You know that wonderful new car smell?

Don't inhale too deeply.

An environmental group is out with its annual review of the stuff your car interior is made of, and it's kind of gross.

The inside of your car is mostly plastic held together with a various adhesives and sealers. Then you got your paint, carpeting, leather and vinyl treatments. All that stuff, when the car is first manufactured, is unstable, and they release organic compounds into the air afterward.

I don't know whether it naturally smells good or whether it smells good because we just paid tens of thousands of dollars and it smells like luxury.

The Ecology Center, says the chemicals contribute to allergies, birth defects, liver toxicity and other problems.

New research released ahead of print and published in the journal Archives of Toxicology indicates that Roundup, the most common formulation of the herbicide glyphosate, is not only more toxic than its constituent ingredients, but is capable of damaging DNA within a human cell line when diluted down to 450-fold lower concentrations than presently used in GMO agricultural applications. In the researchers' own words, Roundup has "genotoxic effects after short exposure to concentrations that correspond to a 450-fold dilution of spraying used in agriculture."

The chemical - glyphosate - is the highest selling herbicide in the world and has been identified as having a wide range of potential adverse health effects -- largely minimized and/or under-reported -- which include over two dozen diseases. Glyphosate's primary properties of concern are its carcinogenicity, genotoxicity and endocrine disruptive actions. Roundup contains a surfactant known as polyoxyethyleneamine which functions to reduce the surface tension between Roundup and the cells exposed to it, making the cellular membranes more permeable to absorbing glyphosate and other chemicals within the formula. The surfactant in Roundup may therefore be responsible for increasing the toxicity of glyphosate by several orders of magnitude higher than it exhibits by itself.

Living in a crowded city or near a busy highway may be tied to a higher chance of having a stroke or losing your memory, new research suggests.

A study published Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine found a higher risk of stroke after "moderate" compared to "good" air quality days in Boston-area residents, especially when traffic-related pollution was high.

And another report in the same journal documented a faster long-term decline in thinking and memory skills in women living in higher-pollution areas of the United States.

A champion of supplements in the House sends a warning to FDA. As we reported last week, FDA has flatly refused to listen to the Senate, rejecting the call of Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Orrin Hatch (R-UT) to withdraw its disastrous New Dietary Ingredient draft guidance and start over. You may recall that Harkin and Hatch are the original drafters of DSHEA, the law that requires supplement manufacturers to submit notifications whenever an NDI is introduced into the marketplace. FDA's job was to articulate how those notifications are to be submitted, but they ignored the original intent of Congress and created a de facto approval system for any supplement or ingredient created or changed over the past eighteen years.

Now Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has composed a letter to FDA expressing regret over FDA's dismissal of Senators Hatch and Harkin's request and reiterating that Congress did not intend to give FDA pre-market review of new dietary ingredients, nor did it intend to permit the agency to treat dietary ingredients in the same manner as food additives.

The letter goes on to articulate the legal problems with FDA's proposal, and strongly urges FDA to withdraw its guidance and instead design a fair and workable NDI notification system. It also requests that FDA refrain from taking any enforcement action that is based solely on positions articulated in the draft guidance that are not unequivocally grounded in the law.

The close symbiotic relationship between our bodies and intestinal bacteria is so profound that some scientists have suggested we be viewed as "metaorganisms."

Indeed, without these friendly bacteria we could not perform critical life-sustaining functions, such as:

• Counteract vitamin B12 deficiency
• Produce the B-group vitamins, as a whole
• Break down pesticides
• Break down xenobiotic hormones like BPA

Probiotics also perform at least 30 essential biological functions, with 13 viewable below:

Gluten free is hot these days. There are books and websites, restaurants with gluten free menus, and grocery stores with hundreds of new gluten free food products on the shelf. Is this a fad, or a reflection of response to a real problem?

