Health & Wellness
Overweight people more often than not suffer from gross malnutrition because the nutritional values of the basic foods available to us have been steadily dropping for the last 50 years even as toxic exposures increase. Obese people tend to eat too many processed white foods with the fiber removed along with many of the vitamins and minerals. Not enough fiber is another common problem with the obese.
Excessive calorie intake is the fast track to leptin resistance. Since it's hard to eat excess of the so-called "clean" foods, excess calories usually come from junk foods as do magnesium deficiencies.
Jennifer Welsh, a LiveScience staff writer explains that when dieters starve themselves of calories, they starve their brain cells as well. New research finds that these hungry brain cells then release "feed me" signals, which drive up hunger, slow down metabolism and thus cause diets to fail. Neurons sense nutrients in the body and tell the body when it's time to eat and time to stop eating. The point is that dieters are not just starving themselves of calories, they are starving themselves of vital minerals and this comes on top of already existing mineral deficiencies that are characteristic of overweight and obese populations.
First, let's differentiate between the two main types of toxins that you're exposed to on a day-to-day basis.

Gudgeon downstream of a wastewater-processing plant had swollen abdomens and other abnormalities.
Consumers who flush unwanted contraceptives down the drain have long been blamed for giving fish more than their fair share of sex organs. Drugs excreted by patients can also taint rivers, even after passing through wastewater-processing facilities.
But evidence is accumulating that the effluent coming from pharmaceutical factories could also be carrying drugs into rivers. Many ecotoxicologists had assumed that water-quality standards, along with companies' desire to avoid wasting valuable pharmaceuticals, would minimize the extent of bioactive compounds released by factories into wastewater, and ultimately into rivers.
A string of studies suggest otherwise. In 2009, for example, researchers1,2 reported very high levels of pharmaceutical ingredients in treated effluent coming from a plant that processes wastewater from factories near Hyderabad, India. The following year, a similar discovery was made at two wastewater-treatment plants in New York, both of which received discharges from drug-production plants.3
Now, researchers have provided the first evidence of similar problems in Europe,4 and have linked it to sex disruption in wild fish populations found in the Dore River in France. "People thought this could not happen in a country that has high environmental standards and good manufacturing practices," says Patrick Phillips, head of the National Water-Quality Assessment Program at the US Geological Survey in Troy, New York, and lead author of the US study. "The evidence from the United States and now from France shows that this is not the case."
TAU researchers work to determine how H1N1 becomes pandemic.
The last century has seen two major pandemics caused by the H1N1 virus - the Spanish Flu in 1918 and 2009's Swine Flu scare, which had thousands travelling with surgical masks and clamoring for vaccination. But scientists did not know what distinguished the Swine Flu from ordinary influenza in pigs or seasonal outbreaks in humans, giving it the power to travel extensively and infect large populations.
Until now. Prof. Nir Ben-Tal of Tel Aviv University's Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and his graduate student Daphna Meroz, in collaboration with Dr. Tomer Hertz of Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, have developed a unique computational method to address this question. Published in the journal PNAS, the research presents a valuable tool for identifying viral mutation strategies, tracking various virus strains and developing vaccinations and anti-virals which can protect the population. It may also lead to more precisely designed vaccines to combat these viral mutations.
Their method reveals that mutations in the virus' amino acids in specific positions, such as antigenic receptor sites, may explain how the new strain successfully spread throughout the population in 2009. These alterations allowed the strain to evade both existing vaccines and the immune system's defenses.
A report by ABC's Good Morning America found that play areas at fast food restaurants may be harboring harmful germs and bacteria.
The report said a mother who is trying to get standards in place for how restaurant play areas should be cleaned helped make the discovery.
Erin Carr-Jordan, the mother who performed the research, said she found clumps of hair, rotting food and gang graffiti, among other things, when she followed her toddler into a play tube at a fast-food restaurant play area.
"It was like getting hit with a brick, it was so disgusting," she told ABC's Good Morning America. "There was filth everywhere, there was black on the walls and it was sticky and there was grime inside the connecting tubes."
Carr-Jordan said she felt restaurant managers were not responsive to her complaints so she felt compelled to start taking video cameras with her to post what she had found on YouTube.
She also spent several thousand dollars of her own money on testing samples at nine restaurants in seven states from restaurants like McDonald's, Burger King, and Chuck E. Cheese's.

