You feel at the end of your rope -- foggy, tired, irritable, flat, and constantly worried. About. Everything. It seems like the world is coming at you, every pixel of it, at 1 million miles per hour, and you just need to press pause, but you can't. Your internist recommends that you see a psychiatrist, you make an appointment, and after 45 minutes, you leave with a Lexapro prescription. Before you walk it over to CVS, try these three dietary changes for 2-4 weeks. See what happens:

1. Eliminate GMOs

Genetically-modified foods are chemical/biological products that are laced and saturated with complex toxic herbicides, and because they are largely unstudied by objective researchers, we are only now beginning to understand how they do their damage, and the relevance of the gut to mental health. We know that the modification of plant genes using animal, insect, and bacterial DNA is a highly unpredictable process that:

-- Disrupts that plant's natural development (lowers its nutritional content and raises its allergy content).

-- Introduces novel proteins, antibiotic resistance genes (built into "Bt corn!") and the potential for transfer of genes to our own gut bacteria.

-- These plants are modified, not for any reason that would ever benefit you or the planet, but so that they can better withstand more and more glyphosate-containing Roundup herbicide (produced by the same company that modifies and sells the patented seeds). This chemical has the following undesirable effects as reviewed in this seminal paper.

• It kills beneficial bacteria through its interference with the "shikimate" pathway.
• The interference with this bacteria promotes "dysbiosis" and the creation of inflammatory compounds from important amino acids like tryptophan.
• When it is broken down by the gut, it produces ammonia.
• It blocks an enzyme that converts testosterone to estrogen, aromatase.
• It chelates/binds calcium, magnesium, zinc, iron, and cobalt.
• It interferes with sulfate availability, critical to cholesterol metabolism and cellular function.
• It interferes with liver enzymes responsible for breaking down other toxins, amplifying their effects.

Heart-clogging trans fats were once a staple of the American diet, plentiful in baked goods, microwave popcorn and fried foods. Now, mindful of the health risks, the Food and Drug Administration is getting rid of what's left of them for good.

Condemning artificial trans fats as a threat to public health, the FDA announced Thursday it will require the food industry to phase them out.

Manufacturers already have eliminated many trans fats, responding to criticism from the medical community and to local laws. Even so, the FDA said getting rid of the rest (the average American still eats around a gram of trans fat a day) could prevent 20,000 heart attacks and 7,000 deaths each year.

The onset of flu season brings with it a rise in the use of antibacterial hand soaps. Many such soaps contain triclosan - a chemical that studies have shown affects the function of heart muscle and has been implicated in altering thyroid function in lab animal studies.

Scientists studying the chemical feel it is not necessary in keeping hands free from bacteria.

The chemical has been the focus of research at UC Davis for the last eight years. The most recent study was one of the first to find that mice exposed to high levels of the chemical showed impairment in the contraction and relaxation of heart and skeletal muscle.

Triclosan - introduced in 1969 as a pesticide - was first used as an antiseptic in 1972. Initially used in surgical scrub soap, it is now widely used in popular antibacterial soaps, such as Dial, and other consumer products, such as toothpaste and cosmetics.

Here's an opinion piece in a Swedish morning paper, highlighting the fact that many hospitals have chosen not to offer any help to obese children:

DN Opinion: "Hospital Closes the Door on Obese Children" (Google translated from Swedish).

Prof. Claude Marcus and others are right that it's terrible that hospitals fail children with serious medical problems. This is not acceptable. But the problem is even greater: The outcome in hospitals treating childhood obesity is woefully bad. Very few children are treated successfully.

In hospitals that do treat obese children, the treatment is usually based on the outdated idea "eat less, run more". They seriously advise parents to limit their child's food intake, dismissing the kids from the table still hungry. They're then advised to try to make the kids run outside, despite not having had enough to eat.

At the same time they ignore study after study showing that children who eat their fill on a low-carb diet will lose more weight.

Because health care workers ignore inconvenient new knowledge, obese children and their parents are given advice that lead to worse outcomes and unnecessary suffering.

Today's treatment for childhood obesity isn't just child abuse. It's family abuse.

Roundup herbicide (glyphosate) is in our air, rain, groundwater, soil and most food in the U.S., and an increasing body of research reveals it has cancer-promoting properties.

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Toxicology Research have recently confirmed the carcinogenic potential of Roundup herbicide using human skin cells (HaCaT ) exposed to extremely low concentrations of the world's best selling herbicide.

The researchers previously reported on glyphosate's tumor promoting potential in a two-stage mouse skin carcinogenesis model[i] through its disruption of proteins that regulate calcium (Ca^2+- ) signaling and oxidative stress (SOD 1), but were unable in these investigations to identify the exact molecular mechanisms behind how glyphosate contributes to tumor promotion.