Yes, gluten is a real problem. But the problem is not just gluten. In fact, there are three major hidden reasons that wheat products, not just gluten (along with sugar in all its forms) is the major contributor to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, depression and so many other modern ills.

This is why there are now 30% more obese than undernourished in the world, and why globally chronic lifestyle and dietary driven disease kills more than twice as many people as infectious disease. These non-communicable chronic diseases will cost our global economy $47 trillion over the next 20 years.

January 23, 2009, after a perfectly normal pregnancy, my daughter was born and immediately displayed seizure symptoms. I was not even able to hold her before she was swept off to the NICU, and we were informed she would be transferred directly to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia - and there we stayed for 6 weeks trying to put the pieces together. She was diagnosed with Tuberous Sclerosis Complex nearly a week into our stay & we found out the intractable epilepsy she suffered from was due to tubers throughout her brain and complicated by hemimegencephaly on the left side. It seemed like we tried and failed every antiepileptic drug they had in stock, and her seizures raged on. The 2nd week in, NICU's neuro team settled on a heavily dosed cocktail of Phenobarbital, Keppra, Topamax & Sabril (which was not even FDA tested or approved at the time, so we had to order it from Canada). There were so many different types of seizures, and nothing seemed to even slow the activity; the doctors didn't seem to know where to start. Since she was seizing so frequently she was physically unable to eat, so I would pump throughout the day and the breast milk produced would be fed to her through an NG tube on gravity feeds. Two days into this process they included a dose of dilantin with her feed, and she immediately developed medical NEC, nearly requiring emergency surgery. They were unsure if it was due to her system being overworked from all the tried and failed drugs, or if it was due to an underlying food allergy, so the doctors then told me she would have to go on formula to test her for allergies.

A previously unknown poisonous mushroom is the culprit in scores of mysterious deaths in China, according to a team of Chinese researchers who reported their findings in the German journal Angewandte Chemie (Applied Chemistry).

Over the past 30 years, more than 260 otherwise perfectly healthy people in the south-western Chinese province of Yunnan have died suddenly and for no apparent reason. The phenomenon, termed "sudden unexplained death," usually occurs during the rainy season from June to August at locations between 1,800 and 2,400 metres above sea level.

In 2005, epidemiological studies suggested that eating mushrooms could be a risk factor. Subsequent studies confirmed the suspicion that consumption of a previously unknown type of mushroom, named Trogia venenata Zhu L. Yang after its discoverer, was responsible for the deaths.

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he's now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?

Dr. Raymond Silkman has a private practice in holistic dentistry and orthodontics in West Los Angeles, California. This article is based on his presentation at the 6th annual conference of the Weston A. Price Foundation in 2005

Cranial & Dental Impacts on Total Health

The widely held model of orthodontics, which considers developmental problems in the jaws and head to be genetic in origin, never made sense to me. Since they are wedded to the genetic model, orthodontists dealing with crowded teeth end up treating the condition with tooth extraction in a majority of the cases. Even though I did not resort to pulling teeth in my practice, and I was using appliances to widen the jaws and getting the craniums to look as they should, I still could not come up with the answer as to why my patients looked the way they did. I couldn't believe that the Creator had given them a terrible blueprint --it just did not make sense. In four years of college education, four years of dental school education and almost three years of post-graduate orthodontic training, students never hear a mention of Dr. Price, so they never learn the true reasons for these malformations. I have had the opportunity to work with a lot of very knowledgeable doctors in various fields of allopathic and alternative healthcare who still do not know about Dr. Price and his critical findings.

These knowledgeable doctors have not stared in awe at the beautiful facial development that Price captured in the photographs he took of primitive peoples throughout the globe and in so doing was able to answer this most important question: What do humans look like in health? And how have humans been able to carry on throughout history and populate such varied geographical and physical environments on the earth without our modern machines and tools?

The answer that Dr. Price was able to illuminate came through his photographs of beautiful, healthy human beings with magnificent physical form and mental development, living in harmony with their environments.