• London cardiologist believes it should be regulated like alcohol

• 'It's toxic, unavoidable, capable of abuse and has negative impact on society'

• Can trigger heart attacks, may cause dementia and is bad for livers

Mince pies, pudding and brandy butter, chocolates, - Christmas truly is the season of sugar. The average British adult will consume the equivalent of 32 teaspoons of the stuff on Christmas Day alone, according to the British Heart Foundation.

UK guidelines recommend that we should have no more than 50g - or around ten teaspoons - of sugar a day.

But surveys suggest the average British adult goes over this by two teaspoons - much of this coming from sugars added to our food by manufacturers.

Coffee and cigarette smoking may protect against the rare liver disease Primary Sclerosing Cholangitis (PSC), study shows.

In a new study from Norway published in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, both coffee consumption and cigarette smoking are shown to potentially protect against primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC). This is a chronic liver disease caused by chronic inflammation of the bile ducts.

The findings are of great interest against a backdrop of increasing knowledge on coffee as a possible protective agent in other liver diseases.

The cross-sectional study was conducted by researchers at the Norwegian PSC Research Center based at Oslo University Hospital and the University of Oslo.

The study was conducted using a questionnaire about environmental exposures, and included 240 PSC patients and 245 controls.

Use is climbing despite questions about how safe the drugs are and how well they work.

The number of children taking powerful antipsychotic drugs has nearly tripled over the last 10 to 15 years, according to recent research. The increase comes not because of an epidemic of schizophrenia or other forms of serious mental illness in children, but because doctors are increasingly prescribing the drugs to treat behavior problems, a use not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). And a disproportionate number of those prescriptions are written for poor and minority children, some as young as age 2.

Doctors are prescribing antipsychotics even though there's minimal evidence that the drugs help kids for approved uses, much less the unapproved ones, such as behavioral problems. And to make matters worse, the little research there is suggests the drugs can cause troubling side effects, including weight gain, high cholesterol, and an increased risk of type-2 diabetes.

Doctors can legally - and commonly do - write prescriptions for any medication they see fit to treat a condition. (See here for more details on off-label prescribing)

It starves your brain, tangles and twists vital cells, and for decades it has been misrepresented as an untreatable, genetically determined disease. Alzheimer's disease is the 6^th leading cause of death in North America¹. The truth, however, is that this devastating illness shares a strong link with another sickness that wreaks havoc on millions of individuals in North America - Diabetes.

We all know that individuals affected by Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes have a notable resistance to insulin. Type 1 is caused by the body's inability to produce insulin, and Type 2 is caused by the deterioration of the body's insulin receptors and associated with the consumption of too much refined carbohydrate like processed grains and sugar. But when studies began to appear in 2005 that revealed a shocking correlation between insulin and brain cell deterioration, major breaks were made around Alzheimer's prevention^[i]. Health practitioners became curious about a critical question - could Alzheimer's disease simply be Type 3 Diabetes?

Alzheimer's disease has long been perceived as mysterious and inevitable. 5.3 million individuals suffer every year from the disease that appears to be untreatable^[ii]. But, if this illness is associated with insulin resistance, this simply isn't the case.

When most people hear of the bubonic plague they tend to think of the Black Death pandemic that swept through the western world in the Middle Ages, wiping out nearly a quarter of the world's population.

Black Death plague was the single biggest killer of people across the world from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries, and surprisingly today, the bubonic plague is still a big problem in many parts of the world.

The latest outbreak has occurred in Madagascar, where an even more vicious strain of the plague than the one in the Middle Ages has killed 39 people so far, according to a government statement last Thursday.

A doctor with the government said that 90 percent of the cases seen were pneumonic plague, a strain that is more severe than the common bubonic plague, typically killing victims within three days, leaving little time for antibiotics to work their magic.

Authorities are issuing warnings to anyone with severe fever and headaches to consult a physician as soon as possible. The government said all drugs to treat the plague would be issued free of charge.

"There is an epidemic in Madagascar which is currently affecting five districts (out of 112). Eighty-six people have been inflicted by the plague, of which 39 have died," said the health ministry in a statement read to AFP.

The industrialization of food production freed people up to pursue careers other than farming. But it also incentivized food companies and restaurants to use low-cost ingredients that taste or look good but often are neither healthful nor natural. For people with food allergies or diet-related diseases such as Celiac and diabetes, eating foods with unknown ingredients is a high-risk activity.

All of these diseases are on the rise in the United States and other developed countries, according to some researchers due to the same lack of exposure to livestock and soil.

For this particular ill of the post-War era, there's now a 21st-century workaround: a hand-held spectrometer that can determine exactly what is in the user's food and display it on his or her smartphone.

A Toronto company called TellSpec has developed a spectroscopy data-crunching algorithm that runs in the cloud and delivers nuggets of useful information to the user through a smartphone app. The idea for the device came from co-founder Isabel Hoffman's daughter, who suffers from gluten intolerance and other food allergies.

"Until recently, spectrometers were large and expensive, but now they are available as tiny affordable chips," explained Hoffman.

