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Americans spend an estimated $5 billion a year on unproven herbal supplements that promise everything from fighting off colds to curbing hot flashes and boosting memory. But now there is a new reason for supplement buyers to beware: DNA tests show that many pills labeled as healing herbs are little more than powdered rice and weeds. Using a test called DNA barcoding, a kind of genetic fingerprinting that has also been used to help uncover labeling fraud in the commercial seafood industry, Canadian researchers tested 44 bottles of popular supplements sold by 12 companies. They found that many were not...

Found this on the Reddit fullmoviesonyoutube list, started watching it, and got sucked in. All about the science of diet, the fat epidemic, and government manipulation.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) extolled a local elementary school in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. for making its students try broccoli gratin, Tuscan kale, and beet hummus, as an example of the department’s efforts to fight obesity. Clinton Elementary School held a “taste test” to preview food that will soon appear on the lunch menu, and was highlighted by USDA for its healthy eating efforts. The Poughkeepsie City school district received a $100,000 grant from the USDA for its “farm to school project,” which it is using to add items such as “butternut squash puree” to school menus. The funding was...

<p>Every day as she sat down for dinner with her husband, Dawn Chadwick would pick at the food on her plate, eating only a fraction of it.</p> <p>Then, as Chris waved goodbye and headed out to work, she would systematically empty the fridge and raid the cupboards, eating as much as she could before he got home.</p>

In my work, I see more people who want to focus on losing weight rather than gaining weight, so I don’t often stop to think about the problem of hunger. It’s easy to overlook the fact that hunger is still a big problem in in the United States. According to statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2011 about 50 million Americans were living with food insecurity — 33.5 million adults and 16.7 million children. What is food insecurity? It’s the inability to provide adequate food on a consistent basis. For adults, not getting enough food can have harmful...

The first time Margaret Dron organized the Gluten Free Expo early last year, it was inside the gymnasium of a small community centre in east Vancouver. She had recruited one volunteer, two speakers, 38 vendors and expected 500 attendees. There was no entrance fee—instead, people were to bring gluten-free goods for the local food bank; three boxes were set aside for the collection. Six hours later, more than 3,000 people had turned out, and the volunteer had to call a one-tonne truck to pick up the donations. In one Sunday afternoon, Dron realized, “there is some serious potential here. So...

American eaters love a good villain. Diets that focus on one clear bad guy have gotten traction even as the bad guy has changed: fat, carbohydrates, animal products, cooked food, gluten. And now Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California at San Francisco, is adding sugar to the list. His book "Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity, and Disease" makes the case that sugar is almost single-handedly responsible for Americans' excess weight and the illnesses that go with it. "Sugar is the biggest perpetrator of our current health crisis," says Lustig, blaming it...

Is sugar toxic and the cause of the obesity epidemic? Here’s a great new video called Toxic Sugar. It’s a recent segment from the major Australian science program Catalyst, on ABC. It’s arguably the best 18-minute introduction ever made on the true causes of the obesity epidemic. The program features the #1 enemy of the sugar industry: professor Robert Lustig. Also appearing: science writer Gary Taubes and obesity expert professor Michael Crowley. See it and then tell your friends. This needs to be seen by a lot of people

Researchers from Canada, France, Germany and the United States reporting in the journal Cell have found a new ground-breaking way of killing cancer cells. Traditional chemotherapy and radiotherapy cause damage to healthy cells, and other more targeted treatments are usually only effective for individual types of cancer. Contrastingly, a new potential treatment does not damage healthy cells and could also be used to treat a wide variety of different cancers. "Cancer cells grow and divide much more rapidly than normal cells, meaning they have a much higher demand for and are often starved of, nutrients and oxygen," explained study co-author...

When mice were fed a diet that was 25% added sugars – an amount consumed by many humans – the females died at twice the normal rate and the males were less likely to reproduce and hold territory, scientists said in a study published Tuesday. The study shows "that added sugar consumed at concentrations currently considered safe exerts dramatic impacts on mammalian health," the researchers said in the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. "Many researchers have already made calls for reevaluation of these safe levels of consumption." "Added sugars" are those added during processing or preparation, not those...