The USDA has called back more than 60,000 pounds of ground beef products believed to be contaminated with E. coli from the National Beef Packing Co. LLC.
Winn-Dixie Stores Inc., Publix Super Markets Inc. and Kroger Co. announced the recalls mainly in the southeastern U.S. and said they stem from problems at the National Beef Packaging Co. of Dodge City, Kan.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced Friday that National Beef was recalling more than 60,000 pounds of beef after the Ohio Department of Agriculture found the bacteria during routine testing.
The recalls affect products sold mainly in Florida, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Tennessee, but the meat was sent to several distributors and could have been repackaged for consumers and sold nationwide.
The agriculture department says there have been no reports of illnesses. A spokesman for National Beef said the company has never had a problem with E. coli. It is checking processes and procedures in an effort to find the cause and prevent it from happening again, the spokesman said.
It may seem incredulous to challenge the practice of vaccination, since it has claimed responsibility for the eradication of many diseases in the past 100 years including polio, smallpox, whooping cough and diphtheria. But these claims are largely based on epidemic studies rather than on clinical evidence of effectiveness. Europe for example, experienced the same rise and decline of polio cases as were seen in the U.S. yet never had the polio vaccine. In addition, many diseases that were once thought to be eradicated simply take on different forms and are given different names. Spinal meningitis and polio have almost identical symptoms and cases of spinal meningitis have increased since the decrease in polio cases.
As Big Pharma becomes more desperate to boost flagging profits, the industry will likely use this tactic to find new sources of revenue - and shame on the FDA for so blatantly aiding and abetting it!
This coming year, seven of the world's twenty bestselling drugs will lose their patent protection and can be sold in generic forms. On this list are the top two money-makers ever created: cholesterol fighting (but overall health-threatening) Lipitor and blood thinning (but bone-destroying) Plavix. This wave of expiring drugs patents will have unprecedented and devastating effects on the industry bottom line. One drug recently made available in generic form - Protonix, a medication for severe heartburn (again, not a drug we would use, and especially dangerous when used with the blood-thinner mentioned above) - previously cost about $170 per month when it was still under patent; its generic version now costs $16. With seven of the top-selling drugs expected to see similarly drastic drops in prices, the drug industry is in a panic - especially considering the fact that there are no new "blockbuster" drugs in the pharmaceutical industry pipeline. Under these circumstances, why not try to turn some supplements into drugs?
Aside from the regulation of our biological clock, melatonin also aids in the regulation of other body hormones. In females, it regulates the timing of the releases of reproductive hormones which helps set the pattern of the menstrual cycle.
The government has come under fire this week for revelations that it knew about antibiotic resistant Salmonella in poultry products that has killed at least one person and sickened more than 100 across the country. Although this is one of the largest turkey recalls - affecting some 36 million pounds of ground turkey - the prevalence of bacteria that is immune to common drugs is on the rise on animal farms, which is where the bulk of U.S. antibiotics get used.
But by going organic, poultry farms can cut the amount of antibiotic resistant bacteria in a single generation by nearly five times, according to a new study published online this week in Environmental Health Perspectives.
"We were surprised to see that the differences were so significant across several different classes of antibiotics even in the very first flock that was produced after the transition to organic standards," Amy Sapkota, of the University of Maryland School of Public Health, and co-author of the new study, said in a prepared statement.













Comment: For more information about toxins in the body and their negative effects on human health read Detoxify or Die By Sherry A. Rogers, M.D.: