The headlines are everywhere: gluten sensitivity doesn't actually exist, and anyone who thinks they have it is a liar, delusional, dumb, or all three. The message isn't a new one, but the stories do point to a new study from a group of researchers who previously found that removing wheat from the diet improved symptoms in people with IBS. In the new paper, the researchers tested whether isolated gluten - rather than wheat - exacerbated IBS symptoms. It did not. The IBS patients in the latest study showed no reaction to isolated gluten, and the only dietary variable that increased their symptoms was wheat. This could suggest that at least for some people (with IBS), gluten sensitivity may actually be wheat sensitivity triggered by the fermentable FODMAP fibers found in the grain.

For most of the last century, our understanding of the cause of obesity has been based on immutable physical law. Specifically, it's the first law of thermodynamics, which dictates that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. When it comes to body weight, this means that calorie intake minus calorie expenditure equals calories stored. Surrounded by tempting foods, we overeat, consuming more calories than we can burn off, and the excess is deposited as fat. The simple solution is to exert willpower and eat less.

The problem is that this advice doesn't work, at least not for most people over the long term. In other words, your New Year's resolution to lose weight probably won't last through the spring, let alone affect how you look in a swimsuit in July. More of us than ever are obese, despite an incessant focus on calorie balance by the government, nutrition organizations and the food industry.

But what if we've confused cause and effect? What if it's not overeating that causes us to get fat, but the process of getting fatter that causes us to overeat?

The more calories we lock away in fat tissue, the fewer there are circulating in the bloodstream to satisfy the body's requirements. If we look at it this way, it's a distribution problem: We have an abundance of calories, but they're in the wrong place. As a result, the body needs to increase its intake. We get hungrier because we're getting fatter.

Why are we fat? Is it gluttony, or is your fat actually hungry?

What if everything you ever learned about weight loss was wrong? What if losing weight has nothing to do with calories - counting them or cutting them out by sheer willpower? What if, in fact, most health professionals (including doctors and dietitians), our own government and especially the food industry are giving us weight loss advice guaranteed to make us fat?

Here's their mantra: "Eat less and exercise more. The secret to weight loss is energy balance. There are no good or bad calories. It's all about moderation."

If you doubt that this advice could be wrong, just look around. We have tripled our obesity rates since 1960, and in the last decade, cases of type 2 diabetes in children have increased by over 30 percent. In 1980, there were no children with type 2 diabetes (formerly known as adult onset diabetes), and now, there are over 50,000. Seven out of ten Americans are overweight. The advice is not working. Could it be the wrong advice?

Nobody wakes up in the morning saying, "Hey, I want to gain weight today. I am going to overeat. I want to be fat."

Rather, we have a $60 billion weight loss industry. It specializes in helping people count calories, eat less and exercise more. When are we going to realize that that our approach - as a scientific community and as policy makers - is failing miserably at stemming the tsunami of obesity and related health, social and economic costs?

Could it be we have it all wrong? Could it be the world is round, not flat, even though it looks flat, just as it seems that if you eat fewer calories than you burn, you will lose weight?

The answer is yes. Our focus on calories has missed the mark entirely. Even if you held the Guinness world record for calorie counting, you could easily be off by 100 calories a day. Do that for 30 years, and you will be 20 to 30 pounds overweight.

Meanwhile, there are fresh victories (and challenges) in the battle to stop AND from monopolizing nutrition advice.
Picture yourself at a continuing education conference for professionals. In the morning, you grab a Hershey's chocolate milk and head to a panel - sponsored by the Wheat Council - on how gluten intolerance is just a "fad." After a lunch provided by McDonalds, you listen in on a discussion (hosted by the Big Food front group International Food Information Council) about how GMOs are perfectly safe and environmentally friendly.

Was this a continuing ed conference for Big Food propagandists? Nope - Registered Dieticians! This was Mother Jones reporter Kiera Butler's actual experience at the annual conference of the California Dietetic Association.

Frankly, we'd expect nothing less from the Coca-Cola, Abbott Nutrition, Pepsi, General Mills, and Kellogg's-funded Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND). After all, corporate contributions are the AND's largest source of income. In fact, the AND's mission has become so skewed that its own members have formed an organization - Dieticians for Professional Integrity - to protest its hijacking by corporate interests.

Why are the AND's doings of concern to the natural health community? Because, as we've previously reported, the AND uses its financial clout to bar other highly qualified professionals from the field of nutritional therapy, to the lasting detriment of consumer choice.

Pick Your Poisoned Food

Is it possible to eat food that is not poisoned today?

If you buy 98% of the items in a grocery store they are processed foods with all kinds of preservatives and other chemicals added.

Even if you buy food labeled organic, there's a possibility that a percentage of the food is problematic.

Buy produce and most likely it is saturated in insecticides or weed killers, especially the GMO food brought to us by Monsanto and friends. The whole idea of GMO is to breed plants that are not killed when sprayed with insecticides and weed killers.

