An allergy expert says Australian children have the highest recorded rate of food allergies in the world and warns the statistics could translate into a wave of chronic diseases.

An Australian study involving 5,000 infants has found one in 10 has a food allergy, with the highest rates found among children in Melbourne.

Immunologist Professor Katie Allen from the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute conducted the study.

"We gave the food to the child to see where they had objective reactions of an allergy, and 10 per cent of those children did demonstrate food allergies," she said.

"We don't want to be proud to be setting records, but there's absolutely no doubt that's the highest rate yet published in the world."

POST-traumatic stress caused by Queensland's summer of disasters has created a suicide epidemic in farming communities, according to Rural Mental Health Australia.

Rural Mental Health spokesman Mr Pycroft said natural disasters, coming on top of other difficulties like financial hardship, led to an increase in depression and suicide in farming communities.

''Any kind of natural disaster can be a stressful experience (and) whether you're directly or indirectly affected, it can lead to mental health issues,'' he said.

Mr Pycroft said multiple factors contributed to the rise in suicides.

''In a rural area there is a lack of access to mental health facilities. There is also limited education and awareness about mental health isolation also plays a role,'' he said.

Canandaigua, New York - The numbers are staggering: Every six minutes in our country a child is sexually abused. Two hundred and forty children. Every day. Nearly five children die each day as a result of abuse or neglect. If child abuse were a disease, we'd have telethons, rallies and other public events to raise money for a cure. Just as we didn't talk openly about cancer in the 1960s and 1970s, we must get past our discomfort talking about child sexual abuse, and give it the attention it deserves.

Child sexual abuse is an epidemic, one that most people would like to think happens in some other neighborhood, to some other family, to some other child. While it may seem easier to live in denial, child abuse happens everywhere. Child sexual abuse knows no barriers - not race, income or religion. It happens in your neighborhood. It's happened to someone you know. I've seen it first-hand, thousands of times.

Women can reduce their chances of having a 'colicky', crying baby by boosting their own intake of a vitamin found in steak, eggs and chicken.

Scientists have shown that women with high levels of vitamin B12 in early pregnancy are three times more likely to have contented, quiet infants.

Meanwhile, those with the lowest levels are far more likely to have babies that cry for at least three hours a day.

The statistics are alarming: Right now the government estimates one in every 110 children born in the U.S. is diagnosed with some form of autism. It is the fastest growing developmental disability and is affecting more and more families in Illinois.

Christine Thornton Wiener, event chair for Autism Awareness Day, joined us to talk about it.

This powerful video contains interviews with experts, parents and victims. It is the story of the high-income partnership between drug companies and psychiatry which has created an $80 billion profit from the peddling of psychotropic drugs to an unsuspecting public. How did these drugs, with no target illness, no known curative powers and a long and extensive list of side effects, become the go-to treatment for every kind of psychological distress?

This is an excellent documentary detailing how the psychiatric drug industry was born and its powerful and profitable partnership with the drug industry, which has turned psychiatry into an $80 billion drug profit center.

• But is any of it based on real medical science?
• How valid are the psychiatric diagnoses being handed out?
• And are the drugs safe?

Unfortunately, the evidence is overwhelmingly stacked against psychiatric drugs. It's becoming ever clearer that most of today's psychiatric diagnoses and subsequent drug treatment is a sham, successfully promoted to make you believe it's based on some scientific truth.

But it's not...

At our house, some of the best discussions take place at the breakfast table. You see, we eat our biggest meal of the day in the morning which is according to the dietary protocols we have researched, experimented, and consider to be optimal for human health. We eat a selection of meats - bacon, home-made pork and turkey sausage patties, hamburgers, fried ham, etc - with buckwheat cakes and lettuce available for those who want to make sandwiches. Often we include other vegetables and deep fried (in duck fat) sweet potatoes. It all takes about an hour to prepare for 10 to 15 people (depending on how many guests are in residence) and naturally, such a robust start to the day invites robust thinking and conversation. These Breakfast Table Talks range from politics to religion to history to physics and usually are kicked off by discussions of current events or whatever any individual happens to be reading at the time. We've been told by some guests who are professional academics that our breakfast table talk is the equivalent of post-grad lectures in any of the given topics we may cover. We just consider it normal conversation.

