Shame is a universal emotion that almost every person experiences at one or more points in life. It is often accompanied by physical sensations such as heat waves, nausea, or blushing. Shame, in itself, is not a mental health disorder, but research has shown that it hugely impacts mental health problems as well as social relationships and decision-making.

Shame has been found to be more prevalent in mental health clients than anger, grief, or anxiety. Many mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse or eating disorders, are influenced and exacerbated by shame. Also, mental health - the absence of severe emotional or behavioral problems - is almost impossible to fully achieve if a person has a high degree of shame.

Shame often surfaces when a person experiences rejection or ridicule. This triggers feelings of being exposed, deeply flawed, and completely alone. At the base of shame is often the strongly held belief that we are the only person with this problem, which, of course, makes it even harder to reach out and ask for help.

Shame and guilt are often used interchangeably but they are different things. Guilt is what people feel when they do something they think is wrong. Shame is what people feel when they are convinced something is wrong with them.

For example, a woman who tries to lose weight can feel guilty about indulging in greasy food but still feel OK about herself as a person. A woman who feels shame about her body will not feel good, even if she manages to stick to her diet. Guilt generally motivates a person to change things because he or she wants to feel better. Shame makes people focus on hiding who they are, instead of changing. Very rarely does shame lead a person to open up and seek help.

For women, shame in our society is generally centered on issues such as body image, weight, or being a good mother. For men, it is often more about success and virility, but it is also increasingly about body issues. Other common issues that may lead to feelings of shame for both genders are suicide, addiction, sexual abuse, sexuality and mental health. Problems with any of these topics interfere with feeling "normal" and make it more difficult to be accepted but easy to feel judged. People who experience shame around these issues feel disconnected from others because they are afraid to open up and instead try to hide what's "wrong" with them.

The less people are aware of their shame and shame triggers, the more it influences their lives. The fear of being seen as deeply flawed leads to defensive strategies such as blaming, lashing out, or judging.

Smokers trying to quit may run into huge drawbacks, including suicide, with the anti-smoking drug Chantix.

A total of 544 suicides and 1,869 attempted suicides have been reported to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as "adverse events" in connection with Chantix, according to documents obtained by Al Jazeera's America Tonight.

The widely popular drug was approved by the FDA in 2006 and is designed to curb the desire to smoke. But its users have reported adverse effects, which are side effects reported to the FDA by patients, doctors or health professionals.

"There were side effects that made it look like it was unsafe for pilots and people in critical occupation because there were seizures, blackouts, temporary blindness, blurry vision," Thomas J. Moore, senior researcher with the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, who was testing new software to analyze adverse events, said.

A new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the whooping cough vaccines that have been in use since the 1990s - and not kids whose parents refuse the whooping cough vaccine - are actually behind the surge in whooping cough outbreaks across the U.S.

This news flies in the face of scads of articles that have come out in the past few years claiming unvaccinated children are behind whooping cough outbreaks. One such article is Time Magazine's, "Parents Not Vaccinating Kids Contributed to Whooping Cough Outbreaks" reported on back in September. Time cited research published in the Journal of Pediatrics - research that involved at least one author who disclosed financial ties to Big Pharma vaccine makers Sanofi Pasteur and GlaxoSmithKline - the two companies that just so happen to produce all the pertussis vaccines available in the U.S.

(Even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) admits that unvaccinated children are not responsible for whooping cough outbreaks, by the way.)

In previous installments, we've proven the following:

• A calorie is not a calorie when you eat it at a different time of day.
• A calorie is not a calorie when you eat it in a differently processed form.
• A calorie is not a calorie when you eat it as a wholly different food.
• A calorie is not a calorie when you eat it as protein, instead of carbohydrate or fat.
• A calorie is not a calorie when you change the type of fat, or when you substitute it for sugar.
• Controlled weight-loss studies do not produce results consistent with "calorie math".
• Even if all calories were equal (and we've proven they're not), the errors in estimating our true "calorie" intake exceed the changes calculated by the 3500-calorie rule ("calorie math") by approximately two orders of magnitude.

(This is a multi-part series. Return to Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, or Part VI.)

Empirical Evidence: A Calorie Is Not A Calorie When You Add Carbohydrate To A Zero-Carb Diet

There are many anecdotal reports of people finding it difficult or impossible to gain weight on a zero-carb diet, even with massive overfeeding. Yet there are controlled trials that seem to show high-fat diets having no such overfeeding advantage. Why not?

New research suggests that people with high blood sugar levels, even those who do not have diabetes, may have an increased risk for developing cognitive impairment. This is according to a study published in the journal Neurology.

Previous research has shown that people with type 2 diabetes - a disorder that causes a person's blood sugar levels to become too high - may increase the risk of dementia.

According to the Mayo Clinic, diabetes is considered a risk factor for vascular dementia as it can damage blood vessels in the brain. This form of dementia is often caused by reduced or blocked blood flow to the brain.

