In grocery stores and fast-food outlets around the United States, a revolution is taking place.

Alternatives to meat may not be new, but recent improvements to the products, such as fake meats that really "bleed" and fake chicken that tastes like the real thing, have led to a surge in popularity of faux meats.

Fake meats are big business with companies such as Burger King, KFC, and Dunkin' all adding the products to their menus. But they're no longer alone.

Now, traditional food companies such as Kellogg's, Tyson, and Kroger are also jumping on the fake meat bandwagon.

Just off of Avenida 23, one of Havana's busiest streets, lies a small shop, its storefront minimally decorated like most others in communist Cuba. The interior is organized like a small jewelry store, with a glass countertop display case separating patrons from a woman in a lab coat, darting in and out from the back room.

Yieve Nieves Pino is the only person sitting in two dozen chairs set up to form something of a waiting area. Pino, 53, has come to this pharmacy to see the doctor regarding the stomach issues that have been bothering her for some time.

But the shelves that line the back wall are not stocked with the sort of pills and ointments that a typical dispensary would have. Instead, they're filled with bags and bottles of various forms of the drumstick tree, called "moringa" in Spanish.

"I've never used natural medicine before, but everyone tells me it's very effective, and that's why I'm here," says Pino through a translator. "I just didn't need it before now. But this is obviously a type of medicine that is much healthier and much better for the body."

This pharmacy only sells traditional medicine — what would be called "alternative medicine" in the United States. That is, natural drugs derived from plants, herbs, roots and trees using knowledge passed down through the generations. There are many more like it around Havana, where drugs created with expensive and sophisticated technology are much harder to come by. In fact, most Cubans have no choice but to consult traditional medicine first before seeking further treatment.

A 10-year-old girl is fighting for her life at a Texas hospital after contracting a rare brain-eating amoeba while swimming in a river.

Lily Mae Avant spent Labor Day weekend with her family swimming in the Brazos River, which winds through their backyard in Whitney, Texas, a small city near Waco. She came down with a headache and fever soon after, on Sept. 8. Over the following days, she began acting strangely, according to her family.

Lily, who had become incoherent and unresponsive, was flown to Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth last Tuesday. Doctors say she contracted Naegleria fowleri, a rare but deadly amoeba that lives in warm freshwater such as lakes, rivers and hot springs. The single-celled organism typically infects swimmers by travelling through the nose and into the brain.

The fatality rate for Naegleria fowleri infections is over 97%. Only four out of 145 known-infected individuals in the United States have survived since the amoeba was first identified in the 1960s, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A new study by UCL in the UK has found that cannabis compounds hold promise as treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder but has highlighted the difficulties with obtaining sufficient evidence.

Cannabis is already an approved treatment for PTSD in US states which permit medicinal cannabis use. In the UK, however, although medicinal cannabis was legalized in September 2008, there have been major practical problems with its implementation, and it's thought that fewer than 100 patients have actually benefited ^[2].

UCL researchers found that significant numbers of PTSD patients - it's a condition thought to affect 1% of the UK population - already self-medicate, some with prescriptions obtained from the US. However, few previous studies have been undertaken, due to legal restrictions, and researchers found that the quality of the evidence in those previous studies was poor. With insufficient clinical evidence, the UCL team concluded that they were unable to make any recommendations about its use for PTSD in the UK ^[1].

California has very strict compulsory vaccination laws for children in school, and as a result more parents are deciding to homeschool their children. The latest information regarding vaccines in California that's making noise is Senate Bill 276 by Senator Richard Pan. The bill eliminated nearly all vaccine medical exemptions. Under this bill, politicians, not physicians, are in charge of deciding whether or not children may receive medical exemptions, which in turn would determine whether or not they can attend school.

This is, in many ways, insanity. And mainstream media isn't helping. Take actress Jessica Biel, for example, who made an appearance with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Instantaneously headlines popped up everywhere claiming that she was 'anti-vax' when that wasn't the case, she is simply a supporter of medical freedom and freedom of choice. Mainstream media constantly uses terms like 'anti-vax' to label those who oppose bills like these, without ever addressing the real science and concerns that many parents have, some of which are listed below.

Muscovites shivered through their coldest August in recorded history. Furthermore, daily all-time low temperature records are continuing to fall across the Russian Federation, joining the myriad of record lows already set in 2019. (This essay is divided into two sections. First is current climate realities. Second is about cold climate sickness.)

