High carbohydrate intake is associated with a higher risk of mortality, and high fat intake with a lower risk, researchers report.

An international team of scientists studied diet and mortality in 135,335 people between 35 and 70 years old in 18 countries, following them for an average of more than seven years. Diet information depended on self-reports, and the scientists controlled for factors including age, sex, smoking, physical activity and body mass index. The study is in The Lancet.

Compared with people who ate the lowest 20 percent of carbohydrates, those who ate the highest 20 percent had a 28 percent increased risk of death. But high carbohydrate intake was not associated with cardiovascular death.

Are you compelled to express yourself through writing, only to find that you just don't know how to begin or what to say? As the digital world encompasses every aspect of our lives we communicate our thoughts and feelings through text, emails, chats and on line discussions. When are we encouraged to express ourselves with the lost art of longhand? Have we completely lost touch with the pen and paper? How does writing benefit us physically, mentally and emotionally? Can there be cathartic benefits of writing? It is fundamental to learning, working memory, academic performance and addressing our deepest thoughts. Words can act as a medium for expression and a catalyst for clarity especially when dealing with trauma.

Join us on this episode of the Health and Wellness Show as we talk about the write stuff. How can we rekindle one of the most fundamental skills we learned as young children? How do we come back to the lost art and what are some tips to inspire us to get us back to the pen and paper?

And stay tuned at the end of the show for Zoya's Pet Health Segment where the topic is squish-faced doggies and the health problems they face.

Running Time: 01:20:51

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Human antidepressants are building up in the brains of bass, walleye and several other fish common to the Great Lakes region, scientists say.

In a new study, researchers detected high concentrations of these drugs and their metabolized remnants in the brain tissue of 10 fish species found in the Niagara River.

This vital conduit connects two of the Great Lakes, Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, via Niagara Falls. The discovery of antidepressants in aquatic life in the river raises serious environmental concerns, says lead scientist Diana Aga, PhD, the Henry M. Woodburn Professor of Chemistry in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences.

"These active ingredients from antidepressants, which are coming out from wastewater treatment plants, are accumulating in fish brains," Aga says. "It is a threat to biodiversity, and we should be very concerned.

"These drugs could affect fish behavior. We didn't look at behavior in our study, but other research teams have shown that antidepressants can affect the feeding behavior of fish or their survival instincts. Some fish won't acknowledge the presence of predators as much."

If changes like these occur in the wild, they have the potential to disrupt the delicate balance between species that helps to keep the ecosystem stable, says study co-author Randolph Singh, PhD, a recent UB graduate from Aga's lab.

"The levels of antidepressants found do not pose a danger to humans who eat the fish, especially in the U.S., where most people do not eat organs like the brain," Singh says. "However, the risk that the drugs pose to biodiversity is real, and scientists are just beginning to understand what the consequences might be."

The research team also included Alicia Pérez-Fuentetaja, PhD, a professor in the biology department and Great Lakes Center at SUNY Buffalo State; Prapha Arnnok, PhD, of Ramkhamhaeng University in Thailand; and Rodjana Burakham, PhD, of Khon Kaen University in Thailand. The study was published on Aug. 16 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

Scientists at the University of Texas have come up with a quick and unique way of helping cancer surgeons know much tissue to remove from a patient.

A handheld device which can identify cancerous tissue in 10 seconds has been created by scientists at the University of Texas.

Tests, published in Science Translational Medicine, suggest the technology is accurate 96 percent of the time.

The inventors of the MasSpec Pen say it could be used during surgery to make sure that all of a tumor has been removed and would avoid the "heartbreak" of leaving cancer in place, where it could potentially start growing again.

Mental health problems including psychotic experiences could in part be down to a lack of sleep, researchers have revealed.

A new study found that people who had undertaken a course of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) designed specifically to treat insomnia not only found their sleep improved, but also experienced reduced paranoia and fewer hallucinations - both psychotic experiences - as well as improvements in depression and anxiety.

"The dominant view is that sleep [problems are] either a symptom of several mental health problems or it is a secondary consequence," said Daniel Freeman, co-author of the research from the University of Oxford. "Really, sleep is one of the contributing causes."

Writing in the journal Lancet Psychiatry, a team of researchers from institutions across the UK describe how they examined the link between sleep and mental health using online surveys to quiz students from 26 universities up and down the country. Individuals were invited to take part in the study if they were found to have insomnia after answering a web-based questionnaire

Microplastic contamination has been found in tap water in countries around the world, leading to calls from scientists for urgent research on the implications for health.

