It's no secret that there's a global plan to try to get people off of meat. Vegetarians and vegans have been pushing the trend for decades now and in terms of health, it would likely have a positive impact on western populations. However, shouldn't we have the choice? Shouldn't this come from within and be a desire for the love and care of animals rather than some dictatorial control mechanism by the scientific elite? Genetically engineered ticks may be causing severe, life-threatening allergic reactions to meat that may soon start to spread throughout the entire world.

Genetically modified insects have been released into the wild for some time now. Disease-carrying mosquitoes and crop-munching caterpillars have already been designed with "living pesticides" and scientists say their approach works with just about any animal - from fish to frogs and rats to humans.

Oxitec and the Mosquito Research and Control Unit of Grand Cayman (MRCU) publicly announced at a American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene that their release of genetically modified sterile mosquitoes into the wild went live years ago after years of laboratory experiments and hypothetical calculations.

Susan Wolver, MD, and Diane Sun, MD, from Virginia Commonwealth University in the US, and colleagues, explains why if you have been bitten by a tick, you may now develop an allergy to red meat. Their article elucidates this connection and discusses the journey of the discovery, yet stop short of emphasizing how these ticks were genetically designed. It's a new syndrome and natural consequence of the interaction of human blood and being bitten by modern ticks they say.

After setting sights on creating a heavily modified apple that 'never browns' and doing their very best to hide the fact that they are indeed genetically altered, a biotech corporation known as Okanagan Specialty Fruits is now pushing for their new genetically modified apples to hit the market. The company recently submitted an application to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency to launch their initiative to get the apples into your local grocery market and reap 'improved industry sales', but they made sure that the data was not available to the public.

Now, after providing virtually no information to the citizens of Canada and submitting only two pages of information on the product actually written by the company, Okanagan Specialty Fruits is now set on a United States release. On July 9th, the USDA posted the corporation's request for approval on their website for the genetically modified 'non-browning' apples, giving the public 60 days to comment before ultimately making a decision.

The move has outraged many watchdog organizations, who have continued to highlight the fact that the initial submission to the Canadian government was 'embarrassing' in its utter lack of real information. Speaking on behalf of the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, activist and biotech researcher Lucy Sharratt stated:

"The CFIA should be deeply embarrassed for wasting Canadian's time on a false invitation to comment on the GM apple... the CFIA public comment period was always a sham because it was based on no data but this farce is now completely exposed."

A diabetes study at the University of Leicester has discovered that South Asians have higher levels of blood sugar than white Europeans independent of risk factors that influence sugar levels.

The study of 4,688 white Europeans and 1,352 South Asians was led by Dr. Samiul A Mostafa, of the University of Leicester, Department of Cardiovascular Sciences, and was published in Diabetes Care, a journal of the American Diabetes Association.

According to the study South Asians had higher levels of three measures of blood sugar: HbA1c (a measure of blood sugar over three months), fasting plasma glucose, and two-hour plasma glucose which are all used for diagnosis of Type 2 Diabetes.

Importantly, these higher levels of sugar markers in South Asians were not accounted for by differences in risk factors that influence diabetes, suggesting they were independently higher. Dr Mostafa, a Clinical Research Fellow in Diabetes and Endocrinology based at Leicester Diabetes Centre, said: "'We know Type 2 Diabetes is more common in South Asians compared to Europeans and is diagnosed at an earlier age.

A highly contagious bacterial disease is spreading in four provinces, infecting as many as 2,000 people with a violent, uncontrollable cough and killing an infant in Alberta, as public-health authorities scramble to boost their vaccination programs.

British Columbia's Fraser Valley, southern Alberta, parts of Southwestern Ontario and New Brunswick are dealing with severe outbreaks of a disease that was once on the wane - pertussis, more commonly known as whooping cough, which can be especially deadly if contracted by infants. The United States, meanwhile, appears headed for its worst year for whooping cough in more than five decades, with more than 18,000 cases reported so far.

When health and nutrition blogger Steve Cooksey received a disturbing 19-page letter from the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition, complete with threats of arrest, he did what others are often afraid to do: made it public.

It seems that his blog, which features nutrition principles based on the Paleo Diet, upset the dietetics board because they construed his online blog as a dispensing a type of "nutrition advising" or "nutrition counseling" without a license.

The Board ordered that Cooksey take down the nutritional advice or face prosecution ... and outrageously even said he could not offer such advice for free to friends over the phone!

But there's much more to this story than meets the eye, as the North Carolina Board of Dietetics/Nutrition is a state chapter of the U.S. American Dietetic Association (ADA) (now formally known as the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics), and newly leaked internal documents show the affront against Steve Cooksey is only the beginning ...

Does the ADA Intend to Silence Any and All Competition?

That certainly appears to be the message in a leaked internal ADA document obtained by Forbes contributor Michael Ellsberg. In April, Ellsberg wrote an article for Forbes detailing an internal ADA document that suggested the agency is moving full-steam ahead with a "strategy for gaining legal control over the term "nutritionist," as a path to limit competition for its members, against competing types of nutrition counseling." ^[1]

For instance, in December 2011 the ADA, which is typically associated with the professional license of "Registered Dietician (RD)," applied for patents on a variety of nutrition-related professional titles spanning from certified nutrition coach and nutrition professional to registered nutrition educator or nutrition associate.