But researchers from Germany now say that even those without diabetes who have high blood sugar levels may be at risk for impaired memory skills.

Scanning the hippocampus

To reach their findings, the researchers analyzed 143 people with an average age of 63, who were free of diabetes or pre-diabetes (impaired glucose intolerance).

The researchers excluded those who were overweight, consumed more than 3.5 servings of alcohol per day, and those who already had memory and thinking impairments.

The participants underwent blood glucose tests and were required to carry out memory tests. One of the tests required subjects to recall a list of 15 words 30 minutes after hearing them.

The use of mental health treatments in children has increased in recent years much more than it has among adults, a new study finds.

The trend signals a growing attention to mental health problems in children, but could also be a source of concern about unnecessary medication use in children, the researchers said.

"On the one hand kids who needed treatment are now getting treatment and benefiting from it," said study researcher Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University in New York. "On the other hand, there's a large increase in prescription of stimulants for adolescents, which is potentially problematic."

For example, the non-medical use of prescription drugs on college campuses one of the concerns about stimulants, and is part of a larger picture of substance abuse, Olfson told LiveScience.

The researchers looked at doctor visits by children, adolescents and adults between 1995 and 2010, and found that at the end of the study period, for every 100 youths (age 20 or younger) who visited the doctor, there were 15 visits that resulted in a mental disorder diagnosis, up from eight visits in 1995, according to the study published today (Nov. 27) in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

In other words, children and adolescents who visit a doctor have become almost twice as likely to be diagnosed with a mental disorder now compared to 1995.

A town council in Ukraine had local cell sites removed, leaving the place with almost no mobile communications. The decision was made, following residents' complaints over health problems and increased number of cancer diagnoses blamed on the equipment.

A group of activists at the town of Yaremche, a ski-resort in Ukraine's Carpathian mountains, have succeeded in pressuring local authorities into dismantling the cell sites of the town's two major mobile connection providers - Kyivstar and MTS. Residents claimed the number of cancer cases increased since the equipment was installed at the top of a chimney near a hospital in 2004.

"We sought help from the sanitary and epidemiological service," said the town's first deputy head, Yury Bodoryak, as cited by Ukrainian on-line source, Obozrevatel. "They only told us that the radiation was above normal and that was it. But finding ourselves under pressure from the residents we had to make that decision."

Most of us have never been told that peanuts are treated with cancer-causing pesticides.

Nor have we been told that they are rotated in fields that contain genetically engineered cotton, a controversial crop used in our food supply that is treated with a weed killer linked to cancer and infertility.

We tend to only hear about the peanut allergy when it comes to peanuts in the news, but a deeper look into how we grow peanuts today unearths a lot of questions.

Since when did so many kids suddenly have a peanut allergy? A peanut butter and jelly sandwich hasn't always been a loaded weapon on a lunchroom table.

From 1997-2002, the incidence of peanut allergy doubled. In the last fifteen years, there has been a 50% increase in the number of children with food allergies. About 1 in 20 U.S. children have food allergies - a 50 percent increase from the late 1990s, according to a recent CDC survey.

But that's not where it stops.

It seems the level of corruption at the hands of politicians and power hungry investors is no different in Canada than anywhere else in the world. Environment Canada has approved the commercial production of GM Atlantic salmon eggs which grow to market-size twice as fast as other farmed salmon. The biotech company responsible, Aquabounty, has revealed that it is no longer asking for approval to grow the fish in the US but plans to produce all of the GM salmon eggs in Canada and then sell "table-ready" GM salmon into the US consumer market. It is an alarming decision that sets Canada up to be the source of global environmental risk, says the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network.
A U.S. company who has lobbied to commercially produce genetically modified salmon eggs in Canada says it has cleared a major hurdle in its proposal to make the fish available for human consumption, a possibility that has critics worried about the prospect of "frankenfish" escaping and endangering wild Atlantic salmon around the world.

The Environment Canada approval is the first government approval for the company AquaBounty. The company has asked for approval of the GM Atlantic salmon for human consumption in the U.S., based on a plan to produce the GM fish eggs in Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada and ship them to Panama for grow-out and processing.

"We're devastated that Prince Edward Island is now officially the home of the Frankenfish," said Leo Broderick of the Prince Edward Island (PEI) group called Islanders Say No to Frankenfish, "We don't want our Island to be the source of this dangerous living pollution."

In case you missed it, in a recent article published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine entitled "Overstatement of Results in the Nutrition and Obesity Peer-Reviewed Literature"(not making this up), the authors found that a lot of papers published in the field of obesity and nutrition have, shall we say, issues.

Well - as they say down South - I never!

The authors looked at over 900 scientific articles on nutrition or obesity published either in 2001 or 2011 in leading journals. They found that about 1 in 11 include "overreaching statements of results."