• Parents: You Can Say No to Vaccinations, Right? Maybe Not for Much Longer...: The proposed new law will legally require doctors and nurses to personally sign off on all religious or personal belief exemptions to vaccination filed with the state. Parents seeking non-medical exemptions will be required to include a signature from a vaccine provider on the exemption form stating that they have been given vaccine benefit and risk information. 3 Currently Washington state mandatory vaccination laws 4 only require signatures from medical personnel when medical exemptions are filed.
• Another Reason to Skip the Soda: High Blood Pressure: There's plenty of evidence that guzzling sugared drinks like sodas can harm your health. The extra calories can lead to obesity and contribute to heart problems and diabetes. Now researchers say the sweet beverages may boost blood pressure as well.
• 14 Ways to Save Money on Groceries: Learning to be a savvy food shopper is not only about the price tag (looking for freshness and food quality are also important), but, that being said, the more you can keep your grocery bill down, the better.
• Svelte 30 Recall: OTC Diet Pill Contains Undeclared Prescription Drug: Svelte 30 Nutritional Consultants, a diet pill manufacturer with an office in Kissimmee, Fla., is voluntarily recalling its "Svelte 30 orange & gray capsules" after a January test conducted by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revealed that the pills contained sibutramine, the FDA-approved prescription diet drug sold as Meridia.
In October 2010, Abbott Laboratories voluntarily pulled Meridia from the shelves, under pressure from the FDA, after data showed that the drug increased the risk of heart attack and stroke.
• Can't Beat Food Cravings? Four Steps to Help You Kick Your Addictions: It's estimated that up to 100 percent of women and 70 percent of men experience food cravings in any given year. Entirely separate from hunger pains, which can be satisfied with a variety of foods, food cravings make you yearn for a taste of something very specific, usually a food rich in sugar, salt or fat.
• And the Nation's Fast-Food Capital Is...: Are you hankering for a Whopper? How about a Gordita Supreme, or a bucket of Extra Crispy? According to numbers crunched by AggData for the Daily Beast, you'd have the best luck in Orlando, Fla., the U.S. city with the highest concentration of Burger King, Taco Bell and KFC restaurants per capita.
• Is It Time to Make Health Freedom a Constitutional Right?: A core principle of what we call Health Medicine is a patient's right to freedom of choice and their right to know. Whom are we kidding when, because of monopolistic medical practices, patients are not informed of all the treatments known from evidence to benefit their condition -- especially alternative-medicine and natural healing treatments? What's the point of extending insurance to all Americans if they're blocked from making choices outside today's allopathic "sick-care" paradigm?
• Local and organic food, farming: Here's