Got milk?

These days, it seems like almost everybody does. Celebrities, athletes, and even former president Clinton's head of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, are all proud to wear the white "milk mustache." After all, everyone knows that you need milk to be healthy ...

Dairy is nature's perfect food -- but only if you're a calf.

If that sounds shocking to you, it's because very few people are willing to tell the truth about dairy. In fact, criticizing milk in America is like taking on motherhood, apple pie, or baseball. But that's just what I'm about to do.

I've invited Dr. Michael Eades and Dr. Mary Dan Eades, two of my favorite bariatric (obesity treatment) doctors in the US and the first to introduce insulin resistance to the mainstream, to explain the facts and benefits of increased saturated fat intake...

Mid-Section Fat Loss: Problem Solved?

A couple of generations ago two physicians - one on the East Coast, one on the West - while working long hours with many patients, serendipitously stumbled onto a method to rapidly decrease fat around the mid-section. We're sure that other doctors figured out the same thing, but these two were locally famous and published their methods. Interestingly, neither was looking to help patients lose weight.

Blake Donaldson, M.D., who practiced in Manhattan, was looking for a treatment for allergies; Walter Voegtlin, M.D., a Seattle gastroenterologist, was trying to figure out a better method for treating his patients with Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. Dr. Donaldson got his inspiration from a meeting he had with the aforementioned Vilhalmur Stefansson; Dr. Voegtlin came up with the same idea based on his knowledge of comparative anatomy. Though they came at two different questions from very different angles, they arrived at the same dietary answer. Both solved the problems they were seeking to solve and, coincidentally, noticed that their overweight patients lost a tremendous amount of fat from their abdominal areas while undergoing the treatment. As happened later with us and with Dr. Atkins, word of their success in combating obesity spread rapidly, and before long both physicians were deluged with overweight patients seeking treatment, completely changing the character of their medical practices. In retirement, both wrote books about their methods. Donaldson's was published in 1961; Voegtlin's in 1972. And as far as we can tell, although their years of practice overlapped, they never knew one another.

Our earliest ancestors ate their food raw - fruit, leaves, maybe some nuts. When they ventured down onto land, they added things like underground tubers, roots and berries.

It wasn't a very high-calorie diet, so to get the energy you needed, you had to eat a lot and have a big gut to digest it all. But having a big gut has its drawbacks.

"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.

Until, that is, we discovered meat.

"What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.

That period is when cut marks on animal bones appeared - not a predator's tooth marks, but incisions that could have been made only by a sharp tool. That's one sign of our carnivorous conversion. But Aiello's favorite clue is somewhat ickier - it's a tapeworm. "The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs," she says.

So sometime in our evolutionary history, she explains, "we actually shared saliva with wild dogs and hyenas." That would have happened if, say, we were scavenging on the same carcass that hyenas were.

But dining with dogs was worth it. Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain - which uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle - piped up and said, "Please, sir, I want some more."

Forget the age-old remedies of yoga, meditation or popping pills. Relieving chronic stress could soon be as simple as having an injection, according to scientists.

Academics say they are close to developing the first vaccine for stress - a single jab that would help us relax without slowing down.

After 30 years of research into cures for stress, Dr Robert Sapolsky, professor of neuroscience at Stanford University in California, believes it is possible to alter brain chemistry to create a state of 'focused calm'.

Professor Sapolsky claims he is on the path to a genetically engineered formula that would remove the need for relaxation therapies or prescription drugs.

An outbreak of bubonic and pneumonic plague in Peru has killed a 14-year-old boy and infected at least 31 people in a northern coastal province.

Oscar Ugarte, the health minister, said authorities were screening sugar and fish meal exports from Ascope province, located about 325 miles north-west of Lima.

Chicama beach, a popular draw for tourists to Peru, is not far away.

Mr Ugarte said the boy, who had Down syndrome, died of bubonic plague on July 26.

He said on Monday that most of the infections were bubonic plague, with four cases of pneumonic plague.

The former is transmitted by flea bites, the latter by airborne contagion. The disease is curable if treated early with antibiotics.

The first recorded plague outbreak in Peru was in 1903. The last, in 1994, killed 35 people.

In one of the first human studies of its kind, researchers have found that urinary concentrations of the controversial chemical Bisphenol A, or BPA, may be related to decreased sperm quality and sperm concentration.

However, the researchers are quick to point out that these results are preliminary and more study is needed. Several studies have documented adverse effects of BPA on semen in rodents, but none are known to have reported similar relationships in humans.

BPA is a common chemical that's stirred much controversy in the media lately over its safety. Critics say that BPA mimics the body's own hormones and may lead to negative health effects. BPA is most commonly used to make plastics and epoxy resins used in food and beverage cans, and people are exposed primarily through diet, although other routes are possible. More than 6 billion pounds of BPA are produced annually.

Another survey conducted in the wake of the BP oil spill has found evidence of significant and potentially lasting impacts on the health, mental health, and economic fortunes of Gulf Coast residents and their children and on the way they live their everyday lives.

The study was conducted by researchers at Columbia University's National Center for Disaster Preparedness, in corroboration with the Children's Health Fund and The Marist Poll of Poughkeepsie, NY.

For the survey, phone interviews were conducted with over 1,200 adults living within 10 miles of the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Mississippi.

New York - The number of children treated for kidney stones at some U.S. hospitals has been on the rise over the past decade, for reasons that are not yet certain, according to a new study.

Kidney stones develop when the urine contains more crystal-forming substances - including calcium, uric acid and a compound called oxalate - than can be diluted by the available fluid. The stones usually cause no lingering damage, but can be painful to pass.

While kidney stones are most common after age 40, they can develop at any age. And in recent years, there have been anecdotal reports from pediatric urologists and kidney specialists that they are seeing an increase in the number of children with kidney stones. One study published earlier this year showed that they were diagnosed in South Carolina kids four times as often in 2007 as in 1996, for unclear reasons.

Study shows fructose used differently from glucose

Findings challenge common wisdom about sugars

Pancreatic tumor cells use fructose to divide and proliferate, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that challenges the common wisdom that all sugars are the same.

Tumor cells fed both glucose and fructose used the two sugars in two different ways, the team at the University of California Los Angeles found.

They said their finding, published in the journal Cancer Research, may help explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancer types.

Keep your heart healthy and you may slow down the aging of your brain, according to a new study reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

In the study, people whose hearts pumped less blood had brains that appeared older than the brains of those whose hearts pumped more blood. Decreased cardiac index, the amount of blood that pumps from the heart in relation to a person's body size, was associated with decreased brain volume using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Researchers observed the link even in those participants who did not have cardiovascular disease, such as heart failure or coronary heart disease. As the brain ages, it begins to atrophy (shrink) and has less volume. The decrease in brain volume is considered a sign of brain aging. More severe brain atrophy occurs in those with dementia, such as Alzheimer's disease.

"The results are interesting in that they suggest cardiac index and brain health are related," said Angela L. Jefferson, Ph.D., the study's lead author and associate professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. "The association cannot be attributed to cardiovascular disease because the relationship also was seen when we removed those participants with known cardiovascular disease from our analyses."