The paleolithic diet has sparked plenty of discussion in the nutrition world (and on this web site) in the last few months. Lots of people are looking for advice on how to get in on this meat and vegetable-centric way of eating that claims inspiration from the simple wild foods a hunter-gatherer might have been lucky to find.

But when Steve Cooksey - a paleo-proponent who describes himself as formerly obese, sedentary and diabetic on his blog - heard from the state of North Carolina that his advice to readers violated a law against nutrition counseling without a license, he bit back. He filed a First Amendment lawsuit.

A European Commission report by the BIO Intelligence Service (BIOS)¹ recommending the phase-out of dental amalgam and mercury in button cell batteries has many wondering if the whole of Europe will eliminate the use of dental mercury by 2018.

It's about time, and hopefully it would push the United States to quickly follow suit. Currently about half of U.S. dentists are mercury-free, and 77 percent of consumers who are informed that amalgam fillings are mostly mercury would choose a mercury-free alternative and are willing to pay more for it.

The European Commission has been working to reduce mercury exposure to humans for the past seven years. While the official stand has been that dental amalgam is safe, recent studies suggest otherwise. Sweden has already phased out dental mercury, and several other European countries have either significantly reduced its use or have imposed restrictions on it. The United States has been shockingly slow to respond to mounting evidence of significant harm from dental amalgam.

It's important to understand that the term "silver filling" is profoundly deceptive, as the composite material contains anywhere from 49 to 54 percent mercury, not silver. The American Dental Association (ADA) has historically covered up this fact, and at one time even declared that removing mercury fillings is unethical -- despite the known fact that dental amalgam emits mercury vapor after it is implanted in your mouth, and this mercury is bioaccumulative and endangers your health in many ways.

The BIOS recommendations have yet to be adopted, but the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) and the Mercury Policy Project say they welcome the study. Project coordinator for the EEB's Zero Mercury Campaign, Elena Lymberidi-Settimo, said the work shows that "mercury use must be phased out," especially since alternatives to mercury use in dentistry are available. "It's high time that mercury becomes the exception rather than the rule," she said to PR Newswire².

"Eccentric training has been shown to produce greater muscle hypertrophy than concentric training as a result of greater ability for maximal force generating capacity during eccentric contractions." - J.P. Farthing, University of Saskatchewan

In a guest post a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I'd be back to talk more about research supporting the Primal principle of "lifting heavy things." Let's do it.

Women Won't Look Like Men and Men Won't Look Like Bulldogs

Before digging into the details about lifting or lowering anything, it is important to address a common fear that exercising with heavy things makes women look like men and men look like bulldogs. The best way to address this fear is to understand our biology. Everyone has a gene called GDF-8, and that controls a substance called myostatin, which controls the amount of muscle we have and how much muscles develop naturally. The base levels of myostatin and muscle in basically all women and most men make it impossible for them to naturally build bulky muscles. It does not matter how much resistance we use. The majority of us - especially women - do not have the genes to build bulky muscles via any form of exercise.

New research, to be published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, finds that men who developed persistent sexual side effects while on finasteride (Propecia), a drug commonly used for male pattern hair loss, have a high prevalence of depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts.

The study, titled "Depressive Symptoms and Suicidal Thoughts Among Former Users of Finasteride With Persistent Sexual Side Effects," was authored by Michael S. Irwig, M.D., an assistant professor of medicine in the Division of Endocrinology at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

For the study, Dr. Irwig administered standardized interviews to 61 men who were former users of finasteride with persistent sexual side effects for more than three months. The interview gathered demographic information, medical and psychiatric histories, and information on medication use, sexual function, and alcohol consumption. All of the former finasteride users were otherwise healthy men with no baseline sexual dysfunction, medical conditions, psychiatric conditions or use of oral prescription medications.

Investigators at Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) and Veterans Affairs (VA) Boston Healthcare System have identified a new gene linked to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The findings, published online in Molecular Psychiatry, indicate that a gene known to play a role in protecting brain cells from the damaging effects of stress may also be involved in the development of PTSD.

The article reports the first positive results of a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of PTSD and suggests that variations in the retinoid-related orphan receptor alpha (RORA) gene are linked to the development of PTSD.

Mark W. Miller, PhD, associate professor at BUSM and a clinical research psychologist in the National Center for PTSD at VA Boston Healthcare System was the study's principal investigator. Mark Logue, PhD, research assistant professor at BUSM and Boston University School of Public Health and Clinton Baldwin, PhD, professor at BUSM, were co-first authors of the paper.

