With symptoms including headaches, nausea, rashes, and fatigue, Caitlin Shetterly visited doctor after doctor searching for a cure for what ailed her. What she found, after years of misery and bafflement, was as unlikely as it was utterly common.

The office of allergist Paris Mansmann, MD, sits on a grassy slope overlooking the Royal River, a wide waterway that originates in inland Maine and winds down across farmland and under train tracks until it hits the coastal town of Yarmouth, where it sloshes into the Atlantic Ocean. When I first came to Mansmann in February 2011, the river was covered with ice, and bare trees stood silver sentry on its shores. I was 36. I'd been sick for three and a half years.

During that time, when I wasn't working as a writer and theater director or being a wife and mother, I visited doctors and had tests. I told few friends or members of my extended family how ill I was, because I didn't have any way to explain what was wrong. I had no diagnosis, just a collection of weird symptoms: tight, achy pain that radiated through my body and caused me to hobble around (my ankles, I'd joke to my husband, Dan, felt like they'd been "Kathy Batesed," à la the movie Misery); burning rashes that splashed across my cheeks and around my mouth like pizza sauce; exhaustion; headaches; hands that froze into claws while I slept and hurt to uncurl in the morning; a constant head cold; nausea; and, on top of all that, severe insomnia - my body just could not, would not, turn off and rest. I visited every doctor who'd see me and tried everything they threw at me: antidepressants; painkillers; elimination diets (including a long eight months when I went without any of the major allergens, such as gluten, nuts, dairy, soy, and nightshades); herbal supplements; iodine pills; steroid shots; hormone treatments; Chinese teas; acupuncture; energy healing; a meditation class - you name it, I did it. Nothing worked. After I maxed out the available rheumatologists, endocrinologists, nutritionists, gastroenterologists, Lyme disease specialists, acupuncturists, and alternative-medicine practitioners in the Portland metropolitan area, I was sent to neurologists in Boston. All of my tests came back normal.

Obesogens are chemicals that can inappropriately alter fat storage and change metabolic set-points. This disrupts energy balance and modifies your appetite to promote fat accumulation. Chemicals in your environment can certainly have an impact on your health and often your weight. Some of these exposures may occur before you're born but there is still a lot that you can control! Exposure to obesogens don't necessary doom you to become overweight, but it's all the more reason to consider ways to avoid exposure and regularly use neutraceuticals and whole foods to aid our body's natural detox mechanisms through our liver, kidneys and bowel.

Here's some easy ways to do a quick check of your home a to determine where your greatest exposures may be coming from.

Here's 12 simple changes that will significantly reduce your risks:

Scientists have long been worried about the possible harmful effects of regular cellular phone use, but studies so far have been largely inconclusive. Currently, radiofrequency electromagnetic fields, such as those produced by cell phones, are classified as possibly carcinogenic to humans (Group 2B) by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). A new Tel Aviv University study, though, may bring bad news.

To further explore the relationship between cancer rates and cell phone use, Dr. Yaniv Hamzany of Tel Aviv University's Sackler Faculty of Medicine and the Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery Department at the Rabin Medical Center, looked for clues in the saliva of cell phone users. Since the cell phone is placed close to the salivary gland when in use, he and his fellow researchers, including departmental colleagues Profs. Raphael Feinmesser, Thomas Shpitzer and Dr. Gideon Bahar and Prof. Rafi Nagler and Dr. Moshe Gavish of the Technion in Haifa, hypothesized that salivary content could reveal whether there was a connection to developing cancer.

Comparing heavy mobile phone users to non-users, they found that the saliva of heavy users showed indications of higher oxidative stress -- a process that damages all aspects of a human cell, including DNA -- through the development of toxic peroxide and free radicals. More importantly, it is considered a major risk factor for cancer.

The findings have been reported in the journal Antioxidants and Redox Signaling.

Despite what the media preaches to you, your body has no intrinsic need for drugs. Over the course of a lifetime, the average person may be prescribed 14,000 pills (this doesn't even include over-the-counter meds), and by the time you reach your 70s you could be taking five or more pills every day, according to Pill Poppers, a documentary.

The featured film asks a poignant question that anyone taking medications should also, which is, are these pills really beneficial, or are they doing more harm than good?

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) made two moves in recent days that seemingly address consumer concerns on some hot button issues. First, it banned the use of bisphenol A (BPA) based epoxy resins in coatings for baby formula packaging. Second, it proposed a limit on how much arsenic is allowed in apple juice. Looking more closely at these decisions, however, it seems that FDA is really more interested in appeasing industry, than doing its duty to protect the public.

