How is it that sunlight, once regarded as a divine power in some cultures, has come to be classified as a Class 1 carcinogen by the World Health Organization (WHO)? This is a question posed by photobiologist Dr. Alexander Wunsch, CEO of Medical Light Consulting in Heidelberg, Germany.

It's a fundamental one because it shows the dichotomy between sunlight in ancient and modern cultures. Once revered as a healing power, today sunlight is blamed for disease and humans are urged to largely shun this natural element.

In the video below, Wunsch explores sunlight from a historical perspective, including how both public and medical opinions of sunlight have changed dramatically over time. He says:

"Nowadays, sunlight is not fashionable anymore. Some experts even try to ban the tan, others work on restrictions, the U.S. Surgeon General issues a call to action on UV and tanning. How can we deal with these dark clouds in a formerly sunny sky?Knowing more details about the past can help us to adjust and normalize the extreme positions of the 'no sun policy' advocated by the World Health Organization (WHO), the anti-cancer associations and many dermatologists."

Mark Twain once wrote, "The basin of the Mississippi is the body of the nation," but even the mighty Mississippi is facing mounting environmental threats.

The Mississippi River was named the second-most polluted waterway in the U.S. in 2012,¹ but it still maintained swatches that were considered to be relatively pristine, particularly in the Upper Mississippi in Minnesota.

Now that, too, is being threatened by changes in the landscape, namely increasing industrial agriculture that is depleting groundwater for irrigation while flooding the area with chemicals.

Forests Rapidly Replaced With Corn, Soy and Potato Fields

Since 2011, about 400 square miles of forest, marshes and grasslands in the Upper Mississippi watershed have been lost. The once-rich natural ecosystems were cleared out to make way for agriculture and urban development.

This is the second fastest rate of land conversion in the U.S., according to a national study reported by a Star Tribune special report.² Forests and marshes help to keep water supplies naturally cleansed and refreshed — the opposite of what occurs when industrial agriculture moves in. The Star Tribune continued:³

"That breathtaking transformation [of natural land being converted to industry] is now endangering the cleanest stretch of America's greatest river with farm chemicals, depleted groundwater and urban runoff.

At this rate, conservationists warn, the Upper Mississippi — a recreational jewel and the source of drinking water for millions of Minnesotans — could become just another polluted river."

We are still on the threshold of fully understanding the complex relationship between light and life, but we can now say emphatically, that the function of our entire metabolism is dependent on light." ~ Dr. Fritz-Albert Popp

It has long been held that non-conventional treatments for cancer such as homeopathy, Tai ji, yoga, or acupuncture couldn't 'cure' a disease because medical science simply didn't understand how these modalities worked. German researchers have proven, with special equipment created for the study of photons stored in our DNA, that there is no need for chemotherapy, or other invasive surgeries to cure the body of cancer. As neurophysiologist, Karl Pribram, has postulated, German experimental physicist, Fritz-Alfred Popp has demonstrated, and many ancient cultures have proven, cancer (along with many other diseases) die in the presence of light.

Pope Francis has made his strongest attack yet on genetically modified plants and animals (GMOs) and the Biotech Industry (which includes companies such as Monsanto, Bayer, Dow, Du Pont, Syngenta and ChemChina), in a letter to the Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) Professor José Graziano da Silva on World Food Day.

On Sunday, World Food Day, Pope Francis stated;

"From the wisdom of rural communities we can learn a style of life that can help defend us from the logic of consumerism and production at any cost, a logic that, cloaked in good justifications, such as the increasing population, is in reality aimed solely at the increase of profit. In the sector in which the FAO works, there is a growing number of people who believe they are omnipotent, or able to ignore the cycles of the seasons and to improperly modify the various animal and plant species, leading to the loss of variety that, if it exists in nature, has and must have its role. Producing qualities that may give excellent results in the laboratory may be advantageous for some, but have ruinous effects for others. And the principle of caution is not enough, as very often it is limited to not allowing something to be done, whereas there is a need to act in a balanced and honest way. Genetic selection of a quality of plant may produce impressive results in terms of yield, but have we considered the terrain that loses its productive capacity, farmers who no longer have pasture for their livestock, and water resources that become unusable? And above all, do we ask if and to what extent we contribute to altering the climate?

"Not precaution, then, but wisdom: what peasants, fisherman and farmers conserve in memory handed down through the generations and which is now derided and forgotten by a model of production that is entirely to the advantage of a limited group and a tiny portion of the world population. Let us remember that it is a model which, despite all its science, allows around eight hundred million people to continue to go hungry."

There's been increasing media coverage recently harkening back to Lamarck and inheritance of genetic code that changes in response to the environment (epigenetics).

"Lamarckism" as it came to be called was eschewed for more than a hundred years after its initial proposition because it was thought that genes were static (this reminds me of how Einstein originally developed a model which required an expanding universe, then he added a coefficient (the 'Cosmological Constant') to return its behavior to a static state, which later in hindsight was found to be wrong). Now it appears Lamarck while overstating the plasticity of genes, was on to something.

