Darkening of the skin at the nape of the neck could be an early indication of insulin resistance and diabetes.

The condition, called Acanthosis Nigricans (AN), is marked by the darkening and thickening of the skin on the sides or back of the neck, the armpits, under the breast, and groin.

Acanthosis Nigricans is a skin condition that signals high insulin levels in the body.

Acanthosis Nigricans is important because these markings can help identify persons who run the risk of developing diabetes in the future.

Better answers to basic nutrition questions needed, says David Kessler, MD

"I'm not sure I know what to eat."

Was this a child at a buffet, or maybe someone on a sodium-restricted diet wondering which foods contain salt? No, these were the words of former FDA commissioner David Kessler, MD, trying to figure out what his own regular diet should be.

"Something has led all of us to get bigger and bigger," Kessler said Wednesday at an event sponsored by The Washington Post and the BlueCross BlueShield Association. "It's coming from what we eat and we don't fully understand it ... I think we have failed in giving nutritional advice to people. If diet and exercise were the answer, we'd all do it and there wouldn't be a problem."

After being told by her doctor that genetically engineered (GE) food and pesticides could be responsible for her son's food allergies, Ekaterina Yakovleva set out to investigate. Her quest for answers was captured by the Russian Times in the featured film, "The Peril on Your Plate: Genetic Engineering and Chemical Agriculture."

The film shows Yakovleva and her team traveling the world to meet "the people who lift the lid on the perils of GMOs and the chemicals used in the industry," as well as proponents of GMOs who argue that genetic engineering is a "high-tech" solution to feeding the world's growing population. Advocates for genetic engineering tell Yakovleva that the technology is beneficial to farmers in that it increases resistance to pests and disease, as well as produces higher yields. But Yakovleva isn't convinced.

She learns nothing could be further from the truth after witnessing the devastation caused by mass farmer suicides in India as a result of the failure of Monsanto's Bt cotton. Yakovleva visits the U.K. where she meets Lady Margaret, Countess of Mar, a member of the House of Lords and a former farmer who suffered from chemical use, and then to the U.S. where she meets with Zen Honeycutt of Moms Across America about the link between GMOs, pesticides and chronic disease in humans.

Plenty of children these days are so obsessed with having internet access that they will virtually refuse to go on holiday unless the hotel or villa has wifi.

They're certainly used to being fully 'connected' at school, where millions of youngsters who were once taught with chalk on a blackboard now sit in circles on the floor surfing the web on their tablets or phones.

The trouble is that though smartphones are used as educational tools in some lessons, they can also be a dangerous distraction during the day for pupils. In fact, youngsters taking phones into schools has become such a contentious issue that now a minister has called for them to be banned.

We see the formulations are much more toxic. The formulations were killing the cells. The glyphosate really didn't do it." - Mike DeVito, acting chief, National Toxicology Program Laboratory

Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller may be even worse for human health than we thought.

As reported this week in the Guardian, new tests show that when Roundup's key active ingredient, glyphosate, is combined with other chemicals to create the final product, the herbicide is more toxic to human cells than glyphosate alone.

As if glyphosate alone weren't toxic enough.

In the foreword to the book by Doctor Suzanne Humphries and Roman Bistrianyk entitled Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and the Forgotten History, Dr. Jayne L. M. Donegan sums up the vaccine 'landscape' that she and all MDs enter into as they become doctors:

Despite questioning the safety and efficacity of vaccination by reputable medical men since its introduction, debate has been, and is, increasingly discouraged. Information published in scientific journals is used to support this position, other views being regarded as "unscientific."

It was a received "article of faith" for me and my contemporaries, that vaccination was the single most useful health intervention that had ever been introduced. Along with all my medical and nursing colleagues, I was taught that vaccines were the reason children and adults stopped dying from diseases for which there are vaccines. We were told that other diseases, such as scarlet fever, rheumatic fever, typhus, typhoid, cholera, and so on, for which there are no vaccines at the time, diminished both in incidence and mortality (ability to kill) due to better social conditions.