A new way to study the role of a critical neurotransmitter in disorders such as epilepsy, anxiety, insomnia, depression, schizophrenia, and alcohol addiction has been developed by a group of scientists led by Gong Chen, an associate professor of biology at Penn State University. The new method involves molecularly engineering a model synapse -- a structure through which a nerve cell send signals to another cell. This model synapse can precisely control a variety of receptors for the neurotransmitter called GABA, which is important in brain chemistry.

The research, which will be published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry on 10 August 2012, opens the door to the possibility of creating safer and more-efficient drugs that target GABA receptors and that cause fewer side effects.

Neurotransmitters -- chemicals sent by nerves to trigger other cells to change their electrical responses -- interact with special receptors located on the cell's outer membrane. These receptors form inside the cell, and then are transported to different locations on the membrane to await the arrival of neurotransmitters. Chen explained that understanding how these receptors work and how they move to various locations on a cell's membrane is a critical step toward the development of new drugs targeting diseases that affect brain chemistry.

In their study, Chen and his team focused on a particular receptor -- called the GABA-A receptor-- that responds to the neurotransmitter GABA. "The GABA-A receptors are associated with various disorders in which nerve-cell excitability is altered, such as epilepsy and anxiety, and these receptors mediate major inhibition in the brain," Chen explained. "Each GABA-A receptor protein is made up of five subunits and there are 19 possible subunits that can combine in various ways to form any single receptor. We focused on a particular group of subunits called Alpha, and how changing these tiny subunits might affect the GABA-A receptor's location on the cell membrane."

A new study is the first to find a difference between how boys and girls respond to prenatal exposure to the insecticide chlorpyrifos. Researchers at the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health (CCCEH) at the Mailman School of Public Health found that, at age 7, boys had greater difficulty with working memory, a key component of IQ, than girls with similar exposures. On the plus side, having nurturing parents improved working memory, especially in boys, although it did not lessen the negative cognitive effects of exposure to the chemical.

Results are published online in the journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology.

In 2011, research led by Virginia Rauh, ScD, Co-Deputy Director of CCCEH, established a connection between prenatal exposure to chlorpyrifos and deficits in working memory and IQ at age 7. Earlier this year, a follow-up study showed evidence in MRI scans that even low to moderate levels of exposure during pregnancy may lead to long-term, potentially irreversible changes in the brain. The latest study, led by Megan Horton, PhD, explored the impact of sex differences and the home environment on these health outcomes.

Dr. Horton and colleagues looked at a subset of 335 mother-child pairs enrolled in the ongoing inner-city study of environmental exposures, including measures of prenatal chlorpyrifos in umbilical cord blood.

When the children reached age 3, the researchers measured the home environment using the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) criteria, including two main categories:

At its most fundamental level, diabetes is a disease characterized by stress -- microscopic stress that causes inflammation and the loss of insulin production in the pancreas, and system-wide stress due to the loss of that blood-sugar-regulating hormone.

Now, researchers led by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) have uncovered a new key player in amplifying this stress in the earliest stages of diabetes: a molecule called thioredoxin-interacting protein (TXNIP). The molecule, they've discovered, is central to the inflammatory process that leads to the death of the cells in the human pancreas that produce insulin.

"This molecule does something remarkable -- it takes stress and makes it worse," said the senior author of the study, UCSF's Feroz Papa, MD, PhD, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF and a member of the UCSF Diabetes Center and the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3).

The study is published this week in the journal Cell Metabolism, with a parallel study by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis. Both studies were funded by the JDRF.

Vaginal birth triggers the expression of a protein in the brains of newborns that improves brain development and function in adulthood, according to a new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers, who also found that this protein expression is impaired in the brains of offspring delivered by caesarean section (C-sections).

These findings are published in the August issue of PLoS ONE by a team of researchers led by Tamas Horvath, the Jean and David W. Wallace Professor of Biomedical Research and chair of the Department of Comparative Medicine at Yale School of Medicine.

The team studied the effect of natural and surgical deliveries on mitochondrial uncoupling protein 2 (UCP2) in mice. UCP2 is important for the proper development of hippocampal neurons and circuits. This area of the brain is responsible for short- and long-term memory. UCP2 is involved in cellular metabolism of fat, which is a key component of breast milk, suggesting that induction of UCP2 by natural birth may aid the transition to breast feeding.

There's no shortage of stories detailing conflicts of interest - so many in fact that you may be getting sick and tired of hearing of them. However, this is a truly important issue that must be tackled, and one of the ways of doing that is by exposing it to the harsh light of day. As long as people remain unaware, or turn a blind eye, it will continue unabated.

The price we pay for not paying attention is the loss of health, as the information disseminated by grossly compromised health agencies is skewed in favor of various industries, with Big Pharma leading the pack as one of the most powerful political and governmental influences.

Here, I will review two important revolving-door cases, and while neither is recent news, many of you may still be unaware of them.