The question of whether newborns should sleep alone or with their mothers - where skin-to-skin contact can be maintained - continues to raise controversy, with a small new South African study contradicting American guidelines that recommend against co-sleeping, because of its link to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Scientists from the University of Cape Town found that separating new babies from their mothers proved physiologically stressful for infants, causing significantly more "anxious arousal" and less "quiet sleep."

The researchers measured heart rate variability in 16 2-day-old sleeping babies for one hour, during both skin-to-skin contact with their mothers - where they were placed prone on their mother's bare chest - and alone in a cot next to their mother's bed. Heart rate variability measures how irregular the intervals between heartbeats are, and is considered an effective, non-invasive way to measure stress levels.

"What is desirable for newborns is to have 'sleep cycling,' which means an even distribution between active sleep and quiet sleep, in periods of about one hour," said Dr. Nils Bergman, a co-author of the study. "In our study, sleep cycling in separated babies was mostly absent, and in six of 16 babies that did show some quiet sleep when separated, it was shorter and shallower."

Voters in Mississippi have overwhelmingly defeated an amendment to establish that a fertilized human egg is a person, despite support for the measure from the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor. If passed, it would have made Mississippi the first state to grant constitutional rights to embryo from the moment of conception. We speak with Diane Derzis, owner of Mississippi's only abortion clinic, the Jackson Women's Health Organization. She notes supporters had hoped to use the Mississippi measure to mount a legal attack on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that established the right to abortion. "If you make a fertilized egg a person, not only have you banned abortion immediately, you have banned most forms of birth control, as they work by preventing implantation of a fertilized egg. That's very clear. There's no two ways about that," Derzis says. Efforts are underway in at least six states, and at the federal level, to adopt similar laws.

In my other blog on milk I explained why milk is not a great source of calcium for humans. Now it is time to look at the health problems associated with milk.

Evidence has been steadily mounting during the past few decades of the potential negative effects of dairy on human health from colic and gut disorders to cancer. Milk is associated with many digestive disorders, poor gut health, food in tolerances and allergies. Many children develop food in tolerances to milk which, at the very least, cause overproduction of mucous and lots of phlegm and runny noses. Worse, these in tolerances can cause severe allergic symptoms. This is often related to the negative impact dairy products have on the gut. Associated with this I have seen colic clear up in many infants once they are taken off dairy.

Lactose intolerance is a "condition" in which the body cannot digest the sugar efficiently (or at all), leading to poor gut health and excess mucous, acid and gas production and varying degrees of abdominal discomfort (1). People with lactose intolerance also experience reduced absorption in the gastrointestinal system (2). Approximately 75% of the world's population (particularly in Eastern countries such as China, India, Africa and in minority populations such as Australian Aboriginals and Native Americans) has a level of lactose intolerance (1), and it is now generally accepted that this "condition" is actually the norm for the human species. It is more prevalent in Asians (about 85%) and African Americans (about 50%) than Caucasians (about 10%). It should be highlighted that the inability to digest lactose is exacerbated by pasteurisation destroying all the enzymes naturally found in milk that would normally help with digestion of the milk.

In previous articles here, here and here, I wrote about the dangers of an environmental toxin called bisphenol-A (BPA). BPA is a chemical that is found in several plastics and plastic additives. It's in the water bottles some folks carry to gyms, the canned tomatoes and coconut milk they cook with, and in the baby bottles moms use to feed their infants.

We've known for decades that BPA has estrogenic activity. In vivo animal studies and in vitro cell-culture research has linked low-level estrogenic activity associated with BPA exposure to all kinds of fun stuff, like diabetes, ADHD, heart disease, infertility and cancer.

There is now significant evidence suggesting that even low levels of BPA-exposure can cause harm, and this is particularly true in vulnerable populations like pregnant women, infants and the chronically ill. (1)

Because of this research, and the growing public awareness that BPA should be avoided, a new crop of "BPA-free" plastic food containers and baby bottles has been introduced. However, a recent study published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives in July has shown that even BPA-free plastics have chemicals with estrogenic activity (EA), and can cause serious health problems as a result. (2)

Dr. Andreas Carrasco remained in the locked car and watched with fear as the crowd beat the vehicle and shouted at him - for two hours. His friends who didn't make it into the vehicle were not so lucky. One ended up paralyzed. Another unconscious. The angry crowd of about 100 were likely organized by a local rice grower who was furious at Carrasco for what he was trying to do that day. Carrasco's crime? Telling people that Roundup herbicide from Monsanto causes birth defects in animals, and probably humans.

Carrasco is a leading embryologist at the University of Buenos Aires Medical School and the Argentinean national research council. He had heard the horrific stories of peasant farmers working near the vast fields of Roundup Ready soybeans - plants genetically engineered to withstand generous doses of Monsanto's poisonous weed killer. The short-term impact of getting sprayed was obvious: skin rashes, headaches, loss of appetite, and for one 11 year old Paraguayan boy named Silvino Talavera, who biked through a fog of herbicides in 2003, death. But Carrasco also heard about the rise of birth defects, cancer, and other disorders that now plagued the peasants who were sprayed by plane. He decided to conduct a study.

