Unexpected serious side effects arose in a huge study of a Merck & Co long-acting niacin drug aimed at raising good HDL cholesterol, according to data released on Saturday, possibly adding another nail to the coffin of niacin therapy for heart patients.

Merck has already given up on the drug that combines extended-release niacin with an experimental agent called laropiprant, designed to prevent the uncomfortable facial flushing associated with niacin.

When it was announced that the drug called Tredaptive had failed to prevent heart attacks, strokes, death and other complications in heart patients also taking drugs to lower bad LDL cholesterol, Merck said it would not seek U.S. approval and would stop selling it in the dozens of other countries where it was already available.

A European medical journal last week said the drug caused concerning muscle weakness, especially in Asian patients.

More US residents are trying to avoid consuming gluten, the protein responsible for the condition known as celiac disease, than are dieting, according to recently released research conducted by market information firm NPD Group.

Furthermore, in January 2013, approximately one-third of all American adults said they are attempting to reduce or eliminate the substance in their diets. According to The NPD Group's latest report, that's the highest percentage since the group began asking American consumers about gluten consumption four years ago.

Those numbers might actually be on the low side, even though less than one percent of US adults have celiac disease, industry analyst Harry Balzer told Nancy Shute of NPR.

Celiac disease is an autoimmune disorder that can be caused by the gluten protein, which is commonly found in wheat, rye and barley. It can cause fatigue, digestive issues, and other symptoms.

However, celiac disease is not the only reason people choose to go gluten-free in their diets, explains CNBC's Katie Little. "The trend to go gluten free has caught on with consumers who don't have either condition but instead see it as part of a healthy diet or a way to lose weight," she said.

It's past time for conventional medicine to step down from its hubristic stance to realize that they don't know better than nature, that they cannot beat nature, and that they must work with nature, not against her. Until they do, they'll be no different than any of the other soul-sucking industries that exist by raping the earth of her bounty.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is again screaming about yet another antibiotic-resistant disease. The latest, a mouthful called carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE) is resistant to nearly all - possibly all - antibiotics and kills one in two people who get it. That makes it one of the most dangerous infectious diseases known.

The increasing number of antibiotic-resistant diseases is terrifying, but the fact that we need to face up to is that these diseases are all caused by the treatment that modern medicine has relied on as the primary excuse for its existence for decades: antibiotics. These drugs were supposedly the greatest invention ever made. They were going to rescue us from all infectious diseases. We were entering a new era.

And it's certainly proven true that we've entered a new era - but it's one of far worse diseases than those originally treated with antibiotics!

• Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) originally burst into headlines as the horrific flesh-eating bacteria. It's still that, though it's been given the gentler name of MRSA.
• Clostridium difficile (C diff) has a mortality rate that may run from 10% to 30%. It's a severe, and often relapsing, disease that causes diarrhea, inability to eat, and lack of energy, not to mention pain.
• Escherichia coli (E coli) is a natural pro-bacterium that normally lives in the human gut. But it's been turned into a killer disease with antibiotics.

Then we have drug-resistant tuberculosis, along with a range of other diseases that are out of control and more virulent as a direct result of modern medicine's standard treatment, antibiotics. The age of antibiotics is turning into something entirely different than was envisioned. Instead of an infectious disease utopia, we're seeing the beginnings of an infectious disease apocalypse - that is, we are as long as the modern medical paradigm stays in effect.

There is no question remaining that fluoride lowers IQ, at least as far as high-quality epidemiological research published in peer-reviewed journals has shown.

Take the conclusion of this systematic review of the literature published in the journal Biological and Trace Elements Research in 2008, which looked at whether fluoride exposure has increased the risk of low intelligence quotient (IQ) in China over the past 20 years:

[C]hildren who live in a fluorosis area [high fluoride exposure] have five times higher odds of developing low IQ than those who live in a nonfluorosis area or a slight fluorosis area.

[See our IQ and Fluoride research page for seven first-hand study abstracts on this connection]

Arguably, those who do question this causal connection despite the research are already under fluoride's powerful spell, since they don't take sufficient care to reduce their exposure to this intellectually-disabling toxin. They've drank the fluoride-contaminated Kool-aid, and are unable to comprehend what is still obvious to those who have not.

But fluoride's toxicity is not specific to only one type of tissue, i.e. neurological, but extends throughout the human body, having been linked to at least 30 distinct health problems stretching from calcification of soft tissue and endocrine glands (such as the pineal) to hypothyroidism, from hair loss to cancer.

While lawmakers and regulators consider the public gullible enough to believe that the IQ-lowering effects of fluoride a worthwhile price to pay for 'healthy' and 'attractive' teeth (even though fluoride exposure leads to fluorosis, an irreversible spotting, often yellowing of the enamel of the teeth), a more serious health problem lurks beneath the propaganda that has converted an industrial byproduct and pollutant into a "therapeutic" water, salt and milk additive. That problem is fluoride's infertility and abortifacient properties.

I've made the argument before that some supplements may be necessary even within the context of a nutrient-dense, whole-foods diet. Some nutrients are challenging to get through food alone, especially if you're not digesting food optimally or you're struggling with a disease that increases your need for particular nutrients. I routinely recommend supplements to many of my patients, and have seen the benefits of proper supplementation in my own life as well.

