No one would defend soft drinks as healthful or good for you. But recent research about high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and artificial sweeteners suggest soft drinks may be even worse for us than we thought. Especially because soft drinks likely contain either HFCS or sugar substitutes. The truth is soft drinks may do a lot more good for the big beverage companies that make them than the people who drink them.

High Fructose Corn Syrup and GMO Corn

Can anyone remember life before high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) was in almost every "sweet" food? The consumption of high fructose corn syrup has grown 1,000 percent since its introduction in soft drinks in 1984. Food producers much prefer HFCS to beet or cane sugar because it can be pumped into trucks and tanks unlike its solid, bulky counterparts. They also like HFCS because it is immune to sugar's wild price swings from unstable political regions and trade barriers and can be produced in the US. HFCS also provides benefits in processed foods like moisture retention and crystallization resistance (which allows "moist" baked goods), flavor enhancement, and, in ice cream protection against "freezing point depression."

What's to not like?

What America can learn from one of the most sustainable food nations on Earth.

If you traverse the South American nation of Bolivia, from the heights of the Andes Mountains to the Amazon Jungle to the urban streets of Santa Cruz, you'll never once find a Big Mac or a McNugget. They don't exist there - and haven't for about a decade. McDonald's couldn't survive in the mountainous country, so in 2002 the global fast-food chain closed its last store.

This is ancient news in Bolivia, of course, but a 2011 documentary about the oddity sent the story around the world and caused many to ask, "What's Bolivia doing so right that McDonald's couldn't make it there?"

On Saturday, France's agriculture ministry temporarily banned the sale, use and cultivation of Monsanto's MON 810 genetically engineered (GE) corn - the only variety that had been authorized in the European Union (EU).

The French government, which argues GE crops present environmental risks, kept pushing to institute the new ban even after the country's highest court struck down similar measures in the past, according to Reuters.

"France's reinstatement of its previous ban of Monsanto's controversial genetically engineered crop ... is another encouraging sign that the biotech industry's iron grip on foreign government's is slipping and that resistance to these flawed products is continuing to take hold," - Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now!.

For years we've been told to reduce our consumption of saturated fats as a sure-fire way to prevent heart disease. But a recent analysis of 45 studies and 27 trials involving over 600,000 participants is forcing a rethink of this long held - and apparently erroneous - assumption.

The primary takeaway of this study is not necessarily that saturated fats don't contribute to heart disease (a link that's now most certainly been cast into doubt) - but that food and the way it affects our health is an incredibly complicated and multifaceted process.

One of the study's authors, Dariush Mozaffarian of the department of epidemiology at Harvard University in Boston, put it best by saying: "Guidelines that focus on the nutrients, single nutrients, as targets for preventing chronic diseases don't make a lot of sense. I think we need to move to food-based guidelines, to really talk about food, not nutrients."

Indeed, a prime example of this problem is the unwarranted focus on cholesterol and its apparent association with cardiovascular disease - the so-called LDL-heart disease hypothesis. Recently, however, physicians are coming to realize that cholesterol levels do not strongly predict our chances of developing heart disease, and there are now over a dozen studies that prove it. The notion that lowering saturated fats - which are typically consumed via butter, whole milk, red meat, poultry, coconut oil, and nuts - will lower bad cholesterol is predicated on some rather shaky ideas.

And now, as the new meta-study shows, there's insufficient data to support current guidelines restricting the consumption of saturated fats in order to prevent heart disease.

As patients, we entrust our health to a variety of medical professionals. We often think of the role doctors play in our well-being, but pharmacists - the gatekeepers of the medicine that doctors prescribe - also play a crucial part.

Like other medical errors, pharmacy mistakes can have serious consequences. According to a 2009 ABC News report, medical mistakes are the eighth-most-common cause of death in the U.S., and pharmacies account for a large portion of those errors.

We occasionally hear stories about the aftermath of these errors, like the Houston woman who last fall sued the pharmacy she says filled her daughter's medication at 10 times the prescribed dose, causing her death. But most people have no idea how frequently these errors occur. I know I didn't until it happened to me. In December, my four-year-old Labrador retriever was prescribed a medication to help with a condition related to her cancer. The pharmacist at a West Chester, Pa., Rite Aid mistakenly filled the medication at three times the prescribed dose, putting my dog's life in danger. Fortunately, she recovered from the overdose after two nights at the emergency veterinarian.

It turns out that dispensing the wrong dose of a prescribed medication is one of the most common pharmacy errors, along with dispensing the wrong drug and providing incorrect instructions. And while we know these errors occur all too frequently - a pharmacy auditor I consulted called them "fairly common" - we don't know exactly how frequently because many cases are never reported and even fewer are publicized. With Americans these days taking more prescription medications than ever before, we should expect these errors to increase.

