School ended early last Monday for students at three elementary schools and one middle school in Kanawha County, West Virginia. Members of the National Guard and the state departments of environmental protection and health were called in. It was the rapid-response team's third deployment to schools in the county this month.

The teachers said the tap water smelled like licorice candy - a fragrance associated with MCHM (4-Methylcyclohexanemethanol), a coal-extraction chemical that had flooded the water supply for 300,000 people in nine West Virginia counties on January 9. Residents of Charleston and the surrounding area live in fear of the sweet scent, and they have grown increasingly bitter.

West Virginia is coal country. More than a million acres of mountain have been blown apart in Appalachia, where the state is situated, in order to retrieve it. Not to mention, West Virginia is plastered with signs extolling the patriotic virtues of the black geological discharge. The signs tout coal as a source of energy independence for the Red, White, and Blue and implore residents to be proud of their natural resources. They frame regulation as an impingement on freedom and a threat not only to the livelihoods of West Virginians but to the country as a whole. Environmentalists have been harassed, beaten, and threatened with their lives for suggesting otherwise.

Meanwhile, local ambulance chasers have launched ad campaigns of their own, appealing to those diagnosed with silicosis, mesothelioma, pneumoconiosis (commonly referred to as Black Lung), and other diseases associated with coal extraction to seek their legal services. It's a sign of the imprint the industry has had on the state's rural communities over the decades. Now, the 10,000-gallon MCHM spill from a chemical storage facility run by Freedom Industries - just a mile upstream from a water treatment plant on the Elk River - has raised questions over how much environmental degradation West Virginians are willing to tolerate in the name of patriotism.

In the immediate aftermath of the contamination, 671 people called poison control, complaining of severe vomiting and diarrhea, rashes and dizziness. The White House declared much of the state a federal disaster area and state troopers were deployed to deliver water.

Five days later, the local water utility declared their product safe to drink. "We are in compliance with all the standards set by the health-based agencies, like the CDC [Center for Disease Control], the West Virginia Bureau of Public Health, and we have been since the 13th of January," Jeff McIntyre, oresident of West Virginia American Water, later testified at a congressional hearing in Washington on February 2.

A new strain of marijuana has motivated hundreds of families with epileptic children to pack up and move to Colorado to legally obtain the drug. The jury is still out on whether this special pot strain does indeed have measurable benefits, or if it's even safe, but drug companies are racing to replicate its effects in pill form.

The therapeutic pot strain, called Charlotte's Web, is bred not have THC­ - the active ingredient in marijuana. Its namesake is 5-year-old Charlotte Figi, a Colorado girl who has Dravet's syndrome. Charlotte reportedly went from having 300 seizures a week in 2010 to being virtually seizure-free two years later after connecting with a nonprofit that grows and produces an oil infused with the special marijuana strain.

In a press release issued this week, one that so far no mainstream media sources have bothered to report, it was announced that Dr. Brian Hooker had finally received documents from the CDC through a Freedom of Information Act that revealed the CDC had access to data linking Thimerosal in vaccines to autism, non-organic sleep disorders, and speech disorders.

Two members of Congress helped Dr. Hooker draft his letter to the CDC, after having spent nearly 10 years submitting over 100 Freedom of Information Acts to no avail.

This information, so far, has been completely blacked out of the mainstream media.

This information is very damaging to the CDC, which has stated for years that there are no studies linking the mercury of Thimerosal in vaccines to autism. You can watch for yourself in the video below the most recent testimony given by the CDC in the November 2012 Congressional Hearing on Autism, where they claim there are no studies linking Thimerosal to autism. Thimerosal is still used today in the flu shot that is administered to pregnant women and infants.

A rare "polio-like syndrome" has caused paralysis in about 20 children from across California, according to a report released Sunday by physicians in the San Francisco Bay Area.

The children, who are between the ages of 3 and 12, developed what is called acute, or sudden, flaccid paralysis -- weakness or loss of muscle tone resulting from injury or disease of the nerves that stimulate muscles to move.

Although polio has been wiped out across most of the globe, other viruses can injure the spine, causing paralysis, said Dr. Keith Van Haren, author of the case report and a pediatric neurologist at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital, at Stanford University. The children who have been affected seem to have been permanently paralyzed, he said.

Van Haren said these cases suggest there is a possibility of a new infectious polio-like syndrome in California.

The illness is not polio. All the victims had been immunized against polio and tested negative for the presence of the disease, Van Haren explained. And the disease is rare. "It's not an epidemic," he said. "But it is something that is concerning."

The culprit could be a virus strain called enterovirus-68 that has been linked to polio-like outbreaks in children in Asia and Australia, Van Haren said. But not all of the victims tested positive for that virus, so the cause of the disease is still unclear.

Some of the children had respiratory or other illnesses before developing muscle paralysis, but for others muscle weakness was the first symptom.

Van Haren said some victims suddenly developed weakness of one or more limbs within about 48 hours of becoming sick. MRI scans showed worrisome changes in the gray matter of the spinal cord.

To help them more effectively fight the disease, the children were given steroids, intravenous immunoglobulin and or blood plasma exchange -- without improvement, according to the authors of the case report.

