Yes, it is true, smoking does not cause lung cancer. It is only one of many risk factors for lung cancer. I initially was going to write an article on how the professional literature and publications misuse the language by saying "smoking causes lung cancer"1,2, but the more that I looked into how biased the literature, professional organizations, and the media are, I modified this article to one on trying to put the relationship between smoking and cancer into perspective. (No, I did not get paid off by the tobacco companies, or anything else like that.)

When the tobacco executives testified to Congress that they did not believe that smoking caused cancer, their answers were probably truthful and I agree with that statement. Now, if they were asked if smoking increases the risk of getting lung cancer, then their answer based upon current evidence should have be "yes." But even so, the risk of a smoker getting lung cancer is much less than anyone would suspect. Based upon what the media and anti-tobacco organizations say, one would think that if you smoke, you get lung cancer (a 100% correlation) or at least expect a 50+% occurrence before someone uses the word "cause."

The law will make it the first large US city or state to prohibit sales to young adults.

City health officials hope that raising the legal purchase age from 18 to 21 will lead to a big decline in smoking rates in a critical age group. Most smokers get addicted to cigarettes before 21, and then have trouble quitting.

The ban has limitations, in terms of its ability to stop young people from picking up the deadly habit. Teenagers can still possess tobacco legally. Children will still be able to steal cigarettes from their parents, take them from friends or buy them from the black-market dealers who are common in many neighbourhoods.

But City Health Commissioner Thomas Farley said the idea was to make it more inconvenient for young people to get started, especially teenagers who had previously had easy access to cigarettes through slightly older peers.

"Right now, an 18-year-old can buy for a 16-year-old," he said. Once the law takes effect, in 180 days, he said, that 16-year-old would "have to find someone in college or out in the workforce."

As the world of people who are wheat-free continues to grow, I am witnessing a range of weird re-exposure reactions when people, intentionally or inadvertently, get re-exposed.

Among the peculiar reactions:

Congestive heart failure

A woman with a clear-cut syndrome of wheat intolerance that was evidenced by diabetes, excessive expression of small LDL particles (around 2000 nmol/L at the start), high triglycerides, gastrointestinal distress, widespread joint pain, and a peripheral neuropathy (impaired coordination, reduced sensation to the legs), and negative blood markers for celiac disease, improved substantially across the entire collection of symptoms. She lost around 40 pounds of weight, reduced HbA1c substantially, dropped small LDL dramatically (to zero), triglycerides to double-digit values, with modest improvement in coordination and peripheral neuropathy, marked improvement in joint discomfort. With each re-exposure, e.g, a couple of bites of birthday cake at her grandson's birthday party, she experienced water retention and congestive heart failure of 27-30 pounds but developing over 7 days. This happened 4-5 times with water retention developing over the precise same time course. On each occasion, she responded to diuretics, losing the 27-30 pounds of retained water, with no other cause identified (no change in left ventricular ejection fraction, no change in kidney status, no change in serum albumin or protein levels, no change in thyroid status, etc.).

Functional achalasia

A young man had been wheat-free for over one year inadvertently had wheat in the form of orzo, mistaking it for rice (since orzo is rice-shaped pasta). Within minutes, food became trapped in his esophagus, necessitating an endoscopy to extract the food. No pathologic findings were seen: no esophageal stricture, inflammation, ulcer, or tumor. There was also no evidence nor history to suggest eosinophilic esophagitis.

• Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) can happen to anyone without any specific cause

• CRPS has no cure and causes chronic pain, usually in the limbs or hands and feet

• On the McGill Pain Index Chart, it ranks higher than childbirth and amputation

A mystery condition that causes extreme pain among sufferers has baffled doctors and researchers, who can find neither its cause nor its cure.

Sufferers of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) wake up one morning to debilitating pain that does not go away.

The condition usually affects the arms, legs, hands or feet and sometimes occurs after an injury as minor as a bruise, but often appears without any identified trauma.

We recently invited nutritional therapist, speaker and educator Nora Gedgaudas to speak with us on SOTT Talk Radio. Widely recognized as an expert on the 'Paleo Diet', Nora maintains a private practice in Portland, Oregon as both a Board-Certified nutritional consultant and a Board-Certified clinical Neurofeedback Specialist.

Nora is also the author of the best-seller Primal Body, Primal Mind: Beyond the Paleo Diet for Total Health and a Longer Life, a book that is changing the way people view their diet and health.

Examining the healthy lives of our pre-agricultural Paleolithic ancestors and contrasting it with the marked decline humanity has undergone in the Agricultural Age, up to and including today's epidemic 'diseases of civilization', Nora's book shows how our modern grain- and carbohydrate-heavy low-fat diets are a far cry from the high-fat, moderate-protein hunter-gatherer diets we are genetically programmed for.

Applying the latest scientific discoveries to the basic hunter-gatherer diet forged in the last Ice Age, Nora's message is that a real alternative is available: a holistic, 'paleo' lifestyle that is helping thousands of people to break the negative feedback loop of poor diet and poor health.

Running Time: 02:07:00

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Carbohydrates are rotting our brains and contributing to devastating diseases such as Alzheimer's, an American neurologist has warned. David Perlmutter, from Florida, believes that even 'good' carbs, such as grains, are severely affecting our brains.

And the staples of our modern diet aren't only increasing the risk of dementia, but contributing to depression, epilepsy and headaches, he believes. Instead of munching on wheat, carbs and sugar,which he calls the brain's silent killers, we should revert back to the way our ancestors ate - with more meat and fat.