Epigenetics suggests that our genes are constantly in a state of flux, exposed and changing in response to environmental factors. But are these changes indeed heritable? Currently, there isn't yet consensus that environment, epigenetics, and inheritance intersect or a valid theory for how genes behave in organisms. But now that Lamarckism is back in the public's vernacular there will be countless studies performed to support or refute the thesis.

PAN, the Pesticide Action Network International, issued a 96-page report dated October 2016 titled "GLYPHOSATE" that every person on the planet ought to be concerned about, especially if you are using it in agriculture and farming; as a homeowner on your weeds; or as an unsuspecting member of society who unknowingly is forced to eat food crops sprayed with it!

According to that Report's Summary, glyphosate—Roundup—Monsanto are synonymous with the number one selling herbicide used in genetically modified crop agriculture, even though glyphosate is manufactured by many companies in other countries.

The herbicidal action of glyphosate is primarily due to its capacity to block the production of essential amino acids in plants and some microorganisms through a pathway called "shikimate", which is present only in plants. Thus it was sold as 'safe' for animals and humans. [1]

The World Health Organization's IARC (International Agency for Research on Cancer) classified glyphosate as probable carcinogen [Group 2A] in 2015! How come it took so long? I find myself asking.

The NHS is buying drugs from pharmaceutical companies in India whose dirty production methods are fuelling the rise of superbugs, and there are no checks or regulations in place to stop this happening.

The growth in superbugs - infections which are resistant to antibiotics - is one of the biggest public health crises facing the world today, and pollution in drug companies' supply chains is one of its causes. Yet the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has established that firms with a history of bad practice and pollution are supplying the NHS, and environmental standards do not feature in NHS procurement protocols.

New tests on water samples taken outside pharmaceutical factories in India which sell to the NHS found they contained bacteria which were resistant to the antibiotics made inside the plants.

This suggests industrial waste containing active antibiotic ingredients is being leaked into the surrounding environment. Studies have shown how this causes nearby bacteria to develop immunity to the drugs - creating "superbugs" - and that those resistant bacteria then spread around the world.

Responding to the Bureau's findings, the Department of Health (DoH) said it would consider bringing in new rules for antibiotic factories which export drugs to Britain.

The idea that depression and other mental health conditions are caused by an imbalance of chemicals (particularly serotonin and norepinephrine) in the brain is so deeply ingrained in our collective psyche that it seems almost sacrilegious to question it.
Of course Big Pharma has played a role in perpetuating this idea. Antidepressant drugs, which are based on the chemical imbalance theory, represent a $10 billion dollar market in the U.S. alone. According to the CDC, 11 percent of Americans over 12 years old take antidepressants, and they are the second-most prescribed medications (after cholesterol-lowering drugs). Doctors wrote a staggering 254 million prescriptions for antidepressants in 2010. (1)

Yet as popular as this theory has become, it is riddled with problems. For example:

• Reducing levels of norepinephrine, serotonin and dopamine does not produce depression in humans, even though it appears to do so in animals.
• Although some depressed patients have low levels of serotonin and norepinephrine, the majority do not. Several studies indicate that only 25 percent of depressed patients have low levels of these neurotransmitters.
• Some depressed patients have abnormally high levels of serotonin and norepinephrine, and some patients with no history of depression have low levels of them. (2)

Researchers from The Ohio State University have discovered that spinal cord injury alters the type of bacteria living in the gut and that these changes can exacerbate the extent of neurological damage and impair recovery of function. The study, "Gut dysbiosis impairs recovery after spinal cord injury," by Kristina A. Kigerl et al., which will be published online October 17 ahead of issue in The Journal of Experimental Medicine, suggests that counteracting these changes with probiotics could aid patients' recovery from spinal cord injuries.

The trillions of bacteria that live in the gastrointestinal tract are collectively known as the gut microbiome. Disruption of this microbial community, or dysbiosis, occurs when nonpathogenic gut bacteria are depleted or overwhelmed by pathogenic inflammatory bacteria. Autoimmune diseases (including multiple sclerosis, type I diabetes, and rheumatoid arthritis) have been linked to dysbiosis, and it has been implicated in the onset or progression of neurological disorders, including autism, pain, depression, anxiety, and stroke.

Traumatic spinal cord injuries have secondary effects or comorbidities, including loss of bowel control, that are likely to cause dysbiosis. The authors reasoned that if any changes in the gut microbiome occur, they might, in turn, affect recovery after spinal cord injury.

A recent review by Julie Pfeiffer and Herbert Virgin suggests that studying the interactions between the enteric virome, other microbes in the microbiota and host genes could be a useful tool with therapeutic benefits.

The mammalian gut microbiome is a complex community in which the virome plays an important role in regulating immunity and homeostasis. Nevertheless, recent data indicate that the enteric virome has been profoundly underestimated and researchers say enteric viruses (poliovirus, retrovirus, norovirus, reovirus) can interact with other microbial constituents that inhabit the intestine through both direct and indirect mechanisms. The coordinated interactions between these different microbial kingdoms - including viruses, bacteria, fungi, eukaryotes and helminths (termed "transkingdom interactions") - have important effects on enteric and systemic immune responses. Genetic variations in the host also affect these interactions and can influence the occurrence of enteric viral diseases.