You would think-as medical students who are supposed to be moderately intelligent-that some of us would have asked, "But if deaths from these diseases decreased due to improved social conditions, mightn't the ones for which there are vaccines also have decreased at the same time for the same reason?" But we didn't.

The medical curriculum is so overloaded with information that you just have to learn what you hear, as you hear it: nonvaccinatable diseases into the social conditions box and vaccinatable diseases into the vaccines box and then onto the next subject.

Alzheimer's disease is expanding unchecked throughout the modern world, despite billions spent annually on pharmaceutical interventions. Could the calcification of the brain play a role?

Despite the multi-billion dollar successes of conventional pharmacological interventions for Alzheimer's disease, lackluster treatment outcomes have revealed them to be an abject failure. The ongoing hypothesis for the past few decades has been that Alzheimer's disease is caused by a lack of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, but acetycholinesterase inhibitors (drugs that inhibit the enzyme that breaks this neurotransmitter down) have failed miserably to produce anything but momentary palliative improvements, if that. In addition, post-marketing surveillance data now clearly shows these drugs may actually cause new, more serious neurological problems, such as seizures.

We know that humans increasingly test positive for residues of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup weedkiller. For example, in tests conducted by a University of California San Francisco lab, 93 percent of the participants tested positive for glyphosate residues.

In the European Union, when 48 members of Parliament volunteered for glyphosate testing, every one of them tested positive.

In October 2017, Time magazine reported on a study involving 50 Californians who were tested between 1993-1996 and again between 2014-2016.. Scientists found that not only did the number of people who tested positive for glyphosate residues increase, but so did the amounts of the residues detected.

Hand-washing is one of the simplest ways to reduce exposure to potential disease-causing germs.¹ This may also reduce your chances of getting sick and/or spreading infection. Regular and proper hand-washing drastically decreases the number of germs having access to your body, especially at key times such as before eating or touching your mouth, eyes or nose, after using the restroom and while cooking in the kitchen.

With drug-resistant infections on the rise, disinfecting your hands and your surroundings may seem like a good idea. However, research has clearly demonstrated this may exacerbate the problem rather than solve it. While the key to preventing the spread of contagious disease is hand-washing, doing it using proper products and techniques, as well as paying attention to how you dry your hands, are critical factors.

Teaching people proper hand-washing techniques may improve health in the community and reduce the number who get sick with diarrhea by 31 percent and respiratory illnesses, such as colds, by up to 21 percent.² Through illness prevention, the number of antibiotics prescribed would also decline, as they are often prescribed unnecessarily for respiratory infections and diarrhea-related illnesses.³

However, it is equally important to pay attention to the products you use to dry your hands. In a recent study presented at the American Society for Microbiology, researchers found high growth rates of bacteria on kitchen towels used to dry hands and dishes and to wipe down countertops.⁴

A tonsillectomy is the surgical removal of your tonsils, two oval shaped pads of tissue located on each side of the back of your throat.¹ Although the number of tonsillectomies has declined drastically in the last 30 years, the surgery continues to be one of the most commonly performed on children,² with more than 530,000 done each year on children under 15 in the U.S.³

Administration of the guidelines for the surgery differ between countries. For instance, England's National Health Service (NHS) has classified the surgery as "of limited benefit,"⁴ with some commissioners unwilling to pay for surgery unless a child has had eight cases of tonsillitis documented by a physician visit in one year, strongly adhering to the letter of the Paradise Criteria for Tonsillectomy.⁵

This has resulted in a significant drop of routine tonsillectomies, with an increase in emergency admissions to the hospital for tonsillitis. While it may appear as if children are suffering more bad sore throats and infections in their tonsils, recent research finds the tonsillectomy childhood rite of passage may come with an associated long-term risk.^6,7

Risks Associated With Tonsillectomy Years After Surgery

Not all scientists agree with the guidelines for tonsillectomies, believing reducing the criteria could result in a reduction in hospital admissions and overall associated health costs.^8,9 Now, a recent first-of-a-kind published study demonstrates early removal of tonsillar and adenoid tissue, which often shrinks in adulthood, may have long-term respiratory system effects.¹⁰ The study was a collaborative effort between Copenhagen Evolutionary Medicine, University of Melbourne and Yale University.