Placebo effect - negative side effects
Placebos have side effects. I have already blogged about the power of the placebo effect. However it wasn't until today that I read about placebos having negative side effects. If you give a placebo instead of a drug and list out the side effect(s) or emphasize the side effects, people actually physically get these side effects. These side effects are the side effects that people on the "real" medication have. For exam

Vitamin B6 you need at least 2-3mg a day
Vitamin B6 is typically not discussed with respect to inflammation. Most inflammation discussion is around antioxidants, vitamin C and fish oils/omega 3's. I have already posted about how vitamin B3 is involved in the antioxidant cycle, well it appears that vitamin B6 may also be involved in reducing risk of heart disease. C-reactive protein (CRP) is a protein produced by the live in response to inflammation. It is used as a indicator of heart disease. This is because heart diseas

Thats disturbing - turkeys so big they can't reproduce !
It is around thanksgiving time in the US of A. Here is a very interesting article about how food has changed due to modern genetic changes. It turns out that turkeys are now over double the size there where when the pilgrims ate them.The key issue - artificial insemination. When turkeys get to big they can't mate as there bodies are to big to do the act! OMG! But with artificial insemination you can

Guess when this was written ?
"Margarines are replacing butter... fresh fruit is a comparative rarity.... green vegetables are scanty, and such as there are, are often cooked to the point of almost complete extraction of their vitamin-contents.... White bread has largely replaced wholemeal bread... Sugar is consumed in quantities unheard of a century ago.... [our diet] is often dangoursely defiditen in one or more vitamins, in proteins of good biological value, and disproportionately rich in starch or sugard or fats, or in all three. Access to abundance of food does not necessary protect from the effects of food deficiency, since a number of factors - prejudice... ignorance, habit - often prevent the proper

Here is the link to the 65 web sites.
Blasted across the news at the moment is that Medsafe has posted a list of 65 web sites that are selling dodgy herbal products. Herbal medicine often gets "bashed"  by conventional medical people so I was interested to see what was on the list. I found the list very difficult to find! None of the press releases included a link to the medsafe list! And a google search was not able to find them either, nor a search of the medsafe site. So unless I am having a dyslexic moment and entering/reading headings wrong the list is hard to find. Howe