The coldest August in record-books stretching back over 150 years is currently gripping the city, with an average air temperature of just 12C (53.6F) -some 6C below the norm. Moscow's previous coldest August was way back in 1884, when the average air temperature for the month was 4C below the norm. In the northeast of the Central District, the temperature dropped below freezing. In Sharya, in the north of the Kostroma region, the air cooled to -3 degrees, and in the grassland the temperature dropped to -7 degrees at the end of August.

Setting the Stage for Climate Sickness

Moscow has been characterized by unusual weather in terms of not only the cold, but also of abundant rainfall and a chronic lack of sunshine. This is setting the stage for climate sickness, not only from cold damp conditions but from increasing vitamin D deficiencies that eventually leads to many disease conditions including cancer.

Doctors need to start preparing their minds and practices to receive patients suffering from cold climate sickness. It is not just Moscow and Russia that is suffering from cold climate change. The National Weather Service reported a winter storm in Alaska on the 20th of August. "Long-range models are indicating cooler than normal temps for the end of Aug/start of Sept," says Minnesota meteorologist Tom Clements.

Children at Oxford's newest school are only allowed to eat vegetarian lunches and are banned from bringing in their own food.

The policies at The Swan School in Summertown were criticised by a parent, who said her daughter 'came home hungry' after the academy opened on Monday.

In what is thought to be a first for an Oxford state school, the new secondary has a completely vegetarian canteen and pupils have no alternative but to eat the hot meal on offer, although there are a couple of meat or fish options available for snacks during break time.

If biology has an Indiana Jones, it is Christopher Ramsden: he specializes in excavating lost studies, particularly those with the potential to challenge mainstream, government-sanctioned health advice.

His latest excavation — made possible by the pack-rat habits of a deceased scientist, the help of the scientist's sons, and computer technicians who turned punch cards and magnetic tape into formats readable by today's computers — undercuts a pillar of nutrition science.

Ramsden, of the National Institutes of Health, unearthed raw data from a 40-year-old study, which challenges the dogma that eating vegetable fats instead of animal fats is good for the heart. The study, the largest gold-standard experiment testing that idea, found the opposite, Ramsden and his colleagues reported on Tuesday in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal).

Although the study is more than just another entry in the long-running nutrition wars — it is more rigorous than the vast majority of research on the topic — Ramsden makes no claims that it settles the question. Instead, he said, his discovery and analysis of long-lost data underline how the failure to publish the results of clinical trials can undermine truth.

According to a new report on patients in Illinois and Wisconsin who experienced severe respiratory illnesses after vaping, 83 percent admitted using black-market cannabis products. While 17 percent said they had used nicotine only, some of them may have been reluctant to admit using illegal drugs, and it's not clear that any of them were using standard e-cigarettes.

These findings cast further doubt on the wisdom of general warnings about "vaping" and "e-cigarettes," which imply that legal nicotine products are implicated in these cases. Such warnings may encourage former smokers who are now vaping to start smoking again, a decision that exposes them to much greater health risks.

The new study, reported Friday in The New England Journal of Medicine, focused on 53 patients who had vaped within 90 days of their symptoms, typically within the previous week. Their median age was 19, and nearly a third were younger than 18. Among the 41 patients who were "extensively interviewed," 80 percent reported using THC products, 7 percent mentioned CBD products, and 17 percent said they had vaped nicotine only. The authors note that "information on product use is based on reports by the patients, and patients may be reluctant to report illicit drug use."

What you are about to read in this article is likely to make you very angry. Once upon a time, the primary mission of our hospitals was to help people, but today they have become vicious financial predators. Many Americans try very hard to avoid visiting the hospital because of what it might cost, but if an emergency happens there is no choice. They often get us when we are at our most vulnerable, and they never explain to us in advance how much their services will actually cost. And then eventually when the bills start arriving we discover that they have charged us 30 dollars for a single aspirin or "$2,000 for a $20 feeding tube". It is a giant scam, but they have been getting away with it for decades, and so they just keep on doing it. And many hospitals go after those that are not able to pay their ridiculous bills extremely aggressively. Just consider the following example which comes to us from USA Today...

Heather Waldron and John Hawley are losing their four-bedroom house in the hills above Blacksburg, Virginia. A teenage daughter, one of their five children, sold her clothes for spending money. They worried about paying the electric bill. Financial disaster, they said, contributed to their divorce, finalized in April.

Their money problems began when the University of Virginia Health System pursued the couple with a lawsuit and a lien on their home to recoup $164,000 in charges for Waldron's emergency surgery in 2017.

I can't imagine any surgery that should ever cost $164,000. You can buy an entire house for that amount of money. It is highway robbery, and those that are engaged in this sort of predatory pricing are literally crooks.