted rats?

New research by an expert on addiction has found the same pattern of behavior in rats on cocaine and rats self-dosing on high fructose corn syrup.

Dr. Francesco Leri, an associate professor of neuroscience and applied cognitive science at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, presented these findings at the annual meeting last week of the Canadian Association for Neuroscience.

Leri has observed his "food addiction hypothesis" in two previously published studies, both using Oreo cookies, but this time he used actual high fructose corn syrup, selected "because of the controversy (over it) in the literature," he told me in an interview.

The pharmaceutical industry has compromised the Western medical establishment and hooked America on drugs. One psychiatrist is fighting back.

For the last 33 years, David Healy, an Irish psychiatrist and professor at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales, has written heavily researched university press books and academic journal articles on various aspects of psychopharmaceuticals. His output includes 20 books, 150 peer-reviewed papers and 200 other published works. He is not only well-pedigreed, with degrees and fellowships from Dublin, Galway and Cambridge medical schools, he is a widely recognized expert in both the history and the science of neurochemistry and psychopharmacology.

Yet Healy says his output and reputation have had little to no effect - both on the pharmaceutical industry he argues buries relevant information about prescription drug harms, and on the psychiatric and medical professions he claims are being "eclipsed" by drug companies.

"It's been clear to me that writing books or articles banging on the risks and hazards of drugs is just going to increase the sale of drugs," said Healy, who speaks calmly, dresses mostly in black and looks a bit like Rod Serling.

Rather than write another university publication, Healy has taken his frustration to the street. In November, he launched a nonprofit website called Rxisk.org with a group of like-minded and highly credentialed international colleagues. The site aggregates FDA data about prescription drug side effects and urges patients to submit a detailed report on their own pharmaceutical drug reactions.

Healy is not the first psychiatrist to express boiling frustration with the pharmaceutical industry or to pen dire warnings about drug-based healthcare. He is joined by people like American psychiatrist Peter Breggin, who has written several books critical of "biological psychiatry," and Irving Kirsch, who directs the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School/Beth Israel Deaconess Medical School and is best known for The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth. Healy is the author of such dire sounding titles as Pharmageddon and Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression.

We like the idea that food can be the answer to our ills, that if we eat nutritious foods we won't need medicine or supplements. We have valued this notion for a long, long time. The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." Today, medical experts concur. If we heap our plates with fresh fruits and vegetables, they tell us, we will come closer to optimum health.

This health directive needs to be revised. If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables, we must choose the right varieties. Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

These insights have been made possible by new technology that has allowed researchers to compare the phytonutrient content of wild plants with the produce in our supermarkets. The results are startling.

Wild dandelions, once a springtime treat for Native Americans, have seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider a "superfood." A purple potato native to Peru has 28 times more cancer-fighting anthocyanins than common russet potatoes. One species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious displayed in our supermarkets.