A decade ago, soya was being hailed as a superfood but in recent years, numerous issues surrounding deforestation and its impact on health have come to light.

Once credited with power to prevent cancer and combat high cholesterol, over the last few years, evidence that soya is far from a superfood has begun to emerge. And it's not just the potentially negative health impact of the bean that has former supporters up in arms: it's the environmental impact. In the UK we rely heavily on soya, or soy, and it's not just for vegetarian food. It is a hidden product in many foods and everyday items such as soap. It is a cheap source of protein for people as well as animals and according to Greenpeace, 80 per cent of soya worldwide is used for the livestock industry. WWF add that the UK consumption alone requires an area the size of Yorkshire to be planted with soya every year. So how did soya go from super crop to super bad?

Despite common perception, the toxic food additive MSG is everywhere - not just in Chinese food! This taste enhancer is actually hidden under dozens of ingredient names in all sorts of processed foods, restaurant foods, beverages, chewing gums, vitamins and supplements. It is added to foods in higher dosages than ever before, and more and more people are experiencing symptoms.

Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) is a health concern because it contains glutamate. Glutamate is the salt form of "Free Glutamic Acid" - a toxin that is associated with serious health problems such as digestive distress, heart attacks, Fibromyalgia, behavior problems, insulin resistance, weight gain, and a long list of other symptoms. [1, 2, 3, 4]

Due to insufficient labeling laws, food companies use many hidden names to disguise Free Glutamic Acid in their ingredients lists. So consumers must look for more than just "MSG" on food labels.

To understand why processed Free Glutamic Acid is associated with so many health problems, it is helpful to learn about natural Glutamic Acid - an amino acid (a building block of protein) that occurs naturally in the body as one of many excitatory neurotransmitters (chemicals that "excite" cells into action).

Glutamatic Acid also occurs naturally in certain unprocessed, whole foods (e.g., tomatoes). In this natural form, it is bound (i.e., linked) together with other amino acids to form a protein. Once ingested, the protein is broken down slowly by the digestive system. The Glutamic Acid is released gradually into the blood stream and is non-toxic. If one ingests more than the body needs, the cells clear away the excess just as they were designed to do. The digestion of these natural, whole food sources releases such a small amount of Glutamic Acid that even people who react to processed MSG can usually tolerate them.

When it comes to cigarettes, schizophrenics just can't seem to get enough. They're two to three times more likely to smoke than the general population, and patients have been known to puff through up to four packs a day. New research on mice may explain this behavior: Nicotine spurs the production of a key neural protein that's scarce in schizophrenics--and that may help relieve their symptoms.

The 100 billion neurons in our brains are continually signaling one another. These impulses are like cars zooming through a city without traffic lights to deliver a message--they would pile up and the messages would get garbled. To keep neural signal traffic flowing, the brain uses certain neurotransmitters as stoplights to prevent neurons from firing out of turn. Reduced levels of one such neurotransmitter, called gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), characterizes the brains of schizophrenia patients. Researchers think that without the stoplight effect of GABA, signals in the schizophrenic brain overlap and get jumbled in a sort of neural traffic jam, resulting in hallucinations, disorganized thinking, and anxiety.

When I picture myself at 75 years old ... well, honestly, I try to avoid picturing myself at 75 years old. No offense to the average septuagenarian, but I'm just not all that jazzed about a future of wrinkles and saggy old lady arms and boobs that hover around my waistline.

Or perhaps I should say I wasn't all that jazzed about the golden years, because now that I've seen 75-year-old bodybuilder Ernestine Shepherd in action? Um, WOW.

Apparently that whole "age is just a number" thing isn't merely something nice you write in a birthday card to your grandma -- it's true!

Declared the oldest competitive female bodybuilder in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2010, Ernestine Shepherd will literally redefine your personal definition of what a 75-year-old human being's body should look like. Shepherd is in better shape than the average 25-year-old!

Perfectly toned and sculpted, lean and mean, with absolutely gorgeous skin and bright eyes -- did this woman make a deal with the devil?

While ubiquitous in nature, melanin, which provides the coloring found in hair, skin, eyes, feathers, scales, etc., is an especially important substance as far as the human condition is concerned. After all, melanin's role in determining skin color makes it the primary physiological basis for racial differentiation among humans.

Entire civilizations, no doubt, have risen and fallen due to their conceptions (and misconceptions) about this pigment's effects on human behavior, to the point that the very notion of humanness itself has been called into question depending on how little or how much melanin a body possessed.

