Health & WellnessS


Pills

Antidepressants once seen as miracle drugs: now risks are becoming evident

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© Jack Sullivan / Alamy
Since the horror of the Thalidomide scandal in the 1960s, pharmaceutical companies and medicines regulators have been acutely aware of the dangers drugs may pose to the unborn child.

Establishing what the effect of a drug may be on a foetus, however, is no simple task. Companies must rely on animal studies in the early stages of research and hope that the drug will behave in humans in the same way. Trials on pregnant women are rarely carried out, for obvious reasons.

Depression and anxiety became big business for the pharmaceutical industry in the 1990s as doctors became better at diagnosing the problems, exposing a population of over-achieving, highly-stressed, worried-well.

Black Cat

Freaky Sleep Paralysis: Being Awake in Your Nightmares

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© John Henry FuseliThe Nightmare
You wake up, but you can't move a muscle. Lying in bed, you're totally conscious, and you realize that strange things are happening. There's a crushing weight on your chest that's humanoid. And it's evil.

You've awakened into the dream world.

This is not the conceit for a new horror movie starring a ragged middle-aged Freddie Prinze Jr., it's a standard description of the experience of a real medical condition: sleep paralysis. It's a strange phenomenon that seems to happen to about half the population at least once.

Attention

Lettuce Recall Expanded

Tanimura & Antle, Inc. of Salinas, California is expanding the geographic scope of its voluntary recall of bulk and wrapped romaine head lettuce, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just announced. The recall was implemented over concerns of Salmonella contamination.

Heart

World Breastfeeding Awareness Week

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While ideology and profit politics predominate discussions and inhibit momentum toward any meaningful and sweepingly effective health care reform in America, there are fundamental and effective options on the table for changing the health culture and health of Americans. Toward the top of that list is the subject of this week's World Breastfeeding Awareness Week.

Info

How To Read Your Body's Warning Signs For Health

This morning, I woke with a stiff neck. I was not aware of it until I turned by head to brush my hair and then - ouch! A stiff neck tells me I am being inflexible. And I was. I had been planning my day to go a certain way - and it was not lining up to my expectations. Do you ever have days like that? You plan everything to order - and life does not conform to it?

"Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans."- John Lennon

Magnify

Why juvenile detention makes teens worse

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© Robert Essel NYC / Corbis
Parents have always warned teenagers against falling in with the wrong crowd, those kids they consider bad influences. Now a new study of juvenile detention in Montreal adds to the evidence that Mom and Dad may have a point.

Cow

Cargill Plant Recalls Nearly a Million Pounds of Tainted Beef

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Not-so-total recall: Cargill’s got nearly a million pounds of tainted beef circulating.
Remember a couple of weeks ago, when news emerged that a Colorado grocery chain had churned out 466,000 pounds of beef tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella, sent it out to six states, and then voluntarily recalled it - but not until weeks after several people had fallen violently ill from it? Well, they must be having some kind of competition out west, because now a California outfit called Beef Packers, owned by Cargill, the globe's biggest agribusiness concern, has issued an even bigger recall of beef tainted with antibiotic-resistant salmonella - this one involving 825,769 pounds circulating in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Utah.

Heart

Probiotics are Essential in Preventing Disease and Maintaining Health

The August, 2009 issue of the journal Pediatrics contains a study analyzing and confirming the positive effects of probiotics in maintaining immunity and preventing disease, particularly in children who experienced a significant decrease in cold and influenza incidences following sustained probiotic supplementation. The study also confirmed that probiotic supplementation decreased the length and severity of illness symptoms in those that did get sick, vindicating what has been known in the natural health community for years concerning probiotics.

The double-blind, placebo-controlled study was conducted with 326 children between the ages of three and five separated into three groups that received one of three milk solutions twice a day for six months. The first group received milk containing the probiotic strain Lactobacillus acidophilus, the second group received milk containing L acidophilus as well as Bifidobacterium animalis, and the third group received plain milk with a placebo.

The results of the single and combination probiotic groups, respectively, were reductions in fever incidence by 53% and 72.7%, coughing incidence by 41.4% and 62.1%, and rhinorrhea incidence by 28.2% and 58.8%, relative to placebo. Duration of fever, coughing, and rhinorrhea were also reduced by 32% and 48%, respectively. Consequently, there were crucial reductions in both the use of antibiotics in the single and combination probiotic groups equaling 68.4% and 84.2% as well as in truancy days from group child care equaling 31.8% and 27.7%, respectively.

Health

Stress Raises Belly Fat, Heart Risks

A recent study assessing the correlation between socially stressed monkeys and cardiovascular disease may have important implications for humans. The research, conducted by Wake Forest University, focused on visceral (belly) fat, and its relationship to metabolic syndrome and heart disease.

Previously, Dr. Carol Shively and her team discovered that monkeys that are chronically stressed have a greater incidence of plaque buildup in the arteries; the current study was intended to discover why this is the case.

Monkey Wrench

Corn Syrup's Mercury Surprise

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© Gary Taxali
If the specter of obesity and diabetes wasn't enough to turn you off- high- fructose corn syrup (HFCS), try this: New research suggests that the sweetener could be tainted with mercury, putting millions of children at risk for developmental problems.

In 2004, Renee Dufault, an environmental health researcher at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), stumbled upon an obscure Environmental Protection Agency report on chemical plants' mercury emissions. Some chemical companies, she learned, make lye by pumping salt through large vats of mercury. Since lye is a key ingredient in making HFCS (it's used to separate corn starch from the kernel), Dufault wondered if mercury might be getting into the ubiquitous sweetener that makes up 1 out of every 10 calories Americans eat.