Who would have thought that it ever would have happened? Someone in mainstream medicine and peer reviewed literature and journals would publish the 'unthinkable': fluoride, the stuff they put into municipal water supplies supposedly to 'protect' teeth from cavities, is a neurotoxin. Wow! And congratulations to doctors Philippe Grandjean, MD, and Philip J Landrigan, MD, two researchers who published their findings in The Lancet Neurology, Volume 13, Issue 3, Pages 330 to 338, March 2014. ^[1]

In the Summary published for their article, it states that

Neurodevelopmental disabilities, including autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and other cognitive impairments, affect millions of children worldwide, and some diagnoses seem to be increasing in frequency. [CJF emphasis added]

Tobacco's genus, Nicotiana, covers over 70 species. The name tobacco usually refers to most famous and widely used Nicotiana Tabacum and its shorter but more potent cousin Nicotiana Rustica, both native to the Americas.

Although it's hard to pinpoint when and where it was first cultivated, it is sure tobacco has been used for several thousand years before the time Christopher Columbus reached Americas in 1492, and after that it spread to the whole world.

Although in present-day society associated with a myriad of health issues, including cancer and cardiovascular diseases, this plant has been used for medicinal, as well as ritual purposes for millennia. Only in the last decades tobacco has been aggressively proclaimed harmful. Up until the '50s they even had doctors promoting them. Why it is so?

Researchers discovered carbapenem-resistant bacteria in raw squid for the first time.
A dangerous "superbug" has made its way into the North American food supply for the first time, Canadian researchers announced Wednesday. Routine testing of raw squid, imported from South Korea, revealed a strain of bacteria resistant to carbapenems, a class of antibiotics used to treat life-threatening infections.

This is concerning because carbapenems are a "last resort" antibiotic, one doctors turn to when common antibiotics fail. Health officials have been watching them closely; in April, the World Health Organization warned that antibiotic resistance had become a serious, global threat to public health, listing the spread of carbapanem resistance as a main reason for that.

By boosting a protein that naturally exists in our cells, an international team of researchers led by the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute (UPCI), partner with UPMC CancerCenter, has found a potential way to enhance our ability to sense and inhibit viral infections.

The laboratory-based discovery, which could lead to more effective treatments for viruses ranging from hepatitis C to the flu, appears in the June 19 issue of the journal Immunity. The research is supported by the National Institutes of Health.

"Despite remarkable advances in vaccination and treatment, diseases caused by viral infections remain among the leading causes of death worldwide," said senior author Saumendra N. Sarkar, Ph.D., assistant professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at UPCI. "We need new defenses against viral infections, and our discovery is proving to be a promising avenue for further exploration."

Dr. Sarkar and his team made the discovery while investigating a protein called oligoadenylate synthetases-like, or OASL, which appears in increased quantities in people with liver cancer caused by the hepatitis C virus.

Sickness-induced insomnia is common because of link between brain and immune system.

Fighting off illness- rather than the illness itself- causes sleep deprivation and affects memory, a new study has found.

University of Leicester biologist Dr Eamonn Mallon said a common perception is that if you are sick, you sleep more.

But the study, carried out in flies, found that sickness induced insomnia is quite common.

The research has been published in the journal PeerJ here.

Dr Mallon said: "Think about when you are sick. Your sleep is disturbed and you're generally not feeling at your sharpest. Previously work has been carried out showing that being infected leads to exactly these behaviours in fruit flies.

In the last article of this series I discussed artificial sweeteners, and gave you my take on whether you should include them in your diet. This week, I want to talk about sugar alcohols, which are another popular low-calorie sugar substitute.

Xylitol is the most popular and most extensively researched, so I'll focus my discussion on it, but the general takeaway of this article applies to other sugar alcohols as well, such as sorbitol and erythritol.

What exactly are sugar alcohols?