The newly leaked document is even more brazen, as the ADA goes on at length to describe a "Mega Issue," which is basically the need to protect the Registered Dietician license, and increase licensure efforts, and retaliations against non-licensed parties, around the country. This is not, as the ADA publicly purports, to protect the public from receiving harmful nutrition advice, but rather, as Ellsberg put it:

" ... the Mega Issue focuses around protecting the health, safety (and presumably profit margin) of... the profession itself."

Cancer seems to be everywhere. According to the American Cancer Society, 1 in 2 men and 1 in 3 women are expected to get cancer in their lifetimes. The Centers for Disease Control reports that it is the leading cause of death by disease in children under the age of fifteen.

And we are all concerned by rising rates of certain childhood cancers, infertility, learning and developmental disabilities, not to mention things like early puberty and breast formation and the escalating rates of autism.

Studies show links between toxic chemicals we're exposed to every day and many of these negative health trends. And almost all pregnant women in America have toxic chemicals in their bodies.

On top of that (or perhaps because of it), the U.S. spends more than any other country on the planet managing disease. We now spend over $7,000 per person per year directly on health care. This sum does not include the cost of additional impacts, such as the costs of educating children with learning disabilities or emotional costs to a family coping with a mother's breast cancer diagnosis.

Tired? Scientists have discovered another possible benefit of a night of restful and uninterrupted sleep. According to a new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health fragmented or interrupted sleep could predict future placement in a nursing home or assisted living facility. The study is featured in the July 2012 issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society and outlines the association between objectively measured sleep and subsequent institutionalization among older women.

"Sleep disturbances are common in older people," said Adam Spira, PhD, lead author of the study and an assistant professor with the Bloomberg School's Department of Mental Health. "Our results show that in community-dwelling older women, more fragmented sleep is associated with a greater risk of being placed in a nursing home or in a personal care home. We found that, compared to women with the least fragmented sleep, those who spent the most time awake after first falling asleep had about 3 times the odds of placement in a nursing home. Individuals with the lowest sleep efficiency - those who spent the smallest proportion of their time in bed actually sleeping - also had about 3 times the odds of nursing home placement." The authors found similar patterns of associations between disturbed sleep and placement in personal care homes, such as assisted-living facilities. Sleep duration per se did not predict placement in either of these settings.

Chronic exposure to dim light at night can lead to depressive symptoms in rodents -- but these negative effects can be reversed simply by returning to a standard light-dark cycle, a new study suggests.

While hamsters exposed to light at night for four weeks showed evidence of depressive symptoms, those symptoms essentially disappeared after about two weeks if they returned to normal lighting conditions.

Even changes in the brain that occurred after hamsters lived with chronic light at night reversed themselves after returning to a more normal light cycle.

These findings add to the growing evidence that suggest chronic exposure to artificial light at night may play some role in the rising rates of depression in humans during the past 50 years, said Tracy Bedrosian, lead author of the study and doctoral student in neuroscience at Ohio State University.

"The results we found in hamsters are consistent with what we know about depression in humans," Bedrosian said.

But the new study, published online in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, also offers some hope.

It was big news when court documents were unsealed revealing a whistleblower lawsuit accusing drug giant Merck of fraud and lying about the true efficacy of its mumps vaccine. Just about every media, large and small, picked it up and the world was abuzz about the hundreds of millions of dollars the lawsuit claimed Merck had defrauded from the U.S. government.

The Wall Street Journal published the story in the form of a Dow Jones news release written by Jon Kamp on June 22, 2012, and links to the story began popping up on social media like Facebook.

Then, suddenly, the link to the story no longer worked, and if anyone clicked on the link in social media, it would show up "page not found." Apparently the story had been pulled, and when search engines and Internet archives wouldn't even show it, it looked as if it had never been published on the Journal's site at all. It was erased nearly clean--except for a small stock-watcher's website, 4Traders.com, which did a good job of erasing it from its main site but didn't catch it in the cache.

The question is, why did the WSJ pull the story and try to erase as if it never existed when there were actual court documents for evidence?

OMNIVORE

1. Grow up on a crappy omnivore diet that includes a lot of junk food and boring home-cooked meals. In the suburbs, ideally. When you meet your first vegan, ask where they get their protein. Say you love cheese too much to ever give it up. Convince yourself there was a strip of leather somewhere on their shoes.

2. Realize how f[****] up it is that animals die so you can eat a McNugget. Go vegetarian.

VEGETARIAN

3. Openly judge meat eaters. Anti-meat militancy often peaks early as you distance your new compassionate identity from your shameful recent past. Lecture mom about the evil of bacon while you pick the remnants of last night's Sloppy Joe out of your teeth.

4. Get annoyed when vegans say you're inconsistent for giving up meat but not dairy and eggs. Make fun of those extremist vegans with your meat eating pals to demonstrate how comparatively sane you are.

5. Finally admit that vegetarianism is inconsistent. You don't eat meat because it causes animal suffering and death, but dairy and eggs cause animal suffering and death. Experience cognitive dissonance. Go vegan.