High fructose corn syrup (HFCS), the sweetener that's ubiquitous in sodas, processed snacks, and junk foods, may tinker with the brain in ways that, unlike glucose, may actually encourage us to overeat. The problem is that after downing a soft drink containing fructose, the brain may not register that we're full, according to a study published in the January 2, 2013 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. For the investigation, scientists used MRI scans to visualize and compare blood flow in the brain after their subjects - 20 young, normal-weight men and women - drank beverages containing HFCS and, a few weeks later, one containing glucose. Scans showed that drinking the glucose-sweetened beverages turns off brain areas that stimulate the desire for food, but this didn't happen when the drinks contained HFCS. The study was small and didn't prove that HFCS contributes to obesity, although increases in obesity have paralleled the use of HFCS. More studies will be necessary to confirm the negative effects HFCS has on the brain.

Whether you suffer with a chronic illness, psychiatric disorder or psychological condition, the first thing to check is your belly. "All diseases begin in the gut," says Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride, M.D., a leading expert on the subject of autism as well as other learning disabilities and digestive disorders. In her work, she heals both mind and body by focusing on the health of the belly.

At her Cambridge Nutrition Clinic established in England in 1998, Dr. Campbell-McBride traces the connection between neurology and nutrition as well as digestion and the functioning of the rest of the body. "The digestive system holds the root of our health," she says pointing out the extensive role that gut flora plays in disease prevention, including protecting us from invading pathogens, detoxification, facilitating the digestion of food as well as the absorption of vitamins and minerals like calcium and zinc, and actually producing B vitamins. In addition, between 84-88% of the immune system is housed in the gut lining, she says, which would equal the size of a tennis court if opened up and laid flat .

Strains of drug-resistant flu are said to be able to pass from one human to another

Increasing numbers of cases of swine flu are being detected that are resistant to Tamiflu, the drug the UK and rest of the world stockpiled to fight a pandemic, according to scientists calling for greater global monitoring.

Even more worryingly, these strains of flu are appearing in patients who have never been treated with the drug, which means the strains are able to pass from one human to another.

Tamiflu, generic name oseltamivir, is one of the few treatments available for pandemic swine flu, although it is thought to be of limited effectiveness. The reluctance of the manufacturer Roche to release all the trial data has made it difficult to ascertain how limited. Nonetheless the drug can save lives if used early in the course of the illness.

Resistance to the drug has been shown before, but the new Australian data on its steady growth and the apparently easy transfer from one person to another of Tamiflu-resistant flu strains will alarm public health experts.

To some, a ketogenic diet amounts to nothing less than a drug-free cancer treatment. The diet calls for eliminating carbohydrates, replacing them with healthy fats and protein.

The premise is that since cancer cells need glucose to thrive, and carbohydrates turn into glucose in your body, then cutting out carbs literally starves the cancer cells.

This type of diet, in which you replace carbs with moderate amounts of high quality protein and high amounts of beneficial fat, is what I recommend for everyone, whether you have cancer or not. It's simply a diet that will help optimize your weight and health overall, as eating this way will help you convert from carb burning mode to fat burning.

Ketogenic diet may be key to brain cancer recovery

The featured video shows Thomas Seyfried, Ph.D, who is one of the leaders in teasing the details of how to treat cancer nutritionally. I am scheduled to interview him shortly and hope to have that interview up later this year. In the video, Professor Seyfried discusses how, as a metabolic disorder involving the dysregulation of respiration, malignant brain cancer can be managed through changes in the metabolic environment.

