So you regularly spend hours - and what feels likes a week's wages - getting your hair highlighted, you're never without straighteners and you've even tried a Brazilian blow-dry to get the perfect sleek look.

Yet your locks stubbornly remain more lacklustre than luscious. Have you ever considered your shampoo might be to blame?

Research suggests it could be - specifically brands that contain sulphates. These have been used for decades as foaming and cleansing agents. You'll find them in toothpaste and shower gel as well as most shampoos.

Brominated vegetable oil (BVO) is vegetable oil with bromine added to it. Brominated vegetable oil is used as an emulsifier in citrus-flavored soft drinks to help the flavors stay suspended in the drink and to produce a cloudy appearance.

Just look at Mountain Dew, for example. The hazy appearance within its very unnatural fluorescent color comes from BVO.

Patented by chemical companies as a flame retardant, and banned in food throughout Europe and Japan, BVO has been added to soft drinks for decades in North America. Now, some scientists have a renewed interest in this little-known ingredient.

Is BVO Safe?

Overall, this is probably not a safe additive. Even the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations imposes restrictions on the use of BVO in the United States. Because there are questions about its safety, an obvious restriction is to limit the amount of BVO in soft drinks. The FDA limits the use of BVO to 15 parts per million in fruit-flavored beverages.

The FDA labels BVO as an "interim food additive" which is "a food-use substance whose safety has been called into question."¹ The FDA has classified only four substances as interim food additives: BVO, acrylonitrile, mannitol, and saccharin.

The European Union, however, isn't messing around with an interim labeling. They think it's dangerous and they've excluded it from the current EU-approved additives list.²

Daily physical activity may reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline, even in people over the age of 80, according to a new study by neurological researchers from Rush University Medical Center that will be published in the online issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology on April 18.

"The results of our study indicate that all physical activities including exercise as well as other activities such as cooking, washing the dishes, and cleaning are associated with a reduced risk of Alzheimer's disease," said Dr. Aron S. Buchman, lead author of the study and associate professor of neurological sciences at Rush. "These results provide support for efforts to encourage all types of physical activity even in very old adults who might not be able to participate in formal exercise, but can still benefit from a more active lifestyle."

In a study published last year in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, researchers put five San Francisco families on a three-day diet of food that hadn't been in contact with plastic. When they compared urine samples before and after the diet, the scientists were stunned to see what a difference a few days could make: The participants' levels of bisphenol A (BPA), which is used to harden polycarbonate plastic, plunged - by two-thirds, on average - while those of the phthalate DEHP, which imparts flexibility to plastics, dropped by more than half.

The findings seemed to confirm what many experts suspected: Plastic food packaging is a major source of these potentially harmful chemicals, which most Americans harbor in their bodies. Other studies have shown phthalates (pronounced THAL-ates) passing into food from processing equipment and food-prep gloves, gaskets and seals on non-plastic containers, inks used on labels - which can permeate packaging - and even the plastic film used in agriculture.

The government has long known that tiny amounts of chemicals used to make plastics can sometimes migrate into food. The Food and Drug Administration regulates these migrants as "indirect food additives" and has approved more than 3,000 such chemicals for use in food-contact applications since 1958. It judges safety based on models that estimate how much of a given substance might end up on someone's dinner plate. If the concentration is low enough (and when these substances occur in food, it is almost always in trace amounts), further safety testing isn't required.

Although it is a central premise of the whole Wheat Belly argument, I fear that some people haven't fully gotten the message:

Modern wheat is an opiate.

And, of course, I don't mean that wheat is an opiate in the sense that you like it so much that you feel you are addicted. Wheat is truly addictive.

Wheat is addictive in the sense that it comes to dominate thoughts and behaviors. Wheat is addictive in the sense that, if you don't have any for several hours, you start to get nervous, foggy, tremulous, and start desperately seeking out another "hit" of crackers, bagels, or bread, even if it's the few stale 3-month old crackers at the bottom of the box. Wheat is addictive in the sense that there is a distinct withdrawal syndrome characterized by overwhelming fatigue, mental "fog," inability to exercise, even depression that lasts several days, occasionally several weeks. Wheat is addictive in the sense that the withdrawal process can be provoked by administering an opiate-blocking drug such as naloxone or naltrexone.

In the fall of 2009, at the height of fears over swine flu, our research group discovered that a majority of clinical trial data for the anti-influenza drug Tamiflu - data that proved, according to its manufacturer, that the drug reduced the risk of hospitalization, serious complications and transmission - were missing, unpublished and inaccessible to the research community. From what we could tell from the limited clinical data that had been published in medical journals, the country's most widely used and heavily stockpiled influenza drug appeared no more effective than aspirin.

After we published this finding in the British Medical Journal at the end of that year, Tamiflu's manufacturer, Roche, announced that it would release internal reports to back up its claims that the drug was effective in reducing the complications of influenza. Roche promised access to data from 10 clinical trials, 8 of which had not been published a decade after completion, representing more than 4,000 patients from every continent except Antarctica. Independent verification of the data seemed imminent. But more than two years later, and despite repeated requests, we have yet to receive even a single full trial report. Instead, the manufacturer released portions of the reports, most likely a very small percentage of the total pages. (One of us, Tom Jefferson, has been retained as an expert witness in a lawsuit relating to some of these issues.)

This is entirely within Roche's rights. After all, regulators have never required drug or medical device manufacturers to share their data with independent researchers or academics. They are required to show the information only to the regulators themselves, who treat the data as secret.

Some may argue that, because the Food and Drug Administration approves drugs for the United States market based on these data, this is not a major cause for concern. But the actual use of drugs is often driven by assumptions about drug safety and effectiveness put forth by articles in peer-reviewed journals (sometimes written by doctors affiliated with the drug manufacturers) and clinical practice guidelines that can be entirely inconsistent with the F.D.A.'s assessments.

A host of potential toxins, allergens and traces of endangered animals showed up in DNA sequencing tests on 15 Chinese traditional medicines, researchers said on Thursday.

Such therapies have been used in China for more than 3,000 years, but have risen in popularity outside Asia in recent decades and now amount to a global industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, according to the study in PLoS Genetics.

Despite their popularity, little scientific evidence exists to prove the benefits of Chinese traditional medicines (TCMs), and a growing body of research has begun to point to their potential dangers.

The samples analyzed for this study included herbal teas, capsules, powders and flakes that were seized by Australian border officials and were subsequently tested by scientists at Australia's Murdoch University.

Plant agents suspected of causing urinary tract and kidney cancer such as Aristolochic acid, as well as the potentially poisonous herb ephedra were among the dangerous elements found.

"TCMs have a long cultural history, but today consumers need to be aware of the legal and health safety issues before adopting them as a treatment option," said lead researcher Michael Bunce, a Murdoch University Australian Research Council Future Fellow.

© Reuters/Lee Celano

Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation. Additional research by Lindsey Ingraham and Amit Shrivastava.

On March 3 Nicole Maurer learned of the proposed settlement between BP and hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast businesses and residents harmed by its 2010 oil spill, the largest in US history.

In her cramped but immaculate trailer on a muddy back road in the small town of Buras, Louisiana, Nicole tells me that the two years since the tragedy began on April 20, 2010, have been "a total nightmare" for her family. Not only has her husband William's fishing income all but vanished along with the shrimp he used to catch but the entire family is plagued by persistent health problems.

For months following the onset of the disaster, she says, there was an oil smell outside their home and "a constant cloudiness, like a haze, but it wasn't fog." Her 6-year-old daughter Brooklyn's asthma got worse, and she now has constant upper respiratory infections. "Once it goes away, it comes right back," Nicole explains.

In the first experiment of its kind to test the suggestion that hookworm infection can reduce some allergic responses, a UK doctor who specializes in medical entomology, infected himself with the parasite and then swallowed a pill camera to film the effect on his intestines.

Dr James Logan, whose research group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) looks for new ways to control the insects that spread deadly diseases like malaria and dengue fever, agreed to infect himself with hookworm in his debut as a tropical disease expert for the TV show Embarrassing Bodies, a new series of which went out on Channel 4 in March.

In using his own body in the service of science, Logan joins self-experimenters like Sir Isaac Newton, who in the 17th century nearly went blind after staring too long at the sun in a mirror in order to study the after-images on his retinas.

Quite apart from the ethical implications of putting a person's health at risk, such self-experimentation is much less common nowadays, with trials tending to be on a much larger scale in order to get enough statistical power for reliable results, but, as in Logan's case, it occasionally happens, under carefully controlled conditions.

A study of pregnant women and their children in New York City has provided clinical evidence that links environmental pollution with childhood obesity.

The most up-to-date statistics show that 17 per cent of children in the U.S. are obese, and that figure rises to 25 per cent in built-up, inner-city neighborhoods.

While poor diet and lack of exercise are still the major contributors to the national epidemic, this new evidence suggest that air pollution can play a role.