As Forbes magazine reports: 'It's in the food you eat,' he writes in his best new book, Grain Brain: The Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar - Your Brain's Silent Killers. 'The origin of brain disease is in many cases predominantly dietary.'

The solution? Going back to the days when our diet was mainly fat - with this making up 75 per cent of our diet, and carbs just 5 per cent. Protein intake should stay the same as it is, at about 20 per cent.

Drug-resistant "superbugs" represent one of the gravest threats in the history of medicine, leading experts have warned.

Routine operations could become deadly "in the very near future" as bacteria evolve to resist the drugs we use to combat them. This process could erase a century of medical advances, say government doctors in a special editorial in The Lancet health journal.

Although the looming threat of antibiotic, or anti-microbial, resistance has been known about for years, the new warning reflects growing concern that the NHS and other national health systems, already under pressure from ageing populations, will struggle to cope with the rising cost of caring for people in the "post-antibiotic era".

In a stark reflection of the seriousness of the threat, England's deputy chief medical officer, Professor John Watson, said: "I am concerned that in 20 years, if I go into hospital for a hip replacement, I could get an infection leading to major complications and possible death, simply because antibiotics no longer work as they do now."

I felt this sensation in the pit of my stomach -- it was a combination of sympathy and anger -- listening to Annie tell me, through tears, about her postpartum journey into the world of psychiatry.

Three separate psychiatrists dismissed me when I expressed concerns about taking an addictive medication like Klonopin. It's been two years, I can't get off it, I'm on four psych meds and I feel worse than I ever did before I started this treatment.

Annie was ushered into the promise-filled halls of psychiatry three months after the birth of her first baby when she began to experience racing heart, insomnia, vigilance, irritability, and a host of physical complaints including joint pain and hair loss. No one did blood work, asked about her diet, or cared about any of the myriad observations about her body and its changes in functioning. This was a "head-up" intervention. I believe women deserve better. People deserve better.

Most patients who come to me for treatment of depression and anxiety do so because they want answers. They want to know WHY they are struggling. The closest they will be offered by their prescribing psychiatrist or primary care doc is some reductionist hand waving about serotonin imbalances. I think it is time to speak to these patients with respect, truthfulness, and to offer them more than a life-long relationship with a pill (or pills, as it will inevitably become over the years). First, let's review some basics:

Depression Is Not a Serotonin Deficiency

Thanks to direct-to-consumer advertising and complicit FDA endorsement of evidence-less claims, the public has been sold an insultingly oversimplified tale about the underlying driver of depression. Here's how we know depression is not a serotonin deficiency corrected by Zoloft:

• There has never been a single study, in humans, to validate the theory of low serotonin in depression. Low levels are found in a minority of patients.
• An antidepressant marketed as Stablon, increases reuptake of serotonin (reducing serotonin activity) and appears to be equally effective as those that decrease it or have no effect on it at all.
• Manipulation of serotonin levels (tryptophan depletion or enhancement) do not consistently result in a depressive syndrome, and may promote future episodes.
• These medications are used to treat an impossibly non-specific and broad array of illnesses from obsessive compulsive disorder to anorexia to premenstrual dysphoria to bipolar depression to irritable bowel syndrome.
• Antidepressants of all categories seems to work about the same regardless of their presumed mechanism of action with about 73 percent of the response unrelated to pharmacologic activity, according to metanalyses by Dr. Irving Kirsch and Fournier, which suggest a powerful role for active placebo effect in all but the most severe depression. In those cases, significant benefit may be achieved by points on a rating scale attributed to side effects such as sedation or activation (improved sleep or energy, unrelated to primary pharmacologic action).

One woman's Italian vacation took a turn for the worse when she woke up with pain in her ear one night. She had no way of knowing then that she'd just been bitten by a Mediterranean recluse spider, and that a chunk of her ear would soon be liquefied by the spider's venom. But that's exactly what happened, according to a recent report of her case.

The 22-year-old woman soon sought treatment for her pain in an Italian hospital, where doctors prescribed an antihistamine. But the swelling in her face and pain in her ear didn't get any better. Once she was back home in the Netherlands, the ear got worse, and portions of it turned black - a clear sign that the skin and cartilage cells were dead.

The dead tissue made it clear to doctors that the woman had been bitten by a Mediterranean recluse, a spider whose bite is known to destroy skin and underlying fat, causing "sunken-in" scars or "a disfigured ear, if you are very unlucky," said Dr. Marieke van Wijk, a plastic surgeon in the Netherlands involved in the woman's treatment.

• Dr Annie Wertz and Dr Karen Wynn carried out the study at Yale University

• 47 eight to 18-month-olds tested with plants and man-made objects

• Children showed 'striking reluctance' to touch plants

Children that don't eat their vegetables may be using their inherited survival instinct, a study has shown.

Dr Annie Wertz and Dr Karen Wynn, both pyschologists at America's Yale University, wrote the study on how children behave around plants.

The academics studied toddlers playing with different objects and realised youngsters didn't pick up natural things, like plants, as much as they played with plastic or metal objects.

At the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University, 47 eight to 18-month-old children were observed and the psychologists who put them in front of two real plants, two realistic-looking artificial plants, and two other objects.

The children in the experiment showed a 'striking reluctance' to touch plants, the doctors noted.

They believe this behaviour is progammed into children from birth to avoid them being harmed or poisoned by flowers or plants.

'This behavioral strategy would protect infants from the dangers posed by plants by decreasing the likelihood of ingesting plant toxins (by either consuming plant parts or ingesting toxins rubbed off on their hands from damaged plant parts), or incurring injuries from plants' physical defenses (e.g., fine hairs, thorns, or noxious oils).' The study says.