Coca-Cola loves to promote the Calories In/ Calories Out (CICO) model. As one of the leading purveyors of sugar sweetened beverages, it constitutes a significant portion of the added sugars in the American diet.

Do you remember the story of the Twinkie diet? In 2010, Mark Haub, a researcher at the Kansas State University achieved notoriety as a follower of the Twinkie diet. For 10 weeks, Haub ate a Twinkie every three hours instead of a regular meal. He also ate Doritos, Oreo cookies and sugary cereal. The catch was that he would only eat 1800 calories per day of some of the most fattening foods on the planet.

In those two months, he lost 27 pounds, his LDL cholesterol got better as did his triglycerides. This gained the attention of every mainstream media outlet, including CNN. This supported the view that it was all about the calories. You could eat whatever you wanted, but as long as you reduced calories, you could still lose weight.

Since before the time of record keeping, essential oils have been used to support the body, mind, and spirit. Many ancient civilizations, including the Egyptians, Romans, Greeks and Chinese highly prized essential oils, and valued them as sources of healing to include in their traditions of medicine.

These days the many beneficial properties of essential oils are best realized when utilized as an adjunct or supplement to other treatments for inflammation, and those that help heal from or prevent disease. Use essential oils in combination with a diet of healthy, real, natural foods that are chemical-, pesticide-, antibiotic-, and hormone-free.

The Dangers of Inflammation

One of the ways your body responds to stress is by creating inflammation, regardless to whether this is stress from your environment, lifestyle, or diet. The result will be an inflamed or heated area.

For example, catching a cold you are likely to incur a fever, which is a type of inflammation that your body uses to eradicate an invading virus. Of course, this is a beneficial and acute kind of inflammation. However, there is a modern-day epidemic that is destroying the balance of your body - chronic, low-grade inflammation.

You become more susceptible to disease and aging when your body is confronted with constant inflammatory response. Slowly, but surely, environmental and dietary toxins build up in your body, activating your immune system, keeping it on high alert, and hyper-reactive, all in a state of inflammation. Stress, chronic food allergies or sensitivities, and leaky gut are also sources of inflammation.

No one likes to be sick, or see others around them be sick. Depending on the severity of the illness, it can be an uncomfortable, sobering, and sometimes devastating occurrence. And in our modern day world, it seems we can't put anything on our skin or in our bodies, or even breathe the air around us, without reading about the dangers we face as a result.

With an ever-growing desire for profit and a greedy hold on scientific advancements, nature's cures seem a thing of the past — or at least that's what large pharmaceutical companies controlling our well-being would like us to believe.

Dr. Kenneth Stoller's book, Incurable Me, exposes some of medicine's biggest, and most protected, secrets, while bringing to light how profit and shareholders control medical practice.The Western world has largely abandoned ancient medicine, but some people are questioning the wisdom of this shift. Doctors, healers, and health enthusiasts, along with anyone skeptical of 'the system,' have begun returning to our healing roots and rediscovering nature's secrets. But why, if there are so many adverse side effects, and so much money thrown into big pharma's medicines, are people not overwhelmingly aware of their options?In Stoller's book, he discusses how the best evidence in medical research rarely makes its way into clinical practice because of the lack of profit it will bring. And when breakthrough studies present the facts that we need to step away from the grasp of big pharma, they are typically buried or altered because they conflict with powerful financial interests. And then there is the Centers for Disease Control, which one would like to believe has our best interest in mind. We all have one life, and one planet to live it on, so why not work together to learn the best ways to be and stay healthy, as well as combat sickness in times of need? Money is its own powerful and addictive drug that has swayed so many decisions, created so much controversy, and, undoubtedly, led to many deaths. Stoller notes the close ties between the Centers for Disease Control and big pharma, arguing that they hinder our health by limiting, altering, and hiding important research. Profit has become the bottom line and our health, necessarily, a casualty.

Last Friday, November 4th, Obama quietly signed an Executive Order titled Advancing the Global Health Security Agenda to Achieve a World Safe and Secure from Infectious Disease Threats.

"It is the policy of the United States to advance the Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA), which is a multi-faceted, multi-country initiative intended to accelerate partner countries' measurable capabilities to achieve specific targets to prevent, detect, and respond to infectious disease threats (GHSA targets), whether naturally occurring, deliberate, or accidental."

So basically, the agenda is to push vaccines and normalize quarantine procedures across nations during outbreaks.

The regular consumption of soda and other sweetened drinks may detonate a lack of sleep and problems with sleep, say American doctors in an article published in Sleep Health journal.

American doctors suppose that in this case, there is a positive feedback loop, in which the habit of consuming sugary drinks and refusing to sleep reinforce each other. That's why it's is very difficult for people to give up this addiction. They also revealed that it is possible to fight the epidemic of soda consumption, obesity and diabetes, improving the sleep of people.