"In contrast to normal neurons and glia, which transition to ketone bodies (beta-hydroxybutyrate) for respiratory energy when glucose levels are reduced, malignant brain tumors are mostly dependent on non-oxidative substrate level phosphorylation due to structural and functional abnormalities in mitochondria. Glucose and glutamine are major fuels for malignant cancer cells. The transition from glucose to ketone bodies as an energy source is an ancestrally conserved adaptation to food deprivation that permits the survival of normal cells during extreme shifts in nutritional environment. Only those cells with a flexible genome, honed through millions of years of environmental forcing and variability selection, can transition from one energy state to another. We propose a different approach to brain cancer management that exploits the metabolic flexibility of normal cells at the expense of the genetically defective and metabolically challenged. This evolutionary and metabolic approach to brain cancer management is supported from studies in orthotopic mouse brain tumor models and from case studies in patients.

Calorie restriction and restricted ketogenic diets (R-KD), which reduce circulating glucose levels and elevate ketone levels, are anti-invasive, anti-angiogenic, and pro-apoptotic towards malignant brain cancer."¹

Current conventional cancer treatment typically involves chemotherapy and radiation therapy. Chemotherapy is a cytotoxic poison, and radiation is devastating to the human body. More often than not, the treatment is what eventually kills the patient. This can no longer be accepted as "the best we can do." As Dr. Seyfried says:

"The reason why we have so few people surviving is because of the standard of care. It has to be changed, if it's not changed, there will be no major progress. Period."

My name is Hannah Bradley and I am 28-years-old. In February 2011 my world changed in an instant when I had a massive seizure in the early hours of the night. Luckily my partner was with me as I lost consciousness and was rushed to hospital. I really don't remember much about the two months that followed apart from seeing many doctors and having constant headaches and a number of seizures.

I was frightened, confused and feared the worst. My worse fears came true when I was diagnosed with a very aggressive brain tumour called Anaplastic Astrocytoma. I could see how serious this was by the fact that so many doctors who had me under their care. As I am sure you can imagine when I heard this news my whole world fell apart. I had so many questions going around my head, like why was this happening to me? What did the future hold and would I survive?

Historical review provides lessons for the control of the plague.

Today archaeologists unearthed a 'Black Death' grave in London, containing more than a dozen skeletons of people suspected to have died from the plague. The victims are thought to have died during the 14th century and archaeologists anticipate finding many more as they excavate the site.

The Plague is by definition a re-emerging infectious disease which affects the lungs and is highly contagious, leading to mass outbreaks across populations. History shows us that population levels suffered globally due to the plague, with around 75 million people globally perishing during the 14th century Black Death.

Treated municipal sewage sludge - that is, the solids from sewage treatment - may be causing illness in people up to a mile from where the sludge is spread on land.

Those are the findings of epidemiology researchers from the Gillings School of Global Public Health at The University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Their study, "Land Application of Treated Sewage Sludge: Community Health and Environmental Justice," was published online March 11 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. It involved residents from North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia who live near fields where sludge is applied as a soil amendment. More than half of people interviewed reported acute symptoms such as burning eyes, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea after sludge had been sprayed or spread. People who live near fields in which industrial swine operations spray waste have reported similar symptoms.

A new study published in the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition implicates gluten-containing grains in the pathogenesis of two related pediatric liver conditions: cryptogenic hypertransaminasemia (HTS), marked by the elevation of liver enzymes (transaminases) with unknown cause, and autoimmune hepatitis (AIH), marked by the host immune system producing autoantibodies that attack the liver.

In fact, the relative risk of a positive diagnosis of autoimmune hepatitis in children with celiac disease was found to be 188.54 times higher than in those without celiac disease, indicating that the damage commonly associated with severe, immune-mediated intolerance to wheat proteins (i.e. celiac disease) extend "beyond the intestine" to the liver. It also opens the door for the therapeutic role of a gluten-free diet in certain pediatric liver diseases.

