Americans spend an estimated $5 billion a year on unproven herbal supplements that promise everything from fighting off colds to curbing hot flashes and boosting memory.But now there is a new reason for supplement buyers to beware: DNA tests show that many pills labeled as healing herbs are little more than powdered rice and weeds.

Using a test called DNA barcoding, a kind of genetic fingerprinting that has also been used to help uncover labeling fraud in the commercial seafood industry, Canadian researchers tested 44 bottles of popular supplements sold by 12 companies. They found that many were not what they claimed to be, and that pills labeled as popular herbs were often diluted - or replaced entirely - by cheap fillers like soybean, wheat and rice.

Consumer advocates and scientists say the research provides more evidence that the herbal supplement industry is riddled with questionable practices. Industry representatives argue that any problems are not widespread.

For the study, the researchers selected popular medicinal herbs, and then randomly bought different brands of those products from stores and outlets in Canada and the United States. To avoid singling out any company, they did not disclose any product names.

Among their findings were bottles of echinacea supplements, used by millions of Americans to prevent and treat colds, that contained ground up bitter weed, Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive plant found in India and Australia that has been linked to rashes, nausea and flatulence.

It's possible to distinguish the clumps of proteins believed to cause the diseases from well-functioning proteins by using a laser imaging technique. If these clumps are removed, the disease is effectively cured. The laser technique could now offer a means of removing the lumps without surgery or the toxic chemicals currently used.

Lasers could be used to cure diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, a new study suggests.

Researchers say they have made a discovery that may allow them to eradicate Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease using light therapy.

Swedish and Polish scientists have discovered it is possible to distinguish clumps of the proteins believed to cause the diseases from the well-functioning proteins in the body by using a laser imaging technique.

Dr Piotr Hanczyc, of Chalmers University of Technology, in Sweden, said: 'Nobody has talked about using only light to treat these diseases until now.

'This is a totally new approach and we believe that this might become a breakthrough in the research of diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

'We have found a totally new way of discovering these structures using just laser light.'

If the protein clumps are removed, the disease is, in principle, cured. The problem until now has been detecting and removing the clumps.

The history of the national conviction that dietary fat is deadly, and its evolution from hypothesis to dogma, is one in which politicians, bureaucrats, the media, and the public have played as large a role as the scientists and the science.

~ Gary Taubes

Finally someone from the conventional world of nutrition has stepped forward to state the obvious: Swedish expert committee: A low-carb diet is most effective for weight loss. Mainstream guidelines can no longer ignore what the alternative media has been saying for years: animal fats are good for our health. Every single person in the world should take this opportunity to redeem our ancestral diet which saw us thrive as intelligent human beings. It is about time to hold accountable the aberration of a diet that has taken hold of our world today, with processed and high-carbohydrate foods that perpetuate the worst state of health human history has ever seen.

Big Agra, Big Pharma and the Food Industry reign over a population crippled with dementia, diabetes, obesity, cancer, cardiovascular diseases, autoimmune diseases, allergies, respiratory problems, digestive problems, and mood disorders which no mainstream guideline can heal or cure satisfactorily. If something is achieved, it is a very bad quality of life at best, requiring something between 4 and 12 pills per day to sustain, and which slowly poisons even the most resilient.

Nurses around the world train diabetic people on dietary guidelines which only perpetuate and worsens their disease. You might be familiar with the following argument: "When calculating your insulin requirements, ignore fats as they don't raise insulin." Right there you have a big clue to the cure! Yet the brainwashing and lack of critical thinking is such that health care providers can't recognize the solution right in front of them even if they spell it out themselves. Then a nonsensical protocol is advised where people have to eat up to 5 times a day, including a carbohydrate meal every single time, just so that prescribed insulin doesn't bring blood sugar levels to dangerously low levels. Most brochures and guidelines given to diabetic patients are written and published by pharmaceutical companies that are then selling the very same prescribed insulin. Imagine if people knew that they only need to drop the carbs in order to decrease their insulin needs. God forbid they should ever cure their diabetes with a low carb diet!

By Ask Umbra

Q. I've been trying to eliminate preservatives and other food additives from my diet. Upon becoming more label aware, I've been shocked to discover how many foods contain "natural flavor." Even butter contains it! I'm suspicious of how natural this flavor actually is! Do you have the scoop on natural flavor additives?

Yours truly,
Lindsay F.
Seattle, WA

A. Dearest Lindsay,

Your question reminds me of one of my favorite old love songs, the one that goes "A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, and butter is just cream that's been whipped until the fat separates from the whey." Those were simpler times. The "natural flavor" that comes packaged with today's butters (and many other processed foods) may sound innocuous, but you're right to wonder about the stuff.