Sugar alcohols are a type of 'low-digestible carbohydrate,' a category that also includes fiber and resistant starch. Sugar alcohols occur naturally in many fruits and are also known as 'polyols,' which you may recognize as a FODMAP. Unlike artificial sweeteners, sugar alcohols aren't completely calorie-free, because we are able to digest and absorb them to some extent. The absorption rate varies among sugar alcohols, from about 50% for xylitol to almost 80% for sorbitol, depending on the individual. (1) Erythritol is almost completely absorbed, but is not digested, so it provides almost no calories. (2)

Compared with artificial sweeteners, sugar alcohols have very few safety and toxicity studies, and are generally accepted as safe. (3) In one long-term human study, 35 participants consumed xylitol as their primary dietary sweetener for two years, and no adverse effects other than GI distress were observed, and GI symptoms dissipated after the first couple months. (4) The amount of xylitol consumed during this trial regularly exceeded 100g per day, often going over 200g per day, depending on the participant.

Metabolic effects of sugar alcohols

Sugar alcohols are a popular choice for weight loss due to their reduced calorie content, and for diabetics due to their low glycemic index. There's not nearly as much research on the metabolic effects of sugar alcohols as there is on artificial sweeteners, but the evidence we have suggests that sugar alcohols are at least harmless, and possibly beneficial.

For the most part, sugar alcohols cause no appreciable changes in blood glucose or insulin in humans, and sorbitol and xylitol have not been found to raise blood glucose following consumption. (5) In diabetic rats, 5 weeks of xylitol supplementation (as 10% of their drinking water) reduced body weight, blood glucose, and serum lipids, and increased glucose tolerance compared with controls. (6) Two other rat studies also found that xylitol-supplemented rats gained less weight and fat mass compared with control rats, and had improved glucose tolerance. (7, 8)

Because sweetness does not predict caloric value in sugar alcohols, one might expect that they would cause the same 'metabolic confusion' that is seen with noncaloric artificial sweeteners. Unfortunately there isn't enough evidence to form a conclusion about this, but my feeling based on what I've read is that this isn't a significant issue for sugar alcohols.

For one, sugar alcohols aren't 'intense sweeteners' like artificial sweeteners, which are hundreds of times sweeter than sugar. In fact, many are less sweet than sugar. Also, sugar alcohols do provide some calories, so there's not as much of a discrepancy between the caloric load your body expects and the caloric load it actually gets.

To answer the question of why we have to sleep, research conducted at the Mexican Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM) revealed that chronic sleep loss can cause certain neurotoxic molecules, which normally circulate in the blood, to be transported to the central nervous system and interfere with the function of neurons.

Beatriz Gómez González, professor and researcher at UAM and head of the scientific project, explained that this phenomenon arises due to an alteration in the central nervous system called blood-brain barrier, which is the component responsible for protecting the brain from potentially neurotoxic agents.

Through the induction of sleep loss on some animals, the specialist at UAM and his staff corroborated that during periods of insomnia, joints vessels in the blood-brain barrier began to degrade. "We observed that some elements could cross that barrier and reach the brain tissue itself," explained the researcher.

By entering the brain, some nerve agents could potentially affect neuronal function and even promote neuron death. For example, the specialist said, an agent called monosodium glutamate found in a wide range of processed foods may cause neuronal damage by overactivation of these cells (excitotoxicity), although the range of neurotoxic agents circulating in the blood is very extensive.

You are insane if you are drinking Biotech's GMO-infused Kool-Aid. Here's why...

Let's put aside the debate about antigenic proteins introduced by transgenes in GMO crops. Transgenes are genes from species that are not naturally present in crops of feed or food importance, e.g. spider genes, bacterial genes, viral genes, etc. These transgenes are capable of producing proteins in the plants that have never been in the human diet over the course of human evolution, stretching back thousands, even millions of years. GM proponents and regulators claim pseudo-scientifically that these novel new GM foods are 'substantially equivalent' to conventional ones, despite a lack of human clinical toxicology studies to prove it; or, they claim that these proteins are inconsequential and do not represent a threat to human health, or the health of the biosphere as whole because they say so - a plea to their own self-appointed, baseless authority.

Would you be fascinated to know that there is a journal Gut?

Just Gut. One journal completely devoted to gut studies in the realm of gastroenterology. As far science trends are concerned, the gut has become a sexy topic, if you can believe it. But it should be more than that.

A lot of people hear "exercise" and think "yeah, yeah, blah, blah..." Or maybe it's only a means to become sexy.

But it should be more than that...

This particular study published in journal Gut - albeit a small one - if true, should be all the more proof that movement is a part of diet and not just a separate entity for the body.