The European Journal of Internal Medicine just published a paper discussing "Nutrition and Alzheimer's disease: The detrimental role of a high carbohydrate diet." Authors Seneff, Wainwright, and Mascitelli provided this abstract:

"Alzheimer's disease is a devastating disease whose recent increase in incidence rates has broad implications for rising health care costs. Huge amounts of research money are currently being invested in seeking the underlying cause, with corresponding progress in understanding the disease progression. In this paper, we highlight how an excess of dietary carbohydrates, particularly fructose, alongside a relative deficiency in dietary fats and cholesterol, may lead to the development of Alzheimer's disease. A first step in the pathophysiology of the disease is represented by advanced glycation end-products in crucial plasma proteins concerned with fat, cholesterol, and oxygen transport. This leads to cholesterol deficiency in neurons, which significantly impairs their ability to function. Over time, a cascade response leads to impaired glutamate signaling, increased oxidative damage, mitochondrial and lysosomal dysfunction, increased risk to microbial infection, and, ultimately, apoptosis. Other neurodegenerative diseases share many properties with Alzheimer's disease, and may also be due in large part to this same underlying cause." [Emphasis added]

It's a nutritional "Catch 22": The public is told, confusingly: "Vitamins are good, but vitamin supplements are not. Only vitamins from food will help you. So just eat a good diet. Do not take supplements! But by the way, there is no difference between natural and synthetic vitamins."

Wait a minute. What's the real story here?

A recent health study reported that the risk of heart failure decreased with increasing blood levels of vitamin C [1]. The benefit of vitamin C (ascorbate) was highly significant. Persons with the lowest plasma levels of ascorbate had the highest risk of heart failure, and persons with the highest levels of vitamin C had the lowest risk of heart failure. This finding confirms the knowledge derived over the last 50 years that vitamin C is a major essential factor in cardiovascular health [2,3]. The study raises several important questions about diet and vitamin supplements.

America's obesity epidemic is proving to be as stubborn as those maddening love handles, and shows no sign of reversing course. More than one-third of adults and almost 17 percent of children were obese in 2009-2010, echoing results since 2003, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Tuesday.

"It's good that we didn't see increases. On the other hand, we didn't see any decreases in any group," said CDC researcher Cynthia Ogden.

Early in the decade, slight increases were seen among white, black and Hispanic men, and among Hispanic and black women. These changes may be leveling off, but the authors said they "found no indication that the prevalence of obesity is declining in any group."

Ever had someone tell you to follow your gut? Or maybe you've been sitting with a test in front of you or a decision to make, and deep down there is something in your gut telling you what the correct answer or choice is.

Research has now revealed that what you may have thought of as an idiom - the "gut instinct" - passed down through the ages is actually deeply rooted in scientific fact. For the past few decades, researchers have been studying the enteric nervous system - a part of the nervous system in the stomach. What they have found tells us not only a lot about what governs our bowel, but also about what controls instincts, mood and even some diseases.

The enteric nervous system (ENS) is a part of the peripheral nervous system, the nerves and ganglia (cell bodies) that lies outside of the brain. It is defined as the "intrinsic innervations of the gut" explains Dr. Michael Gershon, Professor and Chairman of Anatomy and Cell Biology at Columbia University Medical Center and author of the 1998 book The Second Brain over email.

"I looked at the brain and found it daunting," said Gershon in his email explaining why he chose to study this "second brain" over fifty years ago. "I hoped to find an independent nervous system that was simpler to study than the brain."

When Gershon started out, he was one of two researchers in the entire world looking into the ENS, noted a recent article in Psychology Today. Now the study of the neurons and neurotransmitters that make up the ENS is the subject of the research of hundreds and the field of neurogasteroenterology is rising in popularity.

For many, the question isn't whether we believe in eating junk food, but whether we can help it. Our society offers indulgence as a virtue and discipline as a punishment. But discipline is not a punishment; it is a virtue and the key to health and happiness. Without it we become lazy and unfulfilled, and our bad food choices lead to ill-health. With a little practice, though, we can improve our discipline, change our habits, and change our lives.

There are a couple of different types of Paleo people out there: ones that have major health problems to overcome and ones that don't.

Those that don't have big health problems might just like the idea of Paleo on an intellectual level, maybe eating Paleo soothes digestion, maybe it offers more energy, relieves PMS, lowers triglycerides, etc.

Others suffer of serious mental problems like depression or schitzophrenia, major hormonal imbalances like PCOS and endometriosis, debilitating arthritis or, worse yet, many of these combined. The more a body deteriorates the harder it is to hold it together - the more important maintaining a strict diet becomes. It is those with the major health problems that have the biggest job ahead and absolutely must learn to develop better discipline if optimal health is to be achieved.

Whoever you are, you could probably benefit by improving your discipline. Most people in this indulgent society of ours could. Following are some tips that have helped me to become very disciplined in my food choices.

It's a term used so rarely that most of us haven't heard of it. Even mental health professionals say they've read about it in textbooks rather than seen it up close.

But the mysterious symptoms of facial tics and verbal outbursts affecting 12 teenage girls in the small community of LeRoy, N.Y., has brought new awareness to a very unfamiliar stress-related condition referred to as "conversion disorder."

Conversion disorder is characterized by problems with voluntary motor or sensory function that suggest a neurological or other general medical condition but aren't fully consistent with known biological causes or explanations, suggests David Fassler, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the University of Vermont in Burlington. He says such outbreaks are more common in women and are associated with stress or anxiety. The girls began exhibiting symptoms last fall.

Neurologist Laszlo Mechtler of the Dent Neurologic Institute in Buffalo, who has treated all but one of the 12 girls, says tests have ruled out medical disorders, diseases and environmental factors. "These young ladies are individuals who come from a small community. One may have had a significant symptom and it was like a wildfire."

I was surfing the Internet recently, as you do, when I found a vegan website which presented an argument for humans being a herbivorous species - i.e. naturally vegans.

Vegans have such a hard time convincing most people that veganism is right that they will latch onto almost anything, it seems, to boost their case. And some of the things they come up with are quite convincing.

Like this one, for example.

While it looks to be a strong case in favour of our being a herbivorous species, it is actually quite misleading if you are not aware of a few basic facts. I have published verbatim the 'humans are herbivores' argument in the shaded area below; I have then added evidence which shows how wrong it really is.

World reknowned (sic) cardiologist shatters human omnivore myth in one sentence

William C. Roberts MD has five decades of experience in the field of cardiology, written over 1300 scientific publications, a dozen cardiology textbooks, and has been editor in chief of the American Journal of Cardiology for a quarter of a century. He is arguably the most highly regarded cardiologist in the world today.

In his 2008 editorial "The Cause of Atherosclerosis", published in the peer reviewed journal Nutrition in Clinical Practice, Roberts states that there is a single, sole cause to heart disease: cholesterol. If your total cholesterol is below 150 and LDL is below 70, you are essentially heart attack proof. What is the cause of high cholesterol? Saturated fat and animal products:

Atherosclerosis is easily produced in nonhuman herbivores (eg, rabbits, monkeys) by feeding them a high cholesterol (eg, egg yolks) or high saturated fat (eg, animal fat) diet... And atherosclerosis was not produced in a minority of rats fed these diets, it was produced in 100% of the animals! Indeed, atherosclerosis is one of the easiest diseases to produce experimentally, but the experimental animal must be an herbivore. It is not possible to produce atherosclerosis in a carnivore..."

He elaborates in an earlier editorial:

It is virtually impossible, for example, to produce atherosclerosis in a dog even when 100 grams of cholesterol and 120 grams of butter fat are added to its meat ration. (This amount of cholesterol is approximately 200 times the average amount that human beings in the USA eat each day!). (The American Journal of Cardiology, 1990, vol. 66,896.)

He then utterly annihilates the human omnivore myth in a single sentence. Here it is:

***Because humans get atherosclerosis, and atherosclerosis is a disease only of herbivores, humans also must be herbivores.***

At once the insanity of our times comes into razor sharp relief.

Some may debate whether cholesterol is the sole cause of heart disease. It does not matter, the fact remains that atherosclerosis occurs only in herbivores.

If humans were physiological omnivores, heart disease would not exist, let alone be America's #1 killer for over a hundred years.

It may not be the least bit hyperbolic to say that the existence of heart disease in humans is proof that we, as a species, are vegans.

In any case, a low fat vegan diet has been proven again and again to be the cure for heart disease. A mountain of clinical evidence supports this.

According to Roberts, those who are utterly immune to heart disease without the use of statin drugs are pure vegetarian fruit eaters. His own exact words; fruit eaters.

So in addition to never losing an argument with a meat eater ever again, we can rest assured that according to America's top cardiologist, our diet of choice here at 30BaD ain't so crazy at all compared what the myriad of people pretending to be meat eaters are doing.

Looks like a sound argument, right?

It really isn't!

The dangers of processed sugar consumption are documented, as are its carcinogenic effects. But what about sugar free products? It turns out that not only can these products contain a dangerous artificial sweetener called aspartame, but cancer cells actually feed on sugar free products just as much as they do those loaded with sugar.

In a study conducted by UCLA, pancreatic cancer cells were found to multiply and grow more rapidly when fueled by fructose, as opposed to glucose or sucrose. More recently however, it has been found that even staying sugar free can have similar implications. In a collaborative study, it was found that in the absence of a usable sugar source, cancer cells will instead use glutamine - an amino acid - to survive and spread.

Of course fructose consumption (sugar-loaded products) are much more common within the American diet and elsewhere. Fructose is most commonly consumed from processed foods and soft drinks, in the form of mercury-loaded high fructose corn syrup. Along with its numerous health defects, perhaps the most concerning is the fact that this carcinogenic substance is highly addictive and is breeding a new form of 'fructose alcoholism'.

8 Simple Steps to Staying Sick...

Going on a gluten free diet often times leads to great improvements in health. However; if we focus only on gluten free and ignore other lifestyle factors, our improvements will plateau and our health will decline. The following is a list of lifestyle factors that are often ignored and lead to major health problems if you ignore them...

1. Eat processed foods - processed foods are high in calories and low in nutrient density. This combination will accelerate the aging process and put you in a state of nutritional deficiency.
2. Eat processed "gluten free" food items - These products are designed to replace all of the things people miss on a gluten free diet - Bread, pasta, cereal, cake, crackers, donuts, cookies, etc. Most of them are not TRUE gluten free and cause multiple health problems. As a general rule they are not healthy. "Gluten Free" on the package does not make it so. Don't get lost in the marketing hype. Remember why you went gluten free? To regain your health.

The Polio Global Eradication Initiative (PGEI), founded in 1988 by the World Health Organization, Rotary International, UNICEF, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, holds up India as a prime example of its success at eradicating polio, stating on its website (Jan. 11 2012) that "India has made unprecedented progress against polio in the last two years and on 13 January, 2012, India will reach a major milestone - a 12-month period without any case of polio being recorded."

This report, however, is highly misleading, as an estimated 100-180 Indian children are diagnosed with vaccine-associated polio paralysis (VAPP) each year. In fact, the clinical presentation of the disease, including paralysis, caused by VAPP is indistinguishable from that caused by wild polioviruses, making the PGEI's pronouncements all the more suspect.¹

According to the Polio Global Eradication Initiative's own statistics² there were 42 cases of wild-type polio (WPV) reported in India in 2010, indicating that vaccine-induced cases of polio paralysis (100-180 annually) outnumber wild-type cases by a factor of 3-4. Even if we put aside the important question of whether or not the PGEI is accurately differentiating between wild and vaccine-associated polio cases in their statistics, we still must ask ourselves: should not the real-world effects of immunization, both good and bad, be included in PGEI's measurement of success? For the dozens of Indian children who develop vaccine-induced paralysis every year, the PGEI's recent declaration of India as nearing "polio free" status, is not only disingenuous, but could be considered an attempt to minimize their obvious liability in having transformed polio from a natural disease vector into a manmade (iatrogenic) one.