Children's visits to the emergency room for serious food-allergy reactions may be on the rise, if the experience of one major U.S. medical center is an indicator.

Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston found that the number of food-induced allergic reactions treated in their ER more than doubled over six years -- from 164 cases in 2001, to 391 in 2006.

There was an even sharper increase in the number of more serious, and sometimes life-threatening, reactions known as anaphylaxis. Signs and symptoms of anaphylaxis include skin reactions like hives and flushed or pale skin; nausea, vomiting or diarrhea; dizziness or fainting; difficulty breathing; and a sudden drop in blood pressure that can lead to shock.

In 2001, the current study found, there were 78 cases of food-induced anaphylaxis; in 2006, that number was 207.

(This review was authored by Chris Masterjohn. A version of it was originally published in Wise Traditions, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation. The review is copyrighted by the WAPF, which allows the non-commercial reproduction of its material providing due credit is given.)

"Eating foods that contain any cholesterol above 0 mg is unhealthy." -- T. Colin Campbell, The China Study

It was growing up on one of the many dairy farms of the rural American landscape, long before the China Study had taken place, and yet longer before the book was written, that the young T. Colin Campbell formed the views that would shape the early portion of his career.

Cow's milk, "Nature's most perfect food," was central to the existence of his family and community. Most of the food that Campbell's family ate they produced themselves. Campbell milked cows from the age of five through his college years. He studied animal nutrition at Cornell, and did his PhD research on ways to make cows and sheep grow faster so the American food supply could be pumped up with more and more protein.1

Fast forward to the present. Campbell is now on the advisory board of the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine,2 which describes itself as "a nonprofit organization that promotes preventive medicine, conducts clinical research, and encourages higher standards for ethics and effectiveness in research,"3 but whose opposition to the use of animal foods reflects its ties to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and other animal rights groups.4

By 1984, three years after its initial approval for use in tabletop sweeteners and dry food, U.S. consumption of aspartame had already reached 6.9 million pounds per year. This number doubled the following year, and continued to climb well into the 90's.

According to statistics published by Forbes Magazine [i] based on Tate & Lyle estimates, aspartame had conquered 55 percent of the artificial sweetener market in 2003. One of the driving factors behind aspartame's market success is the fact that since it is now off patent protection, it's far less expensive than other artificial sweeteners like sucralose (Splenda).

Today, the statistics on the aspartame market are being kept so close to the vest, it has proven to be virtually impossible to find current data on usage, unless you're willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a market analysis reports and I felt there were better uses for the money than to purchase the answer to that question.

However, a 2009 FoodNavigator article[ii]cites the current global market for aspartame as being less than 37.5 million pounds and worth $637 million.

According to aspartame.org [iii], diet soda accounts for 70 percent of the aspartame consumed. A 12 ounce can of diet soda contains 180 mg of aspartame, and aspartame users ingest an average of 200 mg per day.

However, it can be quite difficult to calculate just how much you're really ingesting, especially if you consume several types of aspartame-containing foods and beverages. Dosing can vary wildly from product to product. For example, the amount of aspartame will vary from brand to brand, and from flavour to flavour. Some can contain close to twice the amount of aspartame as others, and some contain a combination of aspartame and other artificial sweeteners.

A large part of human milk cannot be digested by babies and seems to have a purpose quite different from infant nutrition - that of influencing the composition of the bacteria in the infant's gut.

The details of this three-way relationship between mother, child and gut microbes are being worked out by three researchers at the University of California, Davis - Bruce German, Carlito Lebrilla and David Mills. They and colleagues have found that a particular strain of bacterium, a subspecies of Bifidobacterium longum, possesses a special suite of genes that enable it to thrive on the indigestible component of milk.

This subspecies is commonly found in the faeces of breast-fed infants. It coats the lining of the infant's intestine, protecting it from noxious bacteria.

Infants presumably acquire the special strain of bifido from their mothers, but strangely, it has not yet been detected in adults. "We're all wondering where it hides out," Dr. Mills said.

The indigestible substance that favors the bifido bacterium is a slew of complex sugars derived from lactose, the principal component of milk. The complex sugars consist of a lactose molecule on to which chains of other sugar units have been added. The human genome does not contain the necessary genes to break down the complex sugars, but the bifido subspecies does, the researchers say in a review of their progress in today's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Jay Armstrong says it started with a cough and a visit to the doctor.

"Immediately recognized he was pale," says Armstrong.

His two year old son, Richard, was sick but the doctor asked Armstrong a question he wasn't expecting.

