Several decades ago the modern world went crazy with its dietary habits. People were told to stop eating fats because they led to weight gain and heart disease. The government was behind this advice as well as the American Heart Association, hospitals, manufacturers of cholesterol-lowering drugs, food manufacturers, dairies and doctors.

Here we are thirty years later and obesity and heart disease rates have gone up instead of down. Now some (not enough) researchers are saying the low-fat idea was a big mistake.

In typical fashion, the Mayo Clinic makes this statement on its website: "[T]here is a dark side to fat. The concern with some types of dietary fat (and their cousin cholesterol) is that they are thought to play a role in cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. Dietary fat also may have a role in other diseases, including obesity and cancer."

Is this true, or is it simply an assumption that has been proven wrong? Or is it the kind of misinformation you'd expect from drug companies that manufacture cholesterol-lowering drugs and food giants who make billions selling low-fat, non-fat processed cereal, yogurt, drinks, pizzas, cookies and ice cream?

We need fats in our diets. It's a matter of biology

Fats are essential to human health. The Weston A Price Foundation tells us, "Fats from animal and vegetable sources provide a concentrated source of energy in the diet; they also provide the building blocks for cell membranes and a variety of hormones and hormone-like substances. Fats as part of a meal slow down absorption so that we can go longer without feeling hungry. In addition, they act as carriers for important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. Dietary fats are needed for the conversion of carotene to vitamin A, for mineral absorption and for a host of other processes." (westonaprice.org)

So how can we eat fat and avoid fat at the same time? Food manufacturers came up with the idea of altering fats. And this has led to all sorts of health problems, an outcome not altogether unexpected when scientists try to improve on nature. The worst of the creations was trans fats, which are now even recognized by the mainstream medical profession as unhealthful.

According to new research, alcohol combined with certain medications not only opens up the risks of liver damage, stomach bleeding and other side effects, it also makes those drugs "three times more available to the body, effectively tripling the original dose."

Reporting in the journal Molecular Pharmaceutics, Christel Bergström and colleagues explain that drinking alcohol can increase the amount of non-prescription and prescription drugs that are "available" to the body after taking a specific dose.

Some drugs do not dissolve well in the gastrointestinal tract, and alcohol, or ethanol, can change how enzymes and other substances in the body interact with these medicines.

Because of this, the researchers looked in to whether ethanol made these drugs dissolve more easily, which could make the drugs more readily available in the body, thereby increasing their effects.

On order to test this, the scientists used a simulated environment of the small intestine to test how rapidly 22 different medications dissolved when alcohol was and was not present. To their surprise, almost 60 percent of the medications dissolved much faster when taken with alcohol. In addition, they found that certain types of substances, such as those that were acidic, were more affected. Some common acidic drugs include Warfarin, the anticoagulant; Tamoxifen, used to treat certain forms of cancer; and Naproxen, which relieves pain and inflammation.

The obvious lesson we can learn from this study? When taking medications, don't drink alcohol.

The deadly Ebola virus has killed 14 people in western Uganda this month, Ugandan health officials said on Saturday, ending weeks of speculation about the cause of a strange disease that had many people fleeing their homes.

The officials and a World Health Organization representative told a news conference in Kampala Saturday that there is "an outbreak of Ebola" in Uganda.

"Laboratory investigations done at the Uganda Virus Research Institute...have confirmed that the strange disease reported in Kibaale is indeed Ebola hemorrhagic fever," the Ugandan government and WHO said in joint statement.

Kibaale is a district in mid-western Uganda, where people in recent weeks have been troubled by a mysterious illness that seemed to have come from nowhere. Ugandan health officials had been stumped as well, and spent weeks conducting laboratory tests that were at first inconclusive.

The Pentagon's DARPA lab has announced a milestone, but it doesn't involve drones or death missiles. Scientists at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency say they've produced 10 million doses of an influenza vaccine in only one month's time.

In a press release out of the agency's office this week, scientists with DARPA say they've reach an important step in being able to combat a flu pandemic that might someday decimate the Earth's population. By working with the Medicago Inc. vaccine company, the Pentagon's cutting edge research lab says that they've used a massive harvest of tobacco plants to help produce a plethora of flu-fighting vaccines.

"Testing confirmed that a single dose of the H1N1 VLP influenza vaccine candidate induced protective levels of hemagglutinin antibodies in an animal model when combined with a standard aluminum adjuvant," the agency writes, while still noting, though, that "The equivalent dose required to protect humans from natural disease can only be determined by future, prospective clinical trials."