The FDA's thorough definition of natural flavor essentially boils down to this: It's a substance derived directly from a plant or animal or from the roasting, heating, or fermentation of said animal or plant. The source can be pretty much anything: fruits, veggies, herbs, spices, leaves, roots, bark, meat, eggs, and dairy products among them. Sounds OK so far, doesn't it?

Developer of first commercialised GM food says debate isn't over.

The number of scientists, physicians and legal experts who have signed the group statement, "No scientific consensus on GMO safety" has climbed to 231 in just over a week - and it's still growing.

The number of initial signatories stood at almost 100 on the day the statement was released, 21 October. It has more than doubled since.

A recent signatory is Dr Belinda Martineau, former member of the Michelmore Lab at the UC Davis Genome Center, University of California, who helped commercialise the world's first GM whole food, the Flavr Savr tomato. Dr Martineau said:

"I wholeheartedly support this thorough, thoughtful and professional statement describing the lack of scientific consensus on the safety of genetically engineered (GM/GE) crops and other GM/GE organisms (also referred to as GMOs). Society's debate over how best to utilize the powerful technology of genetic engineering is clearly not over. For its supporters to assume it is, is little more than wishful thinking."

Two days after the California Department of Public Health released its new form requiring parents who want to exempt their kids from required vaccinations to speak with a doctor, an association of public health officers is voicing concern over an option on the form that allows parents to easily bypass the requirement.

A box parents can check allows them to skip talking to their doctor if they vouch that they're "a member of a religion that prohibits me from seeking medical advice or treatment from authorized healthcare practitioners."

What do professional cyclist Dave Zabriskie, ultramarathon runner Timothy Olson, and gold-medal triathlete Simon Whitfield have in common? All of these elite endurance athletes have pushed away the time-honored plate of pasta in favor of a "paleo" approach to nutrition.

They've dialed down the carbohydrates and replaced them with copious amounts of healthy fat. And as multitudes of paleo converts claim (and anecdotal evidence suggests), this may be the key to optimizing performance and extending careers into the late thirties and beyond.

But it requires a leap of faith. "It's like NASA," says conditioning coach Jacques DeVore on the trepidation he felt sending Zabriskie into the 2013 racing season on an unproved diet. "You can test everything in the lab, but then you put it up in space and sometimes things don't work out."

Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries have agreed to pay over $2.2 billion to resolve criminal and civil allegations that the company promoted powerful psychiatric drugs for unapproved uses in children, seniors and disabled patients, the Department of Justice announced on Monday.

The allegations include paying kickbacks to physicians and pharmacies to recommend and prescribe Risperdal and Invega, both antipsychotic drugs, and Natrecor, which is used to treat heart failure.

The figure includes $1.72 billion in civil settlements with federal and state governments as well as $485 million in criminal fines and forfeited profits.

The agreement is the third-largest U.S. settlement involving a drugmaker, and the latest in a string of legal actions against drug companies that allegedly put profits ahead of patients. In recent years, the government has cracked down on the pharmaceutical industry's aggressive marketing tactics, which include pushing medicines for unapproved, or off-label, uses. While doctors are allowed to prescribe medicines for any use, drugmakers cannot promote them in any way that is not approved by FDA.

A decade after SARS swept through the world and killed more than 750 people, scientists have made a troubling discovery: A very close cousin of the SARS virus lives in bats and it can likely jump directly to people.

The findings create new fears about the emergence of diseases like SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome. The virus spread quickly from person to person in 2003 and had a mortality rate of at least 9%. Worries of a severe pandemic led the World Health Organization to issue an emergency travel advisory.

While bats have previously been fingered as a host for SARS, it was believed that the virus jumped from there to weasel-like mammals known as civets, where it went through genetic changes before infecting people. Operating on that belief, China cracked down on markets where bats, civets and other wildlife were sold for food.

WA doctors are being inundated with patients asking if they should dump their anti-cholesterol drugs after a television documentary suggested the pills were overprescribed and doing more harm than good.

Experts are furious by claims in the ABC medical science program Catalyst that cholesterol is a heart disease myth and the drugs statins have few benefits and significant side effects.

The program was a rating success, with almost one million capital-city viewers tuning in to the series on the past two Thursdays.

There is now speculation the ABC has left itself open to litigation after reports of worried patients taking themselves off the drugs without telling their doctor.

Some critics claim the program was heavily biased to the views of several hand-picked US doctors, nutritionists and "suntanned charismatics" who played down the role of cholesterol and saturated fats in heart disease.

Australian Medical Association WA president Richard Choong said one in five patients he had seen at his Port Kennedy practice in the past two days came because they were worried about their prescribed statins.