"Does he drink a lot of milk?"

Right away the doctor knew what was wrong. Richard had iron deficiency anemia and his heart was failing.

"When I went to Dr. Springer, within 30 minutes he was telling me to put my son in the car and go to the hospital."

Richard was drinking too much milk. Doctors say cow's milk is loaded with protein that absorbs iron. Drink too much and kids can become anemic.

Two year old Richard was drinking about 40 ounces a day. Doctors says a child his age should only be drinking about half that.

It's advice Armstrong hadn't heard until his son got sick.

Got milk?

These days, it seems like almost everybody does. Celebrities, athletes, and even former president Clinton's head of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, are all proud to wear the white "milk mustache." After all, everyone knows that you need milk to be healthy ...

Dairy is nature's perfect food -- but only if you're a calf.

If that sounds shocking to you, it's because very few people are willing to tell the truth about dairy. In fact, criticizing milk in America is like taking on motherhood, apple pie, or baseball. But that's just what I'm about to do.

I've invited Dr. Michael Eades and Dr. Mary Dan Eades, two of my favorite bariatric (obesity treatment) doctors in the US and the first to introduce insulin resistance to the mainstream, to explain the facts and benefits of increased saturated fat intake...

Mid-Section Fat Loss: Problem Solved?

A couple of generations ago two physicians - one on the East Coast, one on the West - while working long hours with many patients, serendipitously stumbled onto a method to rapidly decrease fat around the mid-section. We're sure that other doctors figured out the same thing, but these two were locally famous and published their methods. Interestingly, neither was looking to help patients lose weight.

Blake Donaldson, M.D., who practiced in Manhattan, was looking for a treatment for allergies; Walter Voegtlin, M.D., a Seattle gastroenterologist, was trying to figure out a better method for treating his patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Dr. Donaldson got his inspiration from a meeting he had with the aforementioned Vilhalmur Stefansson; Dr. Voegtlin came up with the same idea based on his knowledge of comparative anatomy. Though they came at two different questions from very different angles, they arrived at the same dietary answer. Both solved the problems they were seeking to solve and, coincidentally, noticed that their overweight patients lost a tremendous amount of fat from their abdominal areas while undergoing the treatment. As happened later with us and with Dr. Atkins, word of their success in combating obesity spread rapidly, and before long both physicians were deluged with overweight patients seeking treatment, completely changing the character of their medical practices. In retirement, both wrote books about their methods. Donaldson's was published in 1961; Voegtlin's in 1972. And as far as we can tell, although their years of practice overlapped, they never knew one another.

Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw - fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.

It wasn't a very high-calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big gut to digest it all. But having a big gut has its drawbacks.

"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.

Until, that is, we discovered meat.

"What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.

That period is when cut marks on animal bones appeared - not a predator's tooth marks, but incisions that could have been made only by a sharp tool. That's one sign of our carnivorous conversion. But Aiello's favorite clue is somewhat ickier - it's a tapeworm. "The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs," she says.

So sometime in our evolutionary history, she explains, "we actually shared saliva with wild dogs and hyenas." That would have happened if, say, we were scavenging on the same carcass that hyenas were.

But dining with dogs was worth it. Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain - which uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle - piped up and said, "Please, sir, I want some more."

Forget the age-old remedies of yoga, meditation or popping pills. Relieving chronic stress could soon be as simple as having an injection, according to scientists.

Academics say they are close to developing the first vaccine for stress - a single jab that would help us relax without slowing down.

After 30 years of research into cures for stress, Dr Robert Sapolsky, professor of neuroscience at Stanford University in California, believes it is possible to alter brain chemistry to create a state of 'focused calm'.

Professor Sapolsky claims he is on the path to a genetically engineered formula that would remove the need for relaxation therapies or prescription drugs.

An outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague in Peru has killed a 14-year-old boy and infected at least 31 people in a northern coastal province.

Oscar Ugarte, the health minister, said authorities were screening sugar and fish meal exports from Ascope province, located about 325 miles north-west of Lima.

Chicama beach, a popular draw for tourists to Peru, is not far away.

Mr Ugarte said the boy, who had Down syndrome, died of bubonic plague on July 26.

He said on Monday that most of the infections were bubonic plague, with four cases of pneumonic plague.

The former is transmitted by flea bites, the latter by airborne contagion. The disease is curable if treated early with antibiotics.

The first recorded plague outbreak in Peru was in 1903. The last, in 1994, killed 35 people.