TellSpec has been testing its software using off-the-shelf spectrometers, but it recently completed an IndieGoGo campaign to contract production of its prototyped device, which will power a Raman spectrometer laser beam with batteries that can be recharged through a USB port.

Stick to the grass-fed beef, not the grain-fed meat that dominates the supermarkets, and the health benefits multiply

Thanks to our celebrated collection of native breeds and abundant green pastures, Britain effortlessly picks up the trophy for the world's best tasting beef. So why settle for slack-fleshed, vapid supermarket stuff? This grain-fed produce comes from fast-growing, foreign breeds fattened up on cereals, and won't eat that well, because it is rarely aged, more usually just dispatched directly from abattoir to store. It can't match the taste and succulence of darker, dry-aged beef from heritage breed cattle that grow slowly on a grassy diet. It also won't have that light cover of flavoursome, golden-white fat.

Roman Tritz's memories of the past six decades are blurred by age and delusion. But one thing he remembers clearly is the fight he put up the day the orderlies came for him.

"They got the notion they were going to come to give me a lobotomy," says Mr. Tritz, a World War II bomber pilot. "To hell with them."

The orderlies at the veterans hospital pinned Mr. Tritz to the floor, he recalls. He fought so hard that eventually they gave up. But the orderlies came for him again on Wednesday, July 1, 1953, a few weeks before his 30th birthday.

This time, the doctors got their way.

The U.S. government lobotomized roughly 2,000 mentally ill veterans - and likely hundreds more - during and after World War II, according to a cache of forgotten memos, letters and government reports unearthed by The Wall Street Journal. Besieged by psychologically damaged troops returning from the battlefields of North Africa, Europe and the Pacific, the Veterans Administration performed the brain-altering operation on former servicemen it diagnosed as depressives, psychotics and schizophrenics, and occasionally on people identified as homosexuals.

The VA doctors considered themselves conservative in using lobotomy. Nevertheless, desperate for effective psychiatric treatments, they carried out the surgery at VA hospitals spanning the country, from Oregon to Massachusetts, Alabama to South Dakota.

NPR recently reported on a study where the participants ate either a meat-based, fiber-free ketogenic diet or a vegetarian diet and had their gut microflora analyzed. The low carbohydrate diet was much higher in fat, and as such, increased the prevalence of a microbe involved in fat digestion. "Bilophilia." The article focused on this one and cited a 2012 study where Bilophilia was associated with intestinal inflammation... however, the ketogenic diet increased the levels of Bacteroides and decreased Firmicutes. These are the two that brought the whole gut microbe-obesity connection into the spotlight. The microbiome in obese mice is characterized by low Bacteriodetes and high Firmicutes. Fecal transplants from obese mice to lean mice causes them to gain weight. Little is known about Bilophilia relative to Bacteriodetes & Firmicutes, and I suspect the focus was on Bilophilia because the authors wanted something negative to say about a meat-based, fiber-free ketogenic diet, and that 2012 mouse study suggested Bilophilia could be their answer.

Obesity alters gut microbial ecology (Ley et al., 2005)
This study shows increased Firmicutes & decreased Bacteriodetes in genetically obese mice but not their lean siblings. This is important because microbes are usually inherited from Mom and are common among littermates. Apparently, genetic obesity overrides both.

An obesity-associated gut microbiome with increased capacity for energy harvest (Turnbaugh et al., 2006)
This one shows decreased Bacteriodetes & increased Firmicutes in obesity. This is also the study that shows microbial transplantation from obese to lean mice causes weight gain (with no change in food intake). Oh yeah, and by "microbial transplantation," they mean wiping the poop of a fat mouse all over a skinny one. Yes, that's how they do it.

A study in mice shows how a breakdown of the brain's blood vessels may amplify or cause problems associated with Alzheimer's disease. The results published in Nature Communications suggest that blood vessel cells called pericytes may provide novel targets for treatments and diagnoses.

"This study helps show how the brain's vascular system may contribute to the development of Alzheimer's disease," said study leader Berislav V. Zlokovic, M.D. Ph.D., director of the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. The study was co-funded by the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS) and the National Institute on Aging (NIA), parts of the National Institutes of Health.

Alzheimer's disease is the leading cause of dementia. It is an age-related disease that gradually erodes a person's memory, thinking, and ability to perform everyday tasks. Brains from Alzheimer's patients typically have abnormally high levels of plaques made up of accumulations of beta-amyloid protein next to brain cells, tau protein that clumps together to form neurofibrillary tangles inside neurons, and extensive neuron loss.

Vascular dementias, the second leading cause of dementia, are a diverse group of brain disorders caused by a range of blood vessel problems. Brains from Alzheimer's patients often show evidence of vascular disease, including ischemic stroke, small hemorrhages, and diffuse white matter disease, plus a buildup of beta-amyloid protein in vessel walls. Furthermore, previous studies suggest that APOE4, a genetic risk factor for Alzheimer's disease, is linked to brain blood vessel health and integrity.

"This study may provide a better understanding of the overlap between Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia," said Roderick Corriveau, Ph.D., a program director at NINDS.