A 31-year old woman's heart problems and fainting might have had something to do with the fact that she drank only soda for about half her life, according to a report of her case.

The woman, who lives in Monaco, a small country near southern France, was brought to a hospital after she fainted. A blood test showed she had severely low potassium levels. And a test of her heart's electrical activity revealed she had a condition called long QT syndrome, which can cause erratic heart beats.

The woman did not have a family history of heart or hormone problems. But she told her doctors that, since the age of 15, she had not drunk any water - soda (specifically cola) was the only liquid she consumed. She drank about 2 liters (2 quarts) of cola daily, she said.

After abstaining from soda for just one week, the woman's potassium levels and heart electrical activity returned to normal.

Drinking too much cola may cause excess water to enter the bowels, which in turn leads to diarrhea, and loss of potassium, the researchers said. High amounts of caffeine can also increase urine production and decrease potassium reabsorption, the researchers said. Potassium plays a role in helping a person's heartbeat, and low levels of potassium may cause heart rhythm problems.

I recently spent the day with the family at the Taste of Colorado, a food and music festival in downtown Denver.

As soon as we got there, I spotted the bungee trapeze ride and ran to get in line. I was the only adult (past age 11) who was in line, but I didn't care. I'm a big kid and I'll never grow up.

As soon as I got strapped in, my heart was in my throat. I realized what I had gotten into. I exploded into the sky and I could feel my blood pressure rise. I bounced up and down into the sky for a several minutes. It took me awhile to come off that high.

If I had measured my blood pressure right after that craziness, I'm sure it would've been sky high.

Unfortunately, for many of Americans, elevated blood pressure is happening on a daily basis - without the bungee trapeze.

The most common diagnosis at the doctor's office is high blood pressure (hypertension). This affects Americans at a staggering rate, now reaching 1 in 3 Americans. Having a blood pressure reading that is greater than 140/90 on 3 occasions warrants the diagnosis of hypertension.

Addressing this for one's health is crucial because high blood pressure is the single most important risk factor for the development of heart attacks and stroke.

Health care costs related to hypertension reach several hundred billions of dollars per year, and that number probably won't change anytime soon. Hypertension costs 12% of total US health care costs - more than $185 billion per year. Madness, isn't it?

From the beginning of time (well, at least since there's been fire), man has been eating bone broth. Have you ever wondered why?

I'm sure you remember your mother or grandmother telling you to make sure to eat your chicken soup when you were sick. And likely when you did, you actually felt better. Have you ever wondered why?

I recommend everyone make bone broth and incorporate it into your dietary routine. Here's why.

1. It heals a leaky gut.

The gelatin in bone broth protects and heals the mucosal lining of the digestive tract and helps aid in the digestion of nutrients.

2. Fights infections such as colds and flu.

A study published in the journal Chest shows eating chicken soup during a respiratory infection reduces the number of white blood cells, which are the cells that cause flu and cold symptoms.

3. Reduces joint pain and inflammation.

Steady decline in number of women nursing their babies is blamed on lack of public efforts to counter prejudice

The RCM has shared its concerns about the government's seeming lack of interest in the issue of breastfeeding.

Claire Jones Hughes was mortified when she was told by fellow diners in a cafe that she should be more discreet when breastfeeding her four-month-old daughter. "It was very unpleasant watching you feed," she was informed. But this was affluent, liberal Brighton. Another customer came to her rescue, ordered the group to "get in the 21st century" and, rather than hide away, Claire decided to take a stand. She took to the internet and organised a breastfeeding "flashmob" attended by 60 mothers who, just days later, proudly nursed their babies by the town's clock tower.

Claire, a customer services manager, had made her point and acceptance of public breastfeeding, even in this bastion of tolerance, was given what health professionals would say was a welcome nudge. Yet such a display of unashamed public breastfeeding is unlikely to happen in large swaths of the country, figures from the Department of Health suggest. In Brighton, 67.1% of new mothers were partially or totally breastfeeding their children when they reported for a checkup six to eight weeks following their child's birth, according to statistics for the first three months of 2013. Yet in other parts of the country the figures remain resolutely low.