It is for this reason that melanin's lesser known, functional properties should be considered more closely. In fact, being more pigmented, i.e. darker skinned, or put oppositely, being less de-pigmented, may confer a unique set of health benefits which over the course of human history have been repressed or intentionally misrepresented in order to fuel the sociopolitical construct of race.

In biological science melanin is known to possess a diverse set of roles and functions in a wide range of organisms. These include:

• Protection against biochemical attack: e.g. the smokeshield-like ink of the octopus, and the melanin-based protective colorings of bacteria and fungi which are capable of encapsulating and oxidizing invading organisms in a process known as melanization.
• Mitigating chemical stresses associated with exposure to heavy metals and oxidizing agents.
• Acting as a natural sunscreen: shielding light-sensitive tissue from the potentially damaging effects of ultraviolet light.

Melanin is capable of transforming ultraviolet light energy into heat in a process known as "ultrafast internal conversion"; more than 99.9% of the absorbed UV radiation is transformed from potentially genotoxic (DNA-damaging) ultraviolet light into harmless heat.

If melanin can convert light into heat, could it not also transform UV radiation into other biologically/metabolically useful forms of energy? This may no seem so far fetched when one considers that even gamma radiation, which is highly toxic to most forms of life, is a source of sustenance for certain types of fungi and bacteria.

A new study shows that the compound Coenzyme Q10 (CoQ) reduces oxidative damage, a key finding that hints at its potential to slow the progression of Huntington disease. The discovery, which appears in the inaugural issue of the Journal of Huntington's Disease, also points to a new biomarker that could be used to screen experimental treatments for this and other neurological disorders.

"This study supports the hypothesis that CoQ exerts antioxidant effects in patients with Huntington's disease and therefore is a treatment that warrants further study," says University of Rochester Medical Center neurologist Kevin M. Biglan, M.D., M.P.H., lead author of the study. "As importantly, it has provided us with a new method to evaluate the efficacy of potential new treatments."

Pharmaceutical corporations, like Novo Nordisk, have been using underdeveloped countries as testing grounds for experimental drug trials. Doctors are beginning to speak out against this practice, citing that it has more to do with increasing profits and less to do with scientific research.

In countries like India and South Africa, where the citizens pay for their medicines, these drug trials are quite profitable for drug corporations.

While drug licensing authorities do not require post-marketing studies, major drug corporations regularly contend that they must conduct more experiments on the human population. Using third-world nations is the easiest way to do so considering that the general population in those countries does not have the ability to speak out and protest.

Even as doctors, scientists and health specialists in Bihar continue to investigate the "mysterious disease" which has claimed hundreds of lives in the last one month, the death of 18 more kids on Saturday has taken the toll from 156 to 174.

Additional Secretary (Health) R P Ojha said out of 402 children detected with symptoms of Acute Encephalitis Syndrome (AES), 82 have been admitted to different hospitals for treatment, while 156 died. The rest 164 children have been discharged after treatment.

Unofficial sources, however, put the death toll to 203.

Ever since the "mysterious disease" broke out on May 16, the blame game is on in the state. Bihar Health Minister Ashwani Choubey has charged the Centre with stalling the State's plan to spray the chemical in the susceptible districts -- Muzaffarpur and Gaya -- where the casualty list is long.

Aren't critics of genetically engineered food anti-science? Isn't the debate over GMOs (genetically modified organisms) a spat between emotional but ignorant activists on one hand and rational GM-supporting scientists on the other?

A new report released today, "GMO Myths and Truths",^[1] challenges these claims. The report presents a large body of peer-reviewed scientific and other authoritative evidence of the hazards to health and the environment posed by genetically engineered crops and organisms (GMOs).

Unusually, the initiative for the report came not from campaigners but from two genetic engineers who believe there are good scientific reasons to be wary of GM foods and crops.

A study by the University of Sheffield has found that the air we breathe inside our own homes can have pollutant levels three times higher than the outdoor environment, in city centres and along busy roads.

Researchers from the University's Faculty of Engineering measured air quality inside and outside three residential buildings with different types of energy use (gas vs. electric cookers). They found that nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels in the kitchen of the city centre flat with a gas cooker were three times higher than the concentrations measured outside the property and well above those recommended in UK Indoor Air Quality Guidance1. These findings are published in the Journal of Indoor and Built Environment.

"We spend 90 per cent of our time indoors and work hard to make our homes warm, secure and comfortable, but we rarely think about the pollution we might be breathing in," said Professor Vida Sharifi, who led the research. "Energy is just one source of indoor pollution, but it is a significant one. And as we make our homes more airtight to reduce heating costs, we are likely to be exposed to higher levels of indoor pollution, with potential impacts on our health."