Scores of tap water samples from more than a dozen nations were analysed by scientists for an investigation by Orb Media, who shared the findings with the Guardian. Overall, 83% of the samples were contaminated with plastic fibres.

The US had the highest contamination rate, at 94%, with plastic fibres found in tap water sampled at sites including Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agency's headquarters, and Trump Tower in New York. Lebanon and India had the next highest rates.

European nations including the UK, Germany and France had the lowest contamination rate, but this was still 72%. The average number of fibres found in each 500ml sample ranged from 4.8 in the US to 1.9 in Europe.

The new analyses indicate the ubiquitous extent of microplastic contamination in the global environment. Previous work has been largely focused on plastic pollution in the oceans, which suggests people are eating microplastics via contaminated seafood.

"We have enough data from looking at wildlife, and the impacts that it's having on wildlife, to be concerned," said Dr Sherri Mason, a microplastic expert at the State University of New York in Fredonia, who supervised the analyses for Orb. "If it's impacting [wildlife], then how do we think that it's not going to somehow impact us?"

Debunking Tattoo Mythology: A Short History of The Tattooing Ritual

Tattoos represent a cultural rite of passage, a mode of self-expression, and a means of cultivating one's unique identity ⁽¹⁾. British captain, explorer, and navigator James Cook introduced the word tattoo into the European vernacular, as an amalgamation of the Polynesian word 'ta' to 'strike something' and the Tahitian word 'tatau' meaning 'to mark something' ⁽²⁾.

The historical use of tattoos extends back at least seven thousand years ago, as tattoos were discovered on the extremities of a mummy from that period found in Northern Chile ⁽³⁾. Also, the five thousand year-old mummified remains of Ötzi the Iceman were found to contain osteochondrosis, or abnormal bone growth, in body sites where tattoos were present ⁽²⁾. Pesapane and colleagues (2014) likewise note that documentation of tattoos dates back to records by Roman emperor Constantine the Great in 313 AD, Pope Hadrian 1 in 787 AD, and the Old Testament ⁽²⁾.

Historically, tattoos were used to demarcate group identity, to protect the internal body from the exterior world, as a symbol of religious indoctrination, and in branding rituals as a form of medieval punishment. As an example of tattoos signifying group affiliation, "Crusaders used mostly Christian motifs to ensure that they received a Christian funeral in case they died in a foreign country" ⁽³⁾. In Japan, on the other hand, criminals were branded with tattoos as a mark of social stigmatization from the eighteenth century onward, which led to the rise of a tattooed demographic called the Yakuza ⁽³⁾.

If you're a U.S. adult and don't regularly take a prescription drug, you're now in the minority, according to a survey of nearly 2,000 U.S. adults by Consumer Reports.¹ The revealing sample found that more than half of U.S. adults regularly take prescription medications, and the average adult takes four. If it seems like your friends and family are taking more drugs than they did in the past-or if adults use more meds than they did when you were a kid-it's not in your imagination, either.

Consumer Reports found that the total number of prescriptions filled by Americans (including children) increased by 85 percent from 1997 to 2016-but the total U.S. population increased by only 21 percent during that time.

Malaria killed a 4-year-old girl in Italy, raising fears that the mosquito-borne disease has returned to the country after decades.

Sonia Zago developed a high fever after returning home from a vacation in Bibione, a seaside town on the Adriatic coast near Venice.

As her condition worsened, she was taken to a hospital in the northern city of Trento. Within an hour of arriving, the girl had fallen into a coma and was diagnosed with malaria. Zago was then transferred to a hospital in Brescia that treats tropical diseases, but she died on Sunday night.

The girl had never traveled to a risk-prone country, raising questions about how she contracted the disease.

The Ministry of Health confirmed Tuesday that it had dispatched a team of experts to investigate.

Dr. Claudio Paternoster, director of the infectious diseases ward at Santa Chiara hospital in Trento, said that he had not seen a case of home-grown malaria during his 30-year career.

Chronic illnesses such as asthma and Alzheimer's disease are seemingly being wiped out from human genes thanks to natural selection, as part of human evolution.

According to a ground-breaking study, gene variations associated with asthma, Alzheimer's and high cholesterol have noticeably declined in just two generations. Scientists say this effectively proves that Darwinian evolution not only exists, but is still taking place.


The findings, which follow an analysis of the genetic blueprints of 150,000 Britons and 60,000 Americans carried out by researchers from Columbia and Cambridge University, suggest the diseases could be "weeded out" of the human species in a few thousand years.

"It's a subtle signal, but we find genetic evidence that natural selection is happening in modern human populations," said Joseph Pickrell, an evolutionary geneticist at Columbia University and one of the study's authors, the Telegraph reported.