Swimming has been banned at a former blue flag beach in Co Cork due to excessive E.coli levels while the public has been warned of "potential risks" at three other bathing spots, including two current blue flag beaches.

Cork County Council was forced to prohibit swimming at Fountainstown beach, 23km south of Cork City.

A previous recipient of the coveted EU-approved symbol, the council did not make an application this year for Fountainstown to retain its blue flag status due to stricter bathing water criteria.

Recent tests showed Fountainstown had more than double the EU permitted levels of E.coli.

However, advisory notices have also been placed at three beaches in West Cork - Barleycove in the Mizen peninsula, The Warren at Rosscarbery and Tragumna near Skibbereen.

The fight over rbGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone) continues, even under new ownership.

After acquiring rbGH from Monsanto, Elanco (part of Eli Lilly) has stepped up efforts to convince milk processors and the wider food industry that milk from rbGH-injected cows is safe. Central to their new campaign is a paper, commissioned through PR company Porter-Novelli, from eight prominent experts and academics in medicine and dairy science (Recombinant bovine somatotropin (rbST): a safety assessment).

The authors are Richard Raymond, former undersecretary for Food Safety at USDA, Connie Bales of Duke University Medical Centre, Dale Bauman of Cornell University, David Clemmons of the University of North Carolina, Ronald Kleinman of Harvard Medical school, Dante Lanna of the University of Sao Paolo, Stephen Nickerson of the University of Georgia, and Kristen Sejrsen of Aarhus University, Denmark. The new paper was not peer-reviewed but it was presented at the July 2009 joint annual meeting of the American Dairy Science Association, the Canadian Society of Animal Science and the American Society of Animal Science in Montreal, Canada. It argues strongly for the benefits and safety of rbGH milk and has been widely distributed by Elanco. According to a rebuttal circulated by a number of consumer advocacy organisations, however, the paper misrepresents the position of various medical bodies ⁽¹⁾.

The paper claims, for instance, that the safety of rbGH is endorsed by the American Medical Association (AMA). Through their Campaign for Safe Food, Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility (Oregon PSR), has pointed out that the AMA has no policy on rbGH and offers no such endorsement. Instead, they note the April 2008 AMA newsletter cites past president Ron Davis saying "Hospitals should......use milk produced without recombinant bovine growth hormone".

If you could get 70 percent of Americans addicted to your drugs and rake in $280 billion a year in the process, would you do it? If you could come up with a "pill for every problem" and charge Americans twice as much for those pills as people in other countries pay, would you do it? If you could make more money than you ever dreamed possible by turning the American people into the most doped up people in the history of the planet, would you do it?

In America today, the number of people hooked on legal drugs absolutely dwarfs the number of people hooked on illegal drugs. And, sadly, the number of people killed by legal drugs absolutely dwarfs the number of people killed by illegal drugs. But most Americans assume that if a drug is "legal" that it must be safe. After all, the big pharmaceutical companies and the federal government would never allow us to take anything that would hurt us, right?

Sadly, the truth is that they don't really care about us. They don't really care that prescription painkillers are some of the most addictive drugs on the entire planet and that they kill more Americans each year than heroin and cocaine combined. They don't care that antidepressants are turning tens of millions of Americans into zombies and can significantly increase the chance of suicide (just look at the warning label). All the big pharmaceutical companies really care about is making as much money as they possibly can. The following are 20 signs that the pharmaceutical companies are running a $280 billion money making scam...

I find that grain bashing makes for a tasty, but ultimately unsatisfying meal.

You all know how much I love doing it, though. But no matter how often I sit down to dine on the stuff (and I've done it with great gusto in the past), I always leave the table feeling like I left something behind. Like maybe I wasn't harsh enough about the danger of gluten, or I failed to really convey just how much I hated lectins. If I didn't know better, I'd think the mere mention of grains was eliciting a crazy insulin-esque response and throwing my satiety hormones all out of whack. I was filling up on anti-grain talk, but I just couldn't fill that void for long.