Well, you could find a local organic farm and join its CSA (community supported agriculture) but you can't be sure that the groundwater isn't polluted from local fracking. Frackers don't have to say what's in the fluids they pump into the ground-- fluids which pollute the local aquifer.

You can be pretty sure that if you are buying food packaged by any of the big food companies that it's been processed, and even if it isn't, there's a really good chance the company has donated to GMO labeling campaigns. I'm using the Buycott app on my phone so I can scan products to make sure I'm not giving business to the Koch brothers or companies that have funded anti GMO campaigns.

If you go to a restaurant you can be almost certain that the food is not organic, that it's loaded with chemical preservatives, or worse, poisons from pesticides and weed killers.

A huge percentage of foods and drinks use corn syrup to sweeten them. Almost all corn is GMO. GMO food is made so it tolerates more pesticides and weed killers. Sweeteners are used to addict us to foods.

Public health experts have warned that controversial experiments on mutant viruses could put human lives in danger by unleashing an accidental pandemic.

Several groups of scientists around the world are creating and altering viruses to understand how natural strains might evolve into more lethal forms that spread easily among humans.

But in a report published on Tuesday, researchers at Harvard and Yale universities in the US argue that the benefits of the work are outweighed by the risk of pathogenic strains escaping from laboratories and spreading around the world.

A study by France's National Drug Safety Agency (ANSM) found that one third of French people were taking and at times misusing antidepressants, mood stabilizers and other psychotropic drugs, prompting fresh warnings by health experts.

The report by ANSM, carried by Le Parisien Tuesday, found that 32 percent of French citizens were using psychotropic medication, such as antipsychotics, antidepressants, ADHD drugs, anti-anxiety medications and mood stabilizers.

Both high and low frequency hearing impairment have been linked with sleep apnea in a new study of nearly 14,000 individuals.

"In our population-based study of 13,967 subjects from the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos, we found that sleep apnea was independently associated with hearing impairment at both high and low frequencies after adjustment for other possible causes of hearing loss," said lead author Amit Chopra, MD, currently at the Albany Medical Center in New York.

The study was presented at the 2014 American Thoracic Society International Conference.

All subjects underwent successful in-home sleep apnea studies and on-site audiometric testing at baseline. Sleep apnea was assessed with the apnea-hypopnea index (AHI), which indicates sleep apnea severity based on the number of apnea (complete cessation of airflow) and hypopneas (partial cessation of airflow) per hour of sleep. Sleep apnea was defined as an AHI ≥ 15 events/hour. High frequency hearing impairment was defined as having a mean hearing threshold of greater than 25 decibels in either ear at 2000, 3000, 4000, 6000 and 8000 Hz, and low frequency hearing impairment was defined as having a mean hearing threshold of greater than 25 decibels in either ear at 500 Hz and 1000 Hz.

What happens when the 'Average Joe' gets caught committing a crime? He or she usually gets the book thrown at them, most often spending time in the slammer. However, what happens when "corporations too big to fail" get caught with "their hands in the cookie jar," so to speak? Not very many folks pay the time, but the corporate treasury pays the fine. Why? Apparently, large sums of money can "absolve corporate sins" time after time after time. One industry that has had enormous fines levied against it is the pharmaceutical industry, also known as Big Pharma.

It is the opinion of this writer that Big Pharma's corporate largess is too tempting to resist by federal government agencies, and fines work nicely. Pharma's lobbyists spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year contributing to congressional campaign coffers, which should be outlawed because it is nothing short of bribery - plain and simple. Obviously, a member of Congress will champion a cause - or is 'morally' obligated to do so - for the money Pharma's lobbyists freely hand out. ^[3]

The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine is given to prevent the risk of cancer associated with HPV and is typically administered between the ages of eight and 26. Opponents argue that not only is the vaccine risky, but it is of no value.

The HPV vaccine effects are said to last for only about five years.

In a Health Impact News Daily Post dated today, Dr. Mark Flannery states that, "The problem with this vaccine is this: Even though it's estimated 60 percent of women have the HPV virus, only 1-2 percent of the total population gets cervical cancer, and most of those women get the cancer in their 50s. If the vaccine only works for five years, is administered up to age 26, and yet most cases of cervical cancer happen to women in their 50s, the benefits of the Gardasil vaccine are questionable given the severe consequences it can cause."

In Dr. Flannery's practice, he has worked with a number of people injured by the Gardasil vaccine for HPV and, according to SaneVax, Inc., as of 2013 more than 32,000 people have reported adverse affects to the Gardasil vaccine, more than 145 have died, over 1,000 are permanently disabled, and more than 6,400 have yet to recover. Dr. Flannery writes, "The evidence shows HPV rarely proceeds to cancer and that very few women with HPV develop cervical cancer, as other risk factors are involved."