Aric Prather, a California university assistant, and his colleagues have examined about 19 thousand people participating in the NHANES (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) program.

Doctors regularly tested the participants of the project. They examined their full health, asked questions about their diet, schedule and other details of their daily life.

Two important FDA approved changes to the warning label of Merck Pharmaceutical's shingles vaccine, Zostavax, have been made since the controversial drug was introduced in 2006. The first was in August 2014, when, in addition to potentially causing chickenpox, another side effect was added: shingles! That's right. The vaccine that had been - and continues to be - aggressively marketed to prevent seniors from contracting this excruciating condition was found to actually cause shingles in some individuals.

In February of this year, the FDA approved a label change to warn those who prescribe the Zostavax vaccine of another potential side effect: "Eye Disorders: necrotizing retinitis."

Vision Damage linked to Shingles Vaccine

This disorder, as well as keratitis, causes inflammation and scarring of the eye tissue and can lead to permanent vision loss if not treated quickly. It was reported by WebMD 20 individuals (children and adults) developed keratitis within a month of receiving a chickenpox or shingles vaccine. Keratitis symptoms for adults developed within 24 days of vaccination, while symptoms in children began within 14 days of vaccination.

Join us for another Connecting the Dots episode where we'll catch up on the most recent news and timely topics in the world of health.

Winter is coming and Seasonal Affective Disorder will descend upon millions of people in the Northern Hemisphere. What part does shifting light cycles, either natural or artificially enforced through daylight saving time, play in mood and circadian rhythms? How can the effects of waning daylight be mitigated?

Winter also means that flu season is upon us and if the CDC had its way we'd all be vaccinated. We'll check in with that mega-organization and their partners in crime -- Big Pharma and the FDA -- to see what mischief they've been up to most recently.

We'll also discuss Italy's first Veggie City, protein intake and the wonders of vitamin B12, the disturbing rise of anxiety and suicides in children and how to naturally increase mental well being.

Stay tuned, as always, for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where she connects the dots in animal health news.

Relevant links for the show:
Why Daylight Saving Time is bad for you
High schoolers create new light therapy device to treat seasonal affective disorder
CDC won't allow its own whistleblower to testify in vaccine-damage case
The toxic and flawed science behind flu vaccines
Miracle' drugs big pharma now regrets
A recipe for disaster? Turin, Italy's first 'vegetarian city'
Supplements accelerate benzodiazepine withdrawal: A case report and biochemical rationale
Six herbs that promote mental well-being
Running Time: 01:48:11

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Every winter we are bombarded by information about the cold and how to protect ourselves from it and from health issues associated with it.

Wrap up warm, keep one room heated to a minimum 18*C, avoid hypothermia, eat and drink warm food, get the boiler serviced to avoid carbon monoxide poisoning, turn off the Christmas tree lights to avoid fire. It's endless.

Each winter in the UK upwards of 20,000 extra deaths occur that are attributed in one way, or another to the cold. These are referred to as 'excess deaths from all causes' on the official statistics. Now that wording makes it sound like the medics record which deaths are caused by the cold. In some cases they do, but in mostly they don't, the figure is derived by taking the figure for the deaths recorded during non-winter months and taking it away from the winter tally, the number left is the excess deaths from all causes figure.

Now, some things that happen in winter are fully understandable and clearly lead to more deaths than would occur in drier warmer weather. Road accidents, domestic boiler incidents, house fires, drowning from falling through ice, asthma, pneumonia, falls, influenza and so on all have a higher incidence level in winter than at any other time of year.

Children who use electronic devices at bedtime have more than double the risk of not getting enough sleep during the night compared to who don't use them.

Further, the new review of 20 existing observational studies involving 125,198 children also shows that sleep quality and day-time sleepiness were affected in a similar way.

"Our study is the first to consolidate results across existing research and provides further proof of the detrimental effect of media devices on both sleep duration and quality," says Ben Carter of the Cardiff University School of Medicine.

"Sleep is an often undervalued but important part of children's development, with a regular lack of sleep causing a variety of health problems. With the ever growing popularity of portable media devices, such as smartphones and tablets, the problem of poor sleep amongst children is set to get worse.

Around 1 in 6 women eventually diagnosed with breast cancer initially go to their doctors with a symptom other than a lump, according to a new study conducted in England.

Women who have a symptom of breast cancer other than lumps are also more likely to wait to see a doctor, compared with women who do have lumps, the researchers found. That might put them at risk of worse outcomes if the cancer isn't caught quickly.

"It's crucial that women are aware that a lump is not the only symptom of breast cancer," study leader Monica Koo, a doctoral candidate at University College London, said in a statement. "If they are worried about any breast symptoms, the best thing to do is to get it checked by a doctor as soon as possible."