Well, I've got the hunger today, and this time I aim to stuff myself to the point of perpetual sickness. I don't ever want to have to look at another anti-grain argument again (yeah, right). If things get a little disjointed, or if I descend into bullet points and sentence fragments, it's only because the hunger has taken over and I've decided to dispense with the pleasantries in order to lay it all out at once.

So please, bear with me.

Apart from maintaining social conventions in certain situations and obtaining cheap sugar calories, there is absolutely no reason to eat grains. Believe me -- I've searched far and wide and asked everyone I can for just one good reason to eat cereal grains, but no one can do it. They may have answers, but they just aren't good enough. For fun, though, let's see take a look at some of the assertions:

The majority of doctors, nurses and front line health workers were not vaccinated against flu last winter, official figures have revealed.

Health officials said they were "very disappointed" with the figures, which mean that, despite drives to improve uptake, only 45.6 per cent of health care workers were vaccinated against seasonal influenza - only slightly more than the previous year.

Of more than one million health care workers involved in direct patient care, 466,600 were vaccinated. Forty five per cent of doctors were vaccinated and only 41 per cent of qualified nurses.

Professor Nick Phin, a flu expert at Public Health England (PHE), said: "We are very disappointed to see that fewer than half of frontline healthcare workers received protection against flu last winter, and that the number is only slightly more than the previous year.

"Few healthcare workers will need reminding of the potential impact of flu during winter. Apart from reducing their chances of a miserable illness, vaccination is the only way to protect those patients who are at high risk of the complications of flu. PHE strongly recommends that all frontline health and social care staff take up the offer of vaccination before next winter, and that they encourage their professional colleagues to do the same."

The American medical system is corrupt, ineffective and unnecessarily costly. These outcomes are due to state violence on behalf of the politically connected elite (namely private insurers, physicians, pharmaceutical and medical device companies). Artificial scarcity, price-gouging, misallocation of research funding and the suppression of alternative (non-patentable) therapies can be ameliorated by revoking state-conferred elite privilege and re-establishing cooperative, mutualized healthcare financing.

"Was the government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now."

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 17, 157 - 61

Grocery Insurance

The essential problem with medical financing is described by the Grocery Insurance analogy - third party payment (nominally "private" insurers or the state) divorces price from cost, distributes responsibility, suppresses competition and puts upward pressure on prices: when your insurer only requires a small deductible for each trip to the supermarket, you will probably buy a lot more caviar, filet mignon and white truffle oil.

Likewise, the seller will raise prices. When someone else pays, the seller and the buyer do not have antagonistic interests; the seller wants to charge higher prices and the buyer does not care. Ultimately, costs are externalized. Insurance companies are unscrupulous in their efforts to contain costs, deny coverage and swindle customers (as a matter of necessity) - despite it all, costs are aggregated within the insurance fund and redistributed in the form of higher premiums for everyone. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and the insurance model is based on trying to eat yours.

The state, as disorganized as it is, has less incentive to ruthlessly minimize costs, but immense waste is written off as necessary humanitarian spending. The state suffers diseconomies of scale, bureaucratic inertia, lacks incentive to economize and by its nature the state is centralized and prone to corruption. Hospitals, drug companies and doctors take advantage of the inept Panopticon by price gouging, pushing drugs and executing unnecessary procedures.

Thus, the two-pronged system of unaccountability drives healthcare costs in one direction - up. Meanwhile, tax and premium-payers are gouged with nowhere to turn - to the point at which 17% of U.S. GDP and 23% of the Federal budget is spent on sick care. Nobody should blame sick people for the broken system; they operate within very narrow constraints, especially lack of access to healthy food, clean water, accurate medical information and they endure unsafe working conditions. Claiming that people are hedonistic free-riders is facile. Few will make healthy choices because of the specter of future medical costs; they do so to avoid contracting a disease. The problem is that there are few choices, period, and they're all unhealthy.