Teens are always looking for creative excuses for late homework, low test scores, and waning attention in class. Any who stumbled onto a copy of the September American Journal of Clinical Nutrition may have uncovered the basis for a particularly novel rationalization: "My parents made me a vegetarian."

Plants do not make vitamin B-12, also known as cobalamin. Diets that eschew all animal products can therefore lead to B-12 deficiencies. Because the vitamin plays a key role in some brain functions, toddlers raised from weaning on strictly plant-based foods can experience delays in the acquisition of certain motor skills. In a few instances, infants in strictly vegetarian families have shown severe anemia, dramatic growth retardation, irritability, and in at least one case, went into a coma.

Now, researchers in the Netherlands find that even when parents begin adding animal-based foods to the diets of their formerly strict-vegetarian kids, neurological impairments may persist into adolescence.

Studied across a wide variety (81000 count) of women of various paths and lifestyles, Vitamin D when found in natural food sources had been related to significantly lower depressive symptoms among women than those who do not consume foods rich in Vitamin D.

The researchers particularly involved in the study seem to be under the impression that Vitamin D, in addition to being a crucial part of the human body's chemistry, may directly affect the functioning dopamine and norepinephrine receptors, causing an imbalance in the brain which may lead to depressive symptoms.

It's not a secret that Vitamin D is known to fend off depression.

A study among the elderly in 2006 showed that those with lower levels of vitamin D were many times more likely to be depressed as those with healthy doses, sometimes upwards of 11 times more likely.

It is one of the most serious allegations that could be made about a doctor: manipulating patients' histories to make money. So it is no wonder that the charges, levied by editors of the British Medical Journal (BMJ) in January against medical researcher Andrew Wakefield, are still getting close scrutiny. Now an American whistleblower advocacy group has joined the fray over Wakefield, who in 1998 hypothesized a link, now scientifically disproven, between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine (MMR) and autism.

On 9 November, David Lewis of the National Whistleblower's Center in Washington DC published a letter in the BMJ arguing that Wakefield did not commit research fraud. Lewis told Nature that he thinks the combination of public charges and a slow, secretive investigation has left the public not knowing whom to believe and is unfair to the accused researcher. "[The system] throws people like Andy into a no-man's-land," Lewis says.

Wakefield was the lead author of a 1998 paper in The Lancet reporting on the case histories of 12 children who had received the MMR vaccine and developed symptoms of autism or inflammatory bowel disease.

The paper inflamed public fears about vaccines, but it was retracted in 2010 after the UK General Medical Council (GMC) concluded that Wakefield had a charge of serious professional misconduct to answer, in part because it found that his team did not have proper ethical approval for tests performed on the children. Later in the year, the GMC found him guilty of the misconduct charge and revoked his licence to practice as a doctor. By then, more than 12 large-scale epidemiological studies had failed to find evidence of the hypothesized link and the MMR vaccine is today regarded as safe.

The following is excerpted from Doctors Are More Harmful Than Germs: How Surgery Can Be Hazardous to Your Health -- And What to Do About It, published by North Atlantic Books.

Hippocrates and Paracelsus, whom doctors hail as pioneers in the field, both practiced medicine more closely aligned with homeopathy than with modern, scientific medicine. Samuel Hahnemann, considered the father of homeopathy, tested his medicines on volunteers. (This was the first "evidence-based" medicine.) Hahnemann's research into each remedy's effectiveness helped to spread the popularity of homeopathy around the world.1 By 1900, homeopathy was a relatively old medical tradition. In the United States at that time, 43 percent of medical schools taught homeopathy, including one of the best schools in the world. Homeopathic formulations could be purchased through the Sears catalog by individuals who wished to care for their own health.2

However, the profession suffered greatly from infighting, complacency, the rise of the pharmaceutical industry, and opposition from modern, scientific medicine.3 The American Medical Association formed in 1847 to "improve the ethics" of medical practitioners and to put out of business those engaged in "traffic in secret remedies and patent medicine." 4 Homeopathy gained the unforgivable label of "quackery," its science and methods called into question by the new doctors directly competing with homeopaths for business. There were two other important reasons for the disdain of homeopathy by doctors: the idea that a person's illness was uniquely individual, and the fact that its remedies were inexpensive.

Michelle Duggar's pregnancy with her 20th child is not only jaw-dropping; it is also risky, according to experts.

Duggar, who appears with her husband Jim Bob on the reality TV show 19 Kids and Counting, had a life-threatening experience with her last baby, Josie, who had to be delivered three and a half months early, weighing only 1 lb., 6 oz, according to news reports.

"The more pregnancies one has, the greater the risk of a bad outcome that could leave the children that are already born without a mother," said Dr. Philip Darney, director of the Bixby Center for Global Reproductive Health at the University of California, San Francisco.

Worldwide, he said, as the number of births per women increase, so does the rate of maternal or neonatal death.

Duggar long ago earned a spot in the category doctors have created for women who have had many children. Women achieve what is called grand multiparity when they give birth at least five times, and, for these women, additional pregnancies bring special risks.