I am actually experiencing a new emotion: empathy for Michelle Obama. It's bad enough when an ordinary husband makes his wife look like a fool in public, but when the husband is the most visible man in America, the sting is all the more intense. Yesterday, Michelle released the news that she is making a cameo appearance in a video featuring "a hip-hop song recorded to encourage kids from minority groups to take care of their bodies."

In my efforts to be prepared for the civil unrest that is undoubtedly coming, I'm on a mission to get into better shape in my early fifties, and have revisited the health measure called Body Mass Index (BMI.) Just needing the input from some of you who agree or disagree with this seemingly arbitrary calculation. It seems to be absolutely ridiculous to me in one sense. In my healthiest lean days I was still considered "overweight" according to the BMI calculation. Now, I'm considered "obese," when anyone looking at me would never describe me as such. If I got down...

Statistics indicate that a majority of Muslims residing in the United Kingdom receive government welfare benefits. This includes 53% of working age Muslim adult males. Anjem Choudary, spokesman for the Islamist group Islam4UK, justified the behavior saying that “labor is the lot of the kafir. Muslim men have a higher obligation than working for mere material sustenance. The Quran bids them to wage jihad until all the world obeys the word of Allah.” “Taking the payments freely offered to us by the government enables us to devote our full energy to the struggle to make Islam dominant,” Choudary said. “It...

MAN REPLACED 90 PERCENT OF HIS MEALS WITH DRINK MIXTURE KITCHEN DAILY 6/17/13 The 24-year-old, who has difficulty finding time to shop and cook as a software engineer in Atlanta, researched what nutrients his body actually needed to get from food. He then created Soylent, which, according to Fox News, is a "drink mixture of vitamins and minerals which includes calcium, potassium, zinc, vitamins A, B, C, D, E and K." Rhinehart began swapping his daily meals for his Soylent formula. We caught up with Rhinehart to talk about his new diet.

<p>NEW YORK, N.Y. – They might start calling it the McDiet.</p> <p>McDonald Corp.’s CEO Don Thompson revealed at an analyst conference this week that he shed about 20 pounds in the past year by getting his “butt up” and “working out again.” But he said he hasn’t changed his habit of eating at McDonald’s “every, single day.”</p>

A CALORIE is a calorie. This truism has been the foundation of nutritional wisdom and our beliefs about obesity since the 1960s. What it means is that a calorie of protein will generate the same energy when metabolized in a living organism as a calorie of fat or carbohydrate. When talking about obesity or why we get fat, evoking the phrase “a calorie is a calorie” is almost invariably used to imply that what we eat is relatively unimportant. We get fat because we take in more calories than we expend; we get lean if we do the opposite. Anyone...

If you love sausages, hot dogs, and brats, you might be in for a shorter life, a new study suggests. The study analyzed data from half a million men and women, as a part of the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. It was published in the journal BMC Medicine [PDF]. They found a link between "processed" meat — which includes all meat products, including ham, bacon, sausages; small part of minced meat that has been bought as a ready-to-eat product — and cardiovascular disease and cancer, they report. Also, they found that the more processed meat you eat...

During her Google Hangout today, First Lady Michelle Obama reminded the audience that dogs need a proper diet and exercise, just like children do. The First Lady admitted that President Obama liked to tease their own dog, “Bo” for being lazy, but that they encouraged her girls to take him on walks. “Dogs are no different,” Michelle Obama explained to a woman on the chat. “You want to make sure they are eating a balanced diet, and if they are not an active dog, make sure that their food is reflective of an inactive dog and then get them out...

<p>Only you're probably not going to like his advice for losing weight -- just eat less.</p> <p>"If you eat less than 2,000 calories you'll lose weight," the mayor said on his weekly WOR radio show today. "If you eat more than 2,000 calories, you'll gain weight. Now some things metabolize more quickly than others. And everyone says I should go on this kind of diet or that kind of diet. Don't eat and you'll lose weight."</p>

It's 2 a.m., and you've just scarfed down another chicken wing topped with Cheez Whiz. Embarrassed? Don't be. Plenty of people flock to their refrigerators to snack on strange, late-night food concoctions, reports a new study published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders. Researchers had 507 students take a "concocting survey" that quizzed them on their eating behaviors and what types of foods they typically ate to satisfy their cravings. The results: One in four participants admitted to creating and indulging in crazy food combos. Think sugar-covered scrambled eggs and mayo-smothered vegetables -- and 41.2 percent chalked up their...