A new study in the field of breast cancer prevention and cure has revealed startling results, kicking up a controversy amidst the international medical fraternity. The study, conducted by Canadian researchers, has questioned the deep-seated belief that regular mammograms aided in the decrease of deaths due to breast cancer. It has also suggested that yearly mammograms may be creating an upsurge in the number of women unreasonably getting cured for breast cancer. The air in the medical community is now fraught with tension over the study, which has overtly stated that breast cancer death rates are not decreased by mammograms.

The study, which is one of the biggest and most diligently conducted assessment of mammography, tracked almost 90,000 women, aged 40 to 59, for a quarter-century before raising these powerful doubts. It has shown through its observations that fatality rates from breast cancer and from all other causes were the same among women who got a mammogram test every year. More alarmingly, the study claimed that the screening had harmful effects: One in every five cases of breast cancer detected through mammography and treated, was actually not a real threat to the woman's life and did not need advanced treatments such as surgery, radiation or chemotherapy.

Published on Feb. 11 in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), the study is a pioneer work conducted in the modern era of more successful treatments for breast cancer. In the study, randomly picked Canadian women were assigned to have periodical mammograms and breast examinations done by trained nurses, or to get breast exams alone. The results of the study claimed that 22 percent of aggressive breast cancers were overanalyzed: In other words, these tumors would have usually been too minor to pose a life threat.

During the 2009 global influenza pandemic, millions upon millions were vaccinated for a so-called 'swine-flu', but a joint investigation by theBritish Medical Journal (BMJ) and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (BIJ) has uncovered some serious conflicts of interest between the World Health Organization (WHO), who proposed such heavy vaccinations, and the pharmaceutical companies which created them.

The joint-investigation's report explains that the WHO profited immensely from the scare tactics they utilized to promote the use of a swine flu vaccine. Creating mass hytsteria was the WHO's emergency advisory committee's goal. The advisory panel was choked with individuals highly connected to the pharmaceutical companies with vested interests in both antiviral and influenza vaccines.

An over $4 billion stake was invested in developing these vaccines, and without a pandemic there would be no use for them. Utilizing propaganda and fear, the drugs were pushed on unsuspecting people, and the money was made.

A German magazine has in fact called the swine flu a total sham. The WHO told the world that up to 7 million people could die without the vaccines they were pushing. They are considered a trustworthy organization by many, so governments everywhere, including our own, helped to push the swine flu 'remedy.'

Sugar is the ultimate frenemy. There's so much to love, and then sometimes you really think about it and you're like, ugh, WHYYY. But the part that really gets me is the companies out there that slip unnecessary sugar into their food products. And not just certain ones ... most of them. They do it because they know the effect it has on our minds (and therefore their annoying profits). Sneaky, sneaky.

Even small increases in blood sugar caused by a diet high in carbohydrates can be detrimental to brain health. Recent reports in medical literature link carbohydrate calorie-rich diets to a greater risk for brain shrinkage, dementia and Alzheimer's disease, impaired cognition, and other disorders. David Perlmutter, MD, best-selling author of Grain Brain, explores this important topic in a provocative interview in Alternative and Complementary Therapies from Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers. The article is available free on the Alternative and Complementary Therapies website.

Dr. Perlmutter, a board-certified neurologist and fellow of the American College of Nutrition, has just been appointed Editor-in-Chief of a new peer-reviewed journal,Brain and Gut, that will debut in summer 2014. The journal will publish leading-edge research dedicated to exploring a whole systems approach to health and disease from the intimate relationship between the brain and the digestive systems.

In the interview "Rethinking Dietary Approaches for Brain Health," Dr. Perlmutter says, "We live with this notion that a calorie is a calorie, but at least in terms of brain health, and I believe for the rest of the body as well, there are very big differences between our sources of calories in terms of the impact on our health. Carbohydrate calories, which elevate blood glucose, are dramatically more detrimental to human physiology, and specifically to human health, than are calories derived from healthful sources of fat."

Good morning! I'm filming this video from my kitchen this morning as I make bone broth for my dog, Ada.

I thought it would be a good idea to show you how to make bone broth, in case you ever have a situation in your own life in which bone broth could provide excellent nourishment -- perhaps to help a pet recover from illness, or to provide nutrition for an older animal with a declining appetite.

Bone broth is a source of nourishment that has been around for hundreds of years. Some of you may already be making bone broth for your pets. There are lots of different ways to make it, and there really isn't a wrong way. I'm going to show you the way I make bone broth, but you can also find variations on the Internet.

You've probably heard that chicken noodle soup is kind of a "soul food." When we're sick, we want to eat foods that comfort us. And there's research now that proves the science behind why certain types of foods are nourishing to people and comforting to pets.

Stuck in a paralyzing paradigm? Want to improve your skills but feeling overwhelmed?

If so, 2% is your solution.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines paradigm as...

A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them

Paradigm and mindset are closely related. The emphasis on paradigm is geared towards our preparedness community. Mindset, for our purposes, will focus on the individual.

According to the Oxford American Dictionary, mindset is...

an established set of attitudes held by someone

Many believe mindset determines actions. Hipster life-coach gurus tell you to get your mind right before tackling a new skill, shedding pounds, or reaching goals. Your body follows your head.

This theory may sell books, but will it work in the real world?