The new study, published in the peer-reviewed journal ISRN Dermatology,^[ii] sought out to clarify the exact mode of tumorigenic action, finding the likely mechanism behind glyphosate's cancer promoting properties is through the downregulation of mitochondrial apoptotic (self-destructive) signaling pathways, as well as through the disruption of a wide range of cell signaling and regulatory components. Cell proliferative effects were induced by concentrations lower than .1 mM, and as low as 0.01 mM, which is four orders of magnitude lowerthan concentrations commonly used in GM agricultural applications (e.g. 50 mM). The fact that lower concentrations were more effective at inducing proliferation than higher concentrations (which suppressed cell growth), indicates that Roundup is a potent endocrine disrupter, and further highlights why conventional toxicological risk assessments are inadequate because they do not account for the fact that as concentrations are reduced certain types of toxicity -- e.g. endocrine disruption -- actually increase.

Guys, I have a confession: I was a vegetarian for 17 years, but I didn't do it for the animals. In fact, the Wilburs, Bessies, Babes, and all the other adorably long-lashed barnyard denizens were the furthest thing from my mind. Nope, I became vegetarian for one man, and one man only - Morrissey.

At 15, I was deep, deep in the throes of my love for the high priest of misery. I bought Morrissey glasses, which was harder to do in the pre-Warby early '90s, when the only specs you could find were the bookish wire frames that are big in Bushwick these days. I talked like Morrissey, convinced I wielded his Wildean wit whenever I hurled "vulgar" at the popular girls' backs. I listened to Patti Smith and Sparks records (let's just say I wasn't really ready for Patti at 15). So, the first time I heard The Smiths' queasy ode to anti-vivisection "Meat Is Murder," I was instantly changed. "If Morrissey's a vegetarian, I'll be a vegetarian, too," I thought. And so it was - I'd accepted the Word of Moz into my heart, chapter and verse. And I vowed to never eat meat again.

Teenagers who go to bed late during the school year are more prone to academic and emotional difficulties in the long run, compared to their earlier-to-bed counterparts, according to a new study from UC Berkeley.

Berkeley researchers analyzed longitudinal data from a nationally representative cohort of 2,700 U.S. adolescents of whom 30 percent reported bedtimes later than 11:30 p.m. on school days and 1:30 a.m. in the summer in their middle and high school years.

By the time they graduated from high school, the school-year night owls had lower GPA scores, and were more vulnerable to emotional problems than teens with earlier bedtimes, according to the study published online Nov.10 in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The results present a compelling argument in favor of later middle and high school start times in the face of intense academic, social and technological pressures, researchers said.

"Academic pressures, busy after-school schedules, and the desire to finally have free time at the end of the day to connect with friends on the phone or online make this problem even more challenging," said Lauren Asarnow, lead author of the study and a graduate student in UC Berkeley's Golden Bear Sleep and Mood Research Clinic.

Recently, a study made waves when it revealed fast food chicken nuggets are a whole lot less chicken meat and much more "other" in construction.

But the research shouldn't come as a surprise. The fast food industry is able to offer gut-busting meals at rock-bottom prices and you better believe it isn't because they are cutting into their profits. It's because they are using cheap, and sometimes toxic ingredients.

The latest study came from some the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

Study author and professor of pediatrics and medicine Dr. Richard deShazo and his team selected two fast food restaurants in their town and ordered chicken nuggets off the menu.

Then, they randomly selected one nugget from each bag and dissected it to determine what it was actually made of.

Sample one was only 40% skeletal muscle, what we think of when we think of "meat". The other sample was 50% meat. What made up the rest of the nuggets? Bones, blood vessels, connective tissue, nerves, and fat - "the stuff that usually ends up in dog food," as NPR so aptly put it.

• Declarations of support and affection actually leave us feeling physically warmer, claim scientists

• The findings suggest closeness to others create feelings of contentment as it triggers the same physical responses involved when keeping warm

Feeling loved really can give you a warm glow inside.

Declarations of support and affection actually leave us feeling physically warmer, claim scientists.

They also discovered that holding a heated object can boost our closeness to others. Using MRI scans, they found feelings of social and physical warmth both result in increased activity in the same part of the brain.

A major indicator of the deteriorating quality of conventional medical care in the U.S. is its growing reliance on pharmaceutical drugs as a catch-all for pain and disease management. And a new study published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry shows that this dire situation is only worsening, as many conventional doctors are no longer even properly diagnosing patients but instead just handing out medications willy-nilly in order to get patients out the door.

This is definitely true for millions of American veterans currently taking psychiatric drugs, many of whom have alleged mental conditions that were never clinically diagnosed. According to a new report out of Yale University, roughly one-third of all U.S. veterans between the ages of 65 and 85 currently taking psych drugs never received any sort of mental health diagnosis. As it turns out, less than 40 percent of those taking such drugs but not getting mental health treatment from a specialist have a legitimate mental illness diagnosis.