So what action is the FDA really taking? Due to intense consumer demand, manufacturers of infant formula packaging have already stopped using BPA. And, based on the new standard for arsenic levels, 95 percent of companies that make apple juice are already in compliance.

The FDA's BPA ban is actually an abandonment petition coming from industry stating that it is now illegal to use BPA for those specific products - but it does not say anything about the safety of BPA.

There are three natural catastrophes occurring within nature in slow motion at the moment and they are our fault. All three catastrophes stem from the same kind of mistake made by human science and corporate greed. What are they and what are we doing wrong?

The slow-motion catastrophes are:

• antibiotic-resistant pathogenic bacteria - often termed 'superbugs'
• pesticide-resistant pests - also called 'superbugs'
• herbicide-resistant weeds - now termed 'superweeds'

What do these three have in common?

All three are the result of the application of synthetic toxicity within nature in an attempt to work outside nature's normal processes. The application of toxins meant to inhibit certain organisms produces resistance, because living organisms by nature seek to survive, and will adapt to toxicity in order to continue their survival.

This ability to adapt has been studied for many years by scientists and is well known among biology and evolution science. It is one of the foundations of biology taught at the most fundamental levels of instruction for any beginning scientist.

Yet the scientific community has failed to understand how this most fundamental part of nature will interact with the toxicity that we have introduced over the past century. Did the scientists who developed these synthetic toxins really believe those toxins would provide a permanent solution?

We obviously ignored this most fundamental understanding that living organisms will adapt to toxins. We forgot that organisms will develop defense mechanisms that will override deterrent toxins - producing a stronger organism in the process.

Americans overwhelmingly support labeling foods that have been genetically modified or engineered, according to a New York Times poll conducted this year, with 93 percent of respondents saying that foods containing such ingredients should be identified.

Three-quarters of Americans expressed concern about genetically modified organisms in their food, with most of them worried about the effects on people's health.

Thirty-seven percent of those worried about G.M.O.'s said they feared that such foods cause cancer or allergies, although scientific studies continue to show that there is no added risk.


Among those with concerns, 26 percent said these foods are not safe to eat, or are toxic, while 13 percent were worried about environmental problems that they fear might be caused by genetic engineering.

The screw-worm larva like eating human flesh

A British woman returned from a holiday in Peru hearing scratching noises inside her head to be told she was being attacked by flesh-eating maggots living inside her ear.

Rochelle Harris, 27, said she remembered dislodging a fly from her ear while in Peru but thought nothing more of it until she started getting headaches and pains down one side of her face and woke up in Britain one morning with liquid on her pillow.

Thinking she had a routine ear infection caused by a mosquito bite, she sought medical treatment at the Royal Derby Hospital in northern England, where a consultant noticed maggots in a small hole in her ear-canal.

Seanie Nammock suffers from a crippling genetic condition so rare that it affects only 45 people in the UK

Fashion-mad Seanie Nammock is spending the summer hanging out with friends and shopping for clothes on a well-earned break from her A-levels.

She never goes out without putting on her full make-up and dressing up to look her best. So to most observers she appears like any other attractive sixth-form girl.

But Seanie, 17, is suffering from a crippling genetic condition so rare that it affects only 45 people in the UK. Cruelly - it is slowly turning her into a living statue.

For five years she has been battling fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, known as FOP or stone man syndrome. It turns muscles, ligaments and tendons into solid bone. This forms a second skeleton on top of the original one, and each section of her body affected becomes solid like a statue.

A new study published in Letters in Applied Microbiologyshows that a commonly used food probiotic known as Lactobacillus plantarum is capable of degrading dangerous pesticide residues in wheat (pirimiphos-methyl), confirming the traditional fermentation-based food-processing technique known as culturing can significantly improve the safety of conventional food.

The researchers found that Lactobacillus plantarum enhanced the degradation of the pesticide from 15-34%, a close to 81% enhancement. The significance and impact of the study was described as follows:

Pesticide residues are an unavoidable part of the environment due to their extensive applications in agriculture. As wheat is a major cultivated cereal, the presence of pesticide residues in wheat is a real concern to human health. Reduction in pesticide residues during fermentation has been studied, but there is a lack of data regarding pesticide residues dissipation during cereal fermentation. Present work investigates the dissipation of pirimiphos-methyl during wheat fermentation by L. plantarum. Results are confirmation that food-processing techniques can significantly reduce the pesticide residues in food, offering a suitable means to tackle the current scenario of unsafe food.