The researchers conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of the biomedical literature, spanning from 1977 to May 2012, in order to evaluate the prevalence of celiac disease in children with the two aforementioned liver conditions. Nine studies involving a total of 2046 patients were identified. The results were as follows:

1. Pooled prevalences of celiac disease in children with mild, non-specific cryptogenic persistent HTS and HTS in children with celiac disease were 12.0% (95% CI 4.17-29.96) and 36.0% (95% CI 32.15-40.11), respectively.
2. A gluten-free diet normalized transaminase levels in 77%-100% of celiac disease patients within 4-8 months.
3. Pooled prevalences of celiac disease in children with AIH and AIH in children with celiac disease were 6.3% (95% CI 3.87-11.73) and 1.4% (95% CI 0.84-2.15), respectively.
4. The relative risk (RR) of HTS in children with celiac disease versus the general population, and of celiac disease in children with HTS was 6.55 (95% CI 5.65-7.60) and 11.59 (95% CI 3.80-35.33) fold higher, respectively. The corresponding RRs of AIH in children with celiac disease were 188.54 (95% CI 92.23-385.43) fold higher. The RR of celiac disease in children with AIH was 6.63 (95% CI 3.86-11.40) higher.

Their Conclusion was as Follows

Celiac disease is associated with elevated transaminase levels in about one-third of newly diagnosed children. Cryptogenic persistent HTS may signal gluten-dependent non-specific mild hepatitis (12.0% of cases) or more rarely (6.3%) severe celiac disease-related autoimmune hepatopathy. Relative risks confirm these trends in the considered associations.

If you want to print this article as an A4 leaflet, download a PDF.

Genetically modified (GM) foods are often promoted as a way to feed the world. But this is little short of a confidence trick. Far from needing more GM foods, there are urgent reasons why we need to ban them altogether.

1. GM foods won't solve the food crisis

A 2008 World Bank report concluded that increased biofuel production is the major cause of the increase in food prices.[1] Biofuels are crops grown for fuel rather than food. GM giant Monsanto has been at the heart of the lobbying for biofuels - while profiting enormously from the resulting food crisis and using it as a PR opportunity to promote GM foods!

"The climate crisis was used to boost biofuels, helping to create the food crisis; and now the food crisis is being used to revive the fortunes of the GM industry." - Daniel Howden, Africa correspondent, The Independent (UK)[2]

"The cynic in me thinks that they're just using the current food crisis and the fuel crisis as a springboard to push GM crops back on to the public agenda. I understand why they're doing it, but the danger is that if they're making these claims about GM crops solving the problem of drought or feeding the world, that's bullshit." - Prof Denis Murphy, head of biotechnology, University of Glamorgan, Wales[3]

Last September a doctor in a Saudi hospital was fired for reporting a new, deadly strain of the coronavirus. Now, with half of all confirmed cases ending in death, the World Health Organisation has issued a global alert and scientists are preparing for the worst.

In mid-June last year, Ali Mohamed Zaki, a virologist at the Dr Soliman Fakeeh Hospital in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, took a call from a doctor who was worried about a patient. The 60-year-old man had been admitted to the hospital with severe viral pneumonia and the doctor wanted Zaki to identify the virus. Zaki obtained sputum from the patient and set to work. He ran the usual lab tests. One after another they came back negative.

Puzzled by the results, Zaki sent a sample to a leading virology lab at Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam. While he waited for the Dutch team to examine the virus, Zaki tried one more test of his own. This time he got a positive result. It showed the infectious agent belonged to a family of pathogens called coronaviruses. The common cold is caused by a coronavirus. So is the far more deadly infection Sars. Zaki quickly emailed the Dutch lab to raise the alarm. Their tests confirmed his fears, but went further: this was a coronavirus no one had seen before.

To alert other scientists, Zaki posted a note on proMED, an internet reporting system designed to rapidly share details of infectious diseases and outbreaks with researchers and public health agencies. The move cost him dearly. A week later, Zaki was back in his native Egypt, his contract at the hospital severed, he says, under pressure from the Saudi Arabian Ministry of Health. "They didn't like that this appeared on proMED. They forced the hospital to terminate my contract," Zaki told the Guardian from Cairo. "I was obliged to leave my work because of this, but it was my duty. This is a serious virus."