Researchers have before relied on using chicken eggs to harvest compounds to use in influenza vaccines. With a future outbreak requiring scientists to step up with a solution as soon as possible, though, they've turned to tobacco plants to help produce the vaccines.

Are fish from the Pacific Ocean and Japanese coastal and inland waters safe to eat 16 months after the Fukushima nuclear disaster?

Governments and many scientists say they are. But the largest collection of data on radiation in Japanese fish tells a very different story.

In June, 56 percent of Japanese fish catches tested by the Japanese government were contaminated with ce-sium-137 and -134. (Both are human-made radioactive isotopes - produced through nuclear fission - of the element cesium.)

And 9.3 percent of the catches exceeded Japan's official ceiling for cesium, which is 100 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg). (A becquerel is a unit of radioactivity equal to one nuclear disintegration per second.)

Radiation levels remain especially high in many species that Japan has exported to Canada in recent years, such as cod, sole, halibut, landlocked kokanee, carp, trout, and eel.

Of these species, cod, sole, and halibut, which are oceanic species, could also be fished by other nations that export their Pacific Ocean catch to Canada.

Shift work is associated with an increased risk of major vascular problems, such as heart attacks and strokes, concludes a study published on the website of the British Medical Journal.

This is the largest analysis of shift work and vascular risk to date and has implications for public policy and occupational medicine, say the authors.

Shift work has long been known to disrupt the body clock (circadian rhythm) and is associated with an increased risk of high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes, but its association with vascular disease is controversial.

So a team of international researchers analyzed the results of 34 studies involving over two million individuals to investigate the association between shift work and major vascular events. Shift work was defined as evening shifts, irregular or unspecified shifts, mixed schedules, night shifts and rotating shifts. Control groups were non-shift (day) workers or the general population.

Researchers at UCLA have identified a novel molecule in the brain that, after stroke, blocks the formation of new connections between neurons. As a result, it limits the brain's recovery. In a mouse model, the researchers showed that blocking this molecule -- called ephrin-A5--induces axonal sprouting, that is, the growth of new connections between the brain's neurons, or cells, and as a result promotes functional recovery.

If duplicated in humans, the identification of this molecule could pave the way for a more rapid recovery from stroke and may allow a synergy with existing treatments, such as physical therapy.

Dr. S. Thomas Carmichael, professor of neurology, and colleagues performed the study.

The research appears online this week in the journal PNAS.

Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) have found an association between childhood physical and sexual abuse and age at menarche. The findings are published online in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Researchers led by corresponding author, Renée Boynton-Jarrett, MD, assistant professor of pediatrics at BUSM, found a 49 percent increase in risk for early onset menarche (menstrual periods prior to age 11 years) among women who reported childhood sexual abuse compared to those who were not abused. In addition, there was a 50 percent increase in risk for late onset menarche (menstrual periods after age 15 years) among women who reported severe physical abuse in childhood. The participants in the study included 68,505 women enrolled in the Nurses' Health Study II, a prospective cohort study.

Researchers at the University of Michigan Kellogg Eye Center have identified a compound that could interrupt the chain of events that cause damage to the retina in diabetic retinopathy. The finding is significant because it could lead to a novel therapy that targets two mechanisms at the root of the disease: inflammation and the weakening of the blood barrier that protects the retina.

To date, treatments for diabetic retinopathy, the leading cause of blindness among working-age Americans, have been aimed largely at one of those mechanisms.

In diabetic retinopathy, damage to the retina results, in part, from the activity of vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), a protein that weakens the protective blood-retinal barrier. Recent drugs targeting VEGF have exhibited good response for nearly half of the patients with diabetic retinopathy. But researchers believe that there is also an inflammatory component that may contribute to the disease process.

According to a study published in Breast Cancer Research, it is suggested that male breast cancer has been on the rise for the past 15 years. A study in the 2004 Journal of Toxicology, found that "18 out of 20 breast tumors contained significant concentration of parabens." This study did not conclude a link between them and cancer; however, it raises red flags.

Most people are unaware of what a paraben is and what products actually contain them. If finding significant levels of parabens in breast tumors have been found, this would logically lead us to ask many questions such as: What are parabens? Are they harmful? In what products are they found? Are there alternative products that don't contain them?

What are parabens?

A paraben is a synthetic chemical preservative that is used in wide variety of personal care and cosmetic products. They prevent the growth of bacteria and also help products to last longer on the shelf. One report estimates that they are used in over 13,200 products on the market today. Before being altered, they actually are formed from an acid (p-hydroxy-benzoic acid) found in raspberries and blackberries.