On your side, face-up or face-down? The position which best clears metabolic waste from your brain at night.

Sleeping on your side removes waste from the brain most efficiently, a new study finds.

As a result, sleeping in a lateral position may help reduce the chance of developing Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases.

Professor Maiken Nedergaard, one of the study's authors, said:

"It is interesting that the lateral sleep position is already the most popular in human and most animals — even in the wild — and it appears that we have adapted the lateral sleep position to most efficiently clear our brain of the metabolic waste products that built up while we are awake.

The study therefore adds further support to the concept that sleep subserves a distinct biological function of sleep and that is to 'clean up' the mess that accumulates while we are awake.

Many types of dementia are linked to sleep disturbances, including difficulties in falling asleep.

It is increasing acknowledged that these sleep disturbances may accelerate memory loss in Alzheimer's disease.

Our finding brings new insight into this topic by showing it is also important what position you sleep in."

Our bodies have ten times the amount of microbes than human cells. This set of bacteria is called microbiota. In some instances, bacteria known as pathogens can cause infectious diseases. However, these micro-organisms can also protect us from certain diseases. Researchers from Inserm, Paris Descartes University and the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), through collaboration with teams from China and Sweden, have recently shown how microbiota protects against the development of type 1 diabetes. This research is published in the Immunity journal, 4 August 2015.

To combat pathogens, the immune system has developed various mechanisms to detect, defend against and even destroy micro-organisms that are harmful to the body. This includes antimicrobial peptides and natural proteins that destroy pathogenic bacteria by disrupting their cellular membrane. Not only are they produced by immune cells, they are also produced by cells whose functions are not immune-related.

Today on the Health and Wellness Show we'll be connecting the dots on various health topics in recent news.GMOs, gut bacteria, disease outbreaks, and more... Tune in Weekly on Fridays at 10am EST.

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This article is taken from a talk I gave on HIV/AIDS at the 33rd annual meeting of the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness in Ontario, California last week (some of the slides that I used for this talk are put in here). It is based on a commentary I wrote titled "A Fallacy of Modern Medicine: the HIV/AIDS Hypothesis." [1] As I will show, this fallacy has done a great injustice to people who happen to test positive for HIV, to gay men in particular. It has caused the deaths of many thousands of these young men, becoming what one might call a homosexual holocaust.

A person has died of the plague in Colorado, less than two months after a 16-year-old was also killed by the disease. The individual is believed to have contracted the plague from fleas on a dead rodent or other animal.

The Pueblo City-County Health Department confirmed on Wednesday that the victim was an adult, but failed to provide further details.

"We extend our deepest condolences to the family," said Sylvia Proud, public health director of the Pueblo City-County Health Department, as quoted by local news outlet KRDO.

Our modern processed diets are leading to poor immune functioning and increased risk of inflammatory conditions, allergy, and auto-immunity, researchers warn.

Besides affecting immune functions and our own health, modern diets could also 'code' our DNA and gut bacteria to pass on poor immune functions to our children.

A team of scientists from Yale University in the U.S and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, in Germany, has said that junk food diets could be partly to blame for the sharp increase in autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, including alopecia, asthma and eczema.

The new stark warnings come in a review published in Nutrition Journal, which analysed the impact that the modern Western diet has on immune function and risk of ill-health related to poor immunity and inflammation.

Led by Dr Ian Myles from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), the review analyses the scientific evidence for the impacts and mechanisms of harm for our over-indulgence in sugar, salt, and fat - as well as the data outlining the impacts of artificial sweeteners, gluten, and genetically modified foods.

"While today's modern diet may provide beneficial protection from micro- and macronutrient deficiencies, our over abundance of calories and the macronutrients that compose our diet may all lead to increased inflammation, reduced control of infection, increased rates of cancer, and increased risk for allergic and auto-inflammatory disease," warned Myles in his review.

"In summary, there is enough quality, direct human evidence to conclude that many of the dietary choices in today's modern society appear to have harmful impacts on our immune system and likely on the immune system of our offspring," he said, adding that modern 'solutions' to the negative impacts of poor diet including probiotics and dietary supplements will cannot do enough to counterbalance the damage done - without additional lifestyle changes.

Each person harbors a unique and varied collection of bacteria that's the result of life history as well as their interactions with the environment, diet and medication use. Western diet and lifestyles consisting of fast and processed foods are leading to a lower diversity of bacteria in the gut, say researchers.

"Of potentially greatest concern, our poor dietary behaviours are encoded into both our DNA scaffolding and gut microbiome, and thus these harmful immune modifications are passed to our offspring during their most critical developmental window," he warned.

Chinese authorities seized more than 881 pounds of baby milk formula that had been imported from Japan because it had been produced in areas known to be heavily contaminated with radioactive material emitted by three damaged nuclear reactors at the Fukushima-Daiichi complex. China's Xinhua news agency reported that quarantine officials said that no excessive radioactive material was found in the formula, but the baby food was sent back to Japan because China has had a ban on any imports from the areas around Fukushima.

The July seizure of the Japanese baby formula came just a month after Japan had asked the Chinese to ease restrictions on Japanese food imports. On June 19, Japan's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries used a meeting in Beijing to request that the import bans - which still apply to 10 Japanese prefectures - be lifted. According to the South China Morning Post, the Japanese Agricultural Ministry had stressed "the safety of Japanese food."

While the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) is not a regulatory agency, their release of a full report on glyphosate's ability to cause cancer is making waves throughout the world. Glyphosate is the key component in Monsanto's Roundup.

There are more than 750 products for sale in the USA alone which contain glyphosate, the main ingredient in Monsanto's herbicide that has been selling since the 1970s.

The agency is comprised of an international review board which determined that glyphosate is indeed carcinogenic. Considering that more than '80% of the biotech-created GM crops' throughout the world were manufactured to be used with this herbicide - it would logically follow that the majority of our food supply is now contaminated by a cancer-causing agent(s).

Recent reporting that staff at Waikato Hospital, New Zealand have been bullied into accepting influenza vaccinations is "absolutely unacceptable in a democracy" and is an "assault on workers' human rights".

Katherine Smith, spokeswoman for No Forced Vaccines says that she is "appalled" to learn that one staff member has been sacked because he or she did not comply with the new hospital policy regarding influenza vaccination. [1]

"Influenza vaccination carries serious risks, including the risk of developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a disorder of the nervous system which can involve varying degrees of paralysis and can be fatal in some cases," Mrs Smith continues.

"It's not surprising that many health professionals refuse influenza vaccinations, presumably because they do not want to put their health at risk." [2]

Even with all the progress that has been made in cancer detection and treatment in the last few decades, there is still a long way to go.

Even with all the money that gets poured into cancer research, this disease remains the fourth leading cause of death in the United States - and numbers are similar for many other countries around the world. And a big part of the problem is that the majority of cancer therapies still revolve around some combination of surgery, chemo or radiation therapy. All of these treatments carry risks - and all have unwanted side effects. That is why so many researchers are putting their time into coming up with more natural ways to treat cancer. And one surprising candidate that has emerged from all of this is vitamin E, which is more popularly known for its ability to nourish the skin.

Vitamin E and cancer

What has many people in the cancer research community talking about are several recently published studies that appear to the have found a link between high levels of vitamin E in the body and a decreased chance of breast cancer. Since this form of cancer remains of vital concern to women in particular, these studies have garnered a lot of attention.