That said, there are several supplements that are commonly recommended by conventional doctors and healthcare practitioners that are unnecessary at best, and potentially harmful at worst. Perhaps the best example of this is calcium.

Calcium has become extremely popular to supplement with, especially amongst older women, in the hope that it will prevent osteoporosis. We've all seen the products on the market aimed at the "worried-well", such as Viactiv and Caltrate, suggesting that supplementing with calcium can help maintain bone health and prevent osteoporosis, a serious condition affecting at least 10% of American women. (1) Yet the evidence that calcium supplementation strengthens the bones and teeth was never strong to begin with, and has grown weaker with new research published in the past few years. A 2012 analysis of NHANES data found that consuming a high intake of calcium beyond the recommended dietary allowance, typically from supplementation, provided no benefit for hip or lumbar vertebral bone mineral density in older adults. (2) And a 2007 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that calcium supplements don't reduce fracture rates in older women, and may even increase the rate of hip fractures. (3)

The modern diet of processed foods, takeaways and microwave meals could be to blame for a sharp increase in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, including alopecia, asthma and eczema.

A team of scientists from Yale University in the U.S and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in Germany, say junk food diets could be partly to blame.

'This study is the first to indicate that excess refined and processed salt may be one of the environmental factors driving the increased incidence of autoimmune diseases,' they said.

Junk foods at fast food restaurants as well as processed foods at grocery retailers represent the largest sources of sodium intake from refined salts.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal sent out an international team of researchers to compare the salt content of 2,124 items from fast food establishments such as Burger King, Domino's Pizza, Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonald's, Pizza Hut and Subway. They found that the average salt content varied between companies and between the same products sold in different countries.

Researchers have found a connection between breastfeeding and the development of a child's brain. Researchers concluded, in a study of more than 17,000 infants from newborn to 6.5 years, that prolonged and exclusive breastfeeding improved brain development.

A similar study of nearly 4,000 children showed that babies who were breastfed had significantly higher scores on vocabulary testing at five years of age in comparison with children who were not breastfed. Higher levels were directly correlated with a longer duration of breastfeeding.

Pre-term infants with low-birth weight that received breast milk improved their brain development scores at 18 months when compared with pre-term infants who were not given breast milk. Follow-up research indicated that the scored held true even at 30 months.

Other findings confirmed that babies are less likely to be hospitalised, suffer adverse side-effects to vaccines and significantly reduced the risk of dying as well.

Scientists have watched a mild traumatic brain injury play out in the living brain, prompting swelling that reduces blood flow and connections between neurons to die.

"Even with a mild trauma, we found we still have these ischemic blood vessels and, if blood flow is not returned to normal, synapses start to die," said Dr. Sergei Kirov, neuroscientist and Director of the Human Brain Lab at the Medical College of Georgia at Georgia Regents University.

They also found that subsequent waves of depolarization - when brain cells lose their normal positive and negative charge - quickly and dramatically increase the losses.

Researchers hope the increased understanding of this secondary damage in the hours following an injury will point toward better therapy for the 1.7 million Americans annually experiencing traumatic brain injuries from falls, automobile accidents, sports, combat and the like. While strategies can minimize impact, no true neuroprotective drugs exist, likely because of inadequate understanding about how damage unfolds after the immediate impact.

Kirov is corresponding author of a study in the journal Brain describing the use of two-photon laser scanning microscopy to provide real-time viewing of submicroscopic neurons, their branches and more at the time of impact and in the following hours.

Bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates are what's known as "endocrine disruptors" - that is, at very small doses they interfere with our hormonal systems, giving rise to all manner of health trouble. In peer-reviewed research, BPA has been linked to asthma, anxiety, obesity, kidney and heart disease, and more. The rap sheet for phthalates, meanwhile, includes lower hormones in men, brain development problems, diabetes, asthma, obesity, and, possibly, breast cancer.

So, ingesting these industrial chemicals is a bad idea, especially if you're a kid or a pregnant woman. But avoiding them is very difficult, since they're widely used in plastics, and are ubiquitous in the food supply. The federal government has not seen fit to ban them generally - although the FDA did outlaw BPA from baby bottles last year (only after the industry had voluntarily removed them) and Congress pushed phthalates out of kids' toys back in 2008. Otherwise, consumers are on their own to figure out how to avoid ingesting them.

Unfortunately, that's a really hard task - and eating fresh, local, and organic might not be sufficient, as new research (abstract), published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, shows.

A team led by Sheela Sathyanarayana of University of Washington's Seattle Children's Research Institute performed a "dietary intervention" on two sets of five local families. After using urine tests to establish baseline BPA and phthalate levels for each group, they subjected one set of families to five days of eating meals from a catering company that avoids plastics and uses fresh and, when possible, local and organic ingredients. The other set was given "handouts describing best practice recommendations to reduce phthalate and BPA exposures" and asked to follow them as well as possible as they prepared their meals over the course of the five days. Levels of the chemicals were then again measured after the five-day period.