If you eat pork, get ready to pay a lot more for it. A highly contagious pig virus known as "Porcine Epidemic Diarrhea virus" has now spread to 27 different U.S. states, and it has killed more than 4 million hogs since last May. Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the entire world, estimates that approximately 10 percent of all adult female hogs in America have contracted the disease already, and there is a very good chance that any offspring that they have will die. That is because the mortality rate for this disease for piglets is between 80 and 100 percent.

Fortunately, we are being told that this disease does not affect humans. However, considering the fact that California is in the midst of one of the worst droughts in recorded history, and considering the fact that the U.S. cattle herd has shrunk for seven years in a row, this pig virus is coming at a very, very bad time.

And the frightening thing is that the spread of this disease appears to be accelerating.

We know that statistics may be twisted into the realm of absurdity, but most of us seem to accept them when considering the safety of medicines.

Here's a typical example: We ask a doctor who recommends a vaccine about the risk of contracting Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS), a serious autoimmune condition which may evolve into paralysis. The doctor may assure us that the risk is "probably only one additional case in each million persons vaccinated."

Why should we accept this statistic without question?

Where do these safety statistics come from? They come from epidemiologists and statisticians whose interest is in the promotion of vaccines and who manipulate the statistics so that vaccines appear to be safer than they are in reality.

• Green Bank, West Virginia is situated in the middle of the National Radio Quiet Zone
• All electromagnetic signals are banned within the zone including WiFi and cellphones
• The zone was set up to protect the world's largest radio telescopes from electronic interference
• Americans from across the country have resettled in Green Bank to get away from the signals, which they find physically damaging
• More than 30 people have relocated to Green Bank as of 2013

A small remote town where Wi-Fi is banned has become an unlikely haven for people claiming modern technology has been making them ill.

The so-called 'Wi-Fi refugees' are flocking to the tiny settlement to escape painful symptoms including burning skin, chest pains and acute headaches.

The sufferers argue the affliction - a condition known as Electromagnetic Sensitivity - has been eased by the move and report feeling much better.

Dateline: Ontario, Canada. Eighteen-year-old Brennan McCartney visited his doctor for a chest cold and, despite no history of mental health issues or diagnosis of depression, received a prescription for the antidepressant Cipralex. Four days later, on November 8, 2010, he hanged himself.

Dateline: Laytonsville, Maryland. A psychiatrist prescribed the antidepressant Zoloft to 12-year-old Candace Downing, who suffered anxiety related to schoolwork but was otherwise a bright child with a loving family, a wide circle of friends, and no history of depression. On January 10, 2004, her mother found her dead, hanging from her bed valance.

Dateline: Indianapolis, Indiana. To help pay her college tuition, 19-year-old Traci Johnson volunteered for a clinical trial of a new antidepressant called Cymbalta. On February 7, 2004, she hanged herself at the Eli Lilly laboratory where the experiment was held. She was one of five participants who took their lives during clinical trials of the drug prior to its debut, though all had been pre-screened to confirm they did not have mental problems.

Thousands of similar stories link suicide, self-harm, and violent behavior to psychotherapeutics, but these medicines, often referred to as blockbuster drugs because they top $1 billion in annual sales, are among the most popular in medical history. The antipsychotic Abilify is now the nation's top-selling drug. Research firm IMS Health reports sales totaled nearly $6.5 billion in 2013. The medicine involved in the clinical trial suicides recounted above, Cymbalta, is the fourth-most-prescribed drug in the United States and the fifth top seller at $5.2 billion. Vyvanse, an amphetamine used to treat childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), holds the eighth position on the list of most prescribed meds. Ninth is Lyrica, an anticonvulsant often used to treat social anxiety disorder. Number 36 is antipsychotic Seroquel, prescribed for a wide range of conditions from depression and anxiety to schizophrenia. Antidepressants are the most commonly prescribed medication class in the United States.

Peshawar - After using scare tactics at places, authorities in Pakistan are moving to bribe parents for vaccinating their children with the questionable oral polio vaccine (OPV).

The politics of polio vaccination in Pakistan is seeing new and interesting turns every now and then. The latest move in this connection is the decision of the authorities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province to pay parents who let their children be vaccinated for polio and other diseases, as reported on The Guardian. Parents will be offered 1000 rupees, or around $10, for vaccinating each newborn child.

"It is the first time the country has resorted to monetary incentives, which are rarely used around the world," wrote the paper.

The move comes a month after authorities ordered the arrest of parents in the Sindh province in case they refused to vaccinate their child for polio during a 3-day district-wide vaccination campaign.