Around the breakfast table this morning, the discussion was rather somber for several reasons. The first reason is the death of our neighbor two days ago. Yesterday evening, we spent an hour with the bereaved husband and son, sitting in the bedroom with "Francesca" (a pseudonym) laid out in her burial clothes on the bed. We already knew the story of their 56 years together and the circumstances that led to her death at 74, but we listened again with fascination as "Jean-Luc" re-told the tale; it's hard not to be fascinated when the subject of discussion is laid out there in front of you looking to all the world like she might open her eyes at any moment and join in the conversation.

Celiac disease is a condition that is characterised by intolerance to the protein gluten found in grains such as wheat, oats, rye and barley. Sensitivity to gluten can cause 'flattening' of the finger-like projections in the bowel, which essentially reduce its surface area. The dramatically reduced surface area caused by the condition tends to cause 'malabsorption' of food. Abdominal bloating and discomfort are common symptoms of celiac disease, as are fatigue and malnourishment.

A diagnosis of celiac disease can be interpreted as a major inconvenience. Many commonly-eaten foods become 'off the menu' for those who want to control their symptoms properly. Walking into a sandwich bar and taking one's pick from the usually-vast array on offer is no longer an option for these people. Neither is sitting down to bowls of pasta or most breakfast cereals.

Once these foods are removed from the diet, though, individuals usually experience a relatively rapid improvement in their health and wellbeing.

I had a conversation with a gentleman this week who was diagnosed with celiac disease well into adulthood. Prior to the diagnosis he weighed about 112 lbs (quite underweight for his height), and was chronically tired. After the diagnosis, he cut out gluten, his weight increased to about 150 lbs (about right for his height) and he felt a whole lot better. All of this is quite typical, in my experience, of someone with celiac disease who eliminates gluten from their diet.

During our conversation, I asked this man what he ate. One of the first comments he made was that he thought that most gluten-free versions of regular foods (e.g. bread) were dreadful, not like real food, and so in the main he refused to eat them. What does that leave? The great majority of this man's diet is actually made up of meat, fish, vegetables, fruit and nuts. In other words, his diet was based on very natural, nutritious and unprocessed 'primal' foods. Soon to turn 60, this man looked to be the picture of good health too.

Meditation produces powerful pain-relieving effects in the brain, according to new research published in the April 6 edition of the Journal of Neuroscience.

"This is the first study to show that only a little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation," said Fadel Zeidan, Ph.D., lead author of the study and post-doctoral research fellow at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.

"We found a big effect - about a 40 percent reduction in pain intensity and a 57 percent reduction in pain unpleasantness. Meditation produced a greater reduction in pain than even morphine or other pain-relieving drugs, which typically reduce pain ratings by about 25 percent."

For the study, 15 healthy volunteers who had never meditated attended four, 20-minute classes to learn a meditation technique known as focused attention. Focused attention is a form of mindfulness meditation where people are taught to attend to the breath and let go of distracting thoughts and emotions.

A new report from the National Institutes of Health has found a link between weight loss and lack of stress. According to the study, people with the lowest amount of stress had an easier time losing 10 pounds than people with higher amounts of stress.

Additionally, it was found that plenty of shuteye promoted easier weight loss: people who slept between six and eight hours a night had an easier time shedding pounds.

Of course, applying these findings to one's own weight loss endeavors is easier said than done. In an ideal world, we would all be free of stress and able to sleep soundly for eight hours every night. Reality is a little less relaxing. However, there are things you can do to slash stress (and unwanted weight) from your life.