As the nation stands poised to watch the passing of the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, the question comes to mind, 'is this really a good thing?' and 'how will this effect me?'

The new food safety bill passed by the senate on Sunday is meant to take control of the industry and hold the large industrial agricultural companies accountable for the food they produce. There has been an alarming amount of product recalls and tainted foods that contain bacteria as dangerous as e.coli 157 H7 in their food. Up until this point, companies have tried whatever they could do in order to not be held responsible for any deaths or illnesses caused by their products. This legislation finally holds their feet to the fire.

It's the most important molecule you need to stay healthy and prevent disease - yet you've probably never heard of it. It's the secret to prevent aging, cancer, heart disease, dementia and more, and necessary to treat everything from autism to Alzheimer's disease. There are more than 89,000 medical articles about it - but your doctor doesn't know how address the epidemic deficiency of this critical life-giving molecule ...

What is it? I'm talking about the mother of all antioxidants, the master detoxifier and maestro of the immune system: Glutathione (pronounced "gloota-thigh-own").

The good news is that your body produces its own glutathione. The bad news is that poor diet, pollution, toxins, medications, stress, trauma, aging, infections and radiation all deplete your glutathione.

This leaves you susceptible to unrestrained cell disintegration from oxidative stress, free radicals, infections and cancer. And your liver gets overloaded and damaged, making it unable to do its job of detoxification.

In treating chronically ill patients with Functional Medicine for more than 10 years, I have discovered that glutathione deficiency is found in nearly all very ill patients. These include people with chronic fatigue syndrome, heart disease, cancer, chronic infections, autoimmune disease, diabetes, autism, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, arthritis, asthma, kidney problems, liver disease and more.

As we get older, we can be prone to wasting of muscle tissue (known as sarcopenia). If nothing else, sarcopenia can lead to weakness, which in turn can cause us to be immobile, prone to falls, and increasingly reliant on others for our activities of daily living. One way of preserving muscle bulk as we age is to engage is some resistance exercise on a regular basis. It's also been found that vitamin D supplementation has the capacity to enhance muscle strength (without physical training). See here for more about this.

I was interested to read this week a study which appears to have identified another factor that has the ability to enhance muscle function - in the form of omega-3 fats [1]. In this study, elderly individuals (aged 65 or more) were supplemented with oemag-3 fats or corn oil for a period of 8 weeks. The omega-3 offered 1.86 g of EPA and 1.5 g of DHA per day. Compared to the group taking the corn oil, the omega-3 supplemented group saw improved muscle synthesis in response to increase amino acid and insulin availability (amino acids are the building blocks of muscle protein and insulin facilitates the transport of amino acids into the muscles cells).

UPDATE: YouTube sometimes has "technical problems" playing our embedded videos here. Therefore, if you are having problems watching the documentary, then try watching it at archive.org, although it has a slight blur there. We should have our own video player soon. Reload this page if the video does not appear at all.

Phoenix, Arizona - The Roman Catholic Diocese of Phoenix stripped a major hospital of its affiliation with the church Tuesday because of a surgery that ended a woman's pregnancy to save her life.

Bishop Thomas Olmsted called the 2009 procedure an abortion and said St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center - recognized internationally for its neurology and neurosurgery practices - violated ethical and religious directives of the national Conference of Catholic Bishops.

"In the decision to abort, the equal dignity of mother and her baby were not both upheld," Olmsted said at a news conference announcing the decision. "The mother had a disease that needed to be treated. But instead of treating the disease, St. Joseph's medical staff and ethics committee decided that the healthy, 11-week-old baby should be directly killed."

Air pollution in Britain takes almost two years off the lives of some 200,000 people, an official report into the problem has found.

The study, by the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP), is the first to try to estimate the health burden of air pollution from human sources like traffic, power generation and manufacturing industry.

It concluded that such pollution resulted in the loss of 340,000 years of life in 2008, when the data were collected.

However, rather than being spread across the population as a whole, the committee gauged that this health burden was mostly borne by just 200,000 people, or 0.3 per cent of the population.

This is Insane. Don't ever get scanned by TSA.

While the application of scientific knowledge creates technology, sometimes the technology is later redefined by science. Such is the case with terahertz (THz) radiation, the energy waves that drive the technology of the TSA: back scatter airport scanners.

Emerging THz technological applications

THz waves are found between microwaves and infrared on the electromagnetic spectrum. This type of radiation was chosen for security devices because it can penetrate matter such as clothing, wood, paper and other porous material that's non-conducting.
This type of radiation seems less threatening because it doesn't penetrate deeply into the body and is believed to be harmless to both people and animals.

THz waves may have applications beyond security devices. Research has been done to determine the feasibility of using the radiation to detect tumors underneath the skin and for analyzing the chemical properties of various materials and compounds. The potential marketplace for THz driven technological applications may generate many billions of dollars in revenue.

Because of the potential profits, intense research on THz waves and applications has mushroomed over the last decade.

A new analysis showing the presence of a probable carcinogen in the tap water of 31 cities across the country has raised questions about possible risks posed to consumers in those communities and how they can reduce their exposure.

The chemical, hexavalent chromium, got public attention in the 2000 film Erin Brockovich and has been found to cause cancer in laboratory animals by the National Toxicology Program, part of the National Institutes of Health.

Although basic water filters such as those made by Brita and PUR do not remove hexavalent chromium, several reverse-osmosis systems designed for home use can take the chemical out of water. Such systems are available for purchase online and at hardware stores.

Bottled water is not necessarily an alternative because it is often drawn from municipal water systems and can still contain hexavalent chromium or other contaminants.

What I've seen in my years of adding nutrition to my practice, is that a lot of people "know" certain things about food. "Know" in the sense that we don't question the thought anymore. Like we "knew" that low-fat diets were healthy, right? (see my article titled "Big, Fat Lies" in December).
Or that we "know" eggs can raise your cholesterol. So let's look at a big myth that when you actually learn all the facts, makes you wonder how we got so bamboozled.

Let's start with the myth that soy is a health food. Years ago, China and Japan planted soy beans, NOT as food for people, but for the sole reason of returning nitrogen to the soil since growing rice was especially nitrogen-depleting. They knew better than to eat soy, as it was particularly difficult to digest, causing gas and bloating. However, at some point someone figured out that if you buried it for six months and fermented it, it didn't cause those symptoms. And so miso, tempeh, soy sauce, and natto were created.

Soy made its way to the United States in the 1900s, where Dr. John Harvey Kellogg - the breakfast cereal king - championed the health benefits of the legume and railed against the evils of meat. Henry Ford spent $1.2 million in an effort to make soy plastics and a soy car, and Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were busy promoting soybeans in traditional foods (flours, polenta, etc.) Soy products in the West are treated very differently than they are in the East -- soy is a product of the industrial revolution and is an opportunity for science to develop cheap meat substitutes, to put soy in familiar food products, and to produce soy-based pharmaceuticals. Soy wasn't even seriously considered for food until World War II shortages created a demand for cheap protein. It has been touted as healthy for decades, and the vegetarian population has embraced this, without really knowing the implications of ingesting soy.

New research by scientists at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences reveals that the immune system has an effective backup plan to protect the body from infection when the "master regulator" of the body's innate immune system fails. The study appears in the December 19 online issue of the journal Nature Immunology.

The innate immune system defends the body against infections caused by bacteria and viruses, but also causes inflammation which, when uncontrolled, can contribute to chronic illnesses such as heart disease, arthritis, type 2 diabetes and cancer. A molecule known as nuclear factor kappa B (NF-κB) has been regarded as the "master regulator" of the body's innate immune response, receiving signals of injury or infection and activating genes for microbial killing and inflammation.

Led by Michael Karin, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Pharmacology, the UC San Diego team studied the immune function of laboratory mice in which genetic tools were used to block the pathway for NF-κB activation. While prevailing logic suggested these mice should be highly susceptible to bacterial infection, the researchers made the unexpected and counterintuitive discovery that NF-κB-deficient mice were able to clear bacteria that cause a skin infection even more quickly than normal mice.