Stressing out can cause people to gain weight, according to a study appearing in the July 15 issue of the American Journal of Epidemiology. This new study is believed to be one of the first of its kind to look at the relationship between weight gain and multiple types of stress - job-related demands, difficulty paying bills, strained family relationships, depression or anxiety disorder - in the U.S. population.

"Today's economy is stressing people out, and stress has been linked to a number of illnesses - such as heart disease, high blood pressure and increased risk for cancer. This study shows that stress is also linked to weight gain,'' according to Jason Block, M.D., M.P.H., who conducted the research as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar® at Harvard University. Block practices internal medicine at Brigham & Women's Hospital and is on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School/Harvard Pilgrim Health Care.

The U.S. government is about to unleash a sweeping new vaccination program that claims to protect people from swine flu. The vaccines, which are of course completely useless against any mutated strain of the H1N1 influenza virus, are nevertheless quite useful at suppressing the immune function of those who receive them. Well-designed medical studies conducted over the years have consistently shown that the people who catch the flu (influenza) with the greatest frequency are precisely those who get the most flu shots.

To those who know anything about the immune system, vaccines and influenza, it may seem shocking to learn that the U.S. influenza vaccine program will first target those with the weakest immune systems to begin with: Toddlers as young as six months old, pregnant women and adults with degenerative disease. This is precisely what Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced today.

One in three breast cancer patients identified in public screening programs may be treated unnecessarily, a new study says. Karsten Jorgensen and Peter Gotzsche of the Nordic Cochrane Centre in Copenhagen analyzed breast cancer trends at least seven years before and after government-run screening programs for breast cancer started in parts of Australia, Britain, Canada, Norway and Sweden.

The research was published Friday in the BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal. Jorgensen and Gotzsche did not cite any funding for their study.

Researchers in Japan are reporting new evidence that the ordinary vinegar - a staple in oil-and-vinegar salad dressings, pickles, and other foods - may live up to its age-old reputation in folk medicine as a health promoter. They are reporting new evidence that vinegar can help prevent accumulation of body fat and weight gain.

Stimulant drugs such as Ritalin provide no long-term benefit in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to the latest findings of the ongoing Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA), published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

According to previous analysis of MTA data, stimulant drugs do improve the social functioning and reduce symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity in children with ADHD for the first year of treatment. In the current analysis, however, researchers followed 485 children for eight years and found that children who remained on medication for that entire time showed no improvement in symptoms over those who had stopped taking the drugs.

"If you put a child on medication, he or she is far better right at that time. The question for parents is: Is this going to make a benefit for my child long term?" said researcher William Pelham, of the University of Buffalo. "The answer is no. Behavioral treatments are going to have much better benefit in the long term."

The benefits of calorie restriction are well documented in animals, but now the results have been replicated in a close relative of man over a lengthy period.

Cutting calories may delay the ageing process and reduce the risk of disease, a long-term study of monkeys suggests.

The benefits of calorie restriction are well documented in animals, but now the results have been replicated in a close relative of man over a lengthy period.

Over 20 years, monkeys whose diets were not restricted were nearly three times more likely to have died than those whose calories were counted.

Writing in Science, the US researchers hailed the "major effect" of the diet.

Venezuela's Health Ministry has banned the Coca-Cola Zero sugar-free drink citing dangers to human health, national media said on Thursday.

The ministry's inspectors visited a Ñoca-Cola factory on Wednesday and discovered a "harmful ingredient" in the Coke Zero drink. Media reports did not specify the health threat posed by product.

Health Minister Jesus Mantilla has ordered the drink to be removed from Venezuela's stores saying: "The product should be withdrawn from circulation to preserve the health of Venezuelans."

Interview with Jane Burgermeister, a science journalist who has filed criminal charges against the World Health Organization, U.S. officials and business executives. She alleges that the H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic is a hoax designed to sell vaccines.

Jane Burgermeister, an Austrian science journalist and investigative reporter has filed criminal charges with the FBI against the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and high ranking U.S. officials and business executives. She alleges that officials conspired to use a virus - the H1N1 "swine flu" - that was engineered in a lab to create a flu pandemic in order to sell vaccines.

Her accusations are extremely bold, yet carefully researched and documented and rely on evidence from published scientific research, legal actions, and interviews with prominent scientists. What Burgermeister has done is connect the dots, but has she come to the right conclusion?

The U.S. government has classified the bird flu and swine flu vaccines as bioweapons which would appear to some as incriminating, given the circumstances and the long strange tale of how vaccines become weapons.

One of the key points of Burgermeister's suit is that the new strain of flu is a synthetic structural recombinant containing genes from birds, humans, and pigs from different continents. Burgermeister said it's reasonable to assume it came out of a laboratory, specifically a bioweapons laboratory. "Mother Nature does not naturally recombine bird, swine and three human influenza viruses," asserts Burgermeister. Further, some respected scientists who examined H1N1 say the virus contains strains of the 1918 Spanish Pandemic flu. That flu strain was reassembled by molecular pathologists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C. and distributed to other agencies, the WHO and pharmaceutical companies around the world.

Another is that Baxter released contaminated vaccines onto the general public in Austria which resulted in death and sickness. She also warns of plans to make the vaccines compulsory in several countries in reaction to the manufactured pandemic.

On the surface the charge appears outrageous, and yet the evidence Burgermeister has gathered is compelling.

It's also a lot to digest so I contacted Burgermeister to summarize her allegations.

She calls it an act of bioterrorism.

Bottled water makers make millions off people who believe their products are purer than tap water, but consumers do not realize that they are less regulated than plain old tap water, according to a U.S. Congressional report released on Wednesday.

The report from the General Accountability Office also found that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has little power to regulate the safety of bottled water, and even states with the power to regulate it concentrate more on tap water.

For years, Alfonso Torress-Cook followed the rules in his quest to eliminate hospital-acquired infections. Patients at his hospital received large doses of antibiotics and were scrubbed down with alcohol-based soaps, as he and his colleagues aimed to kill every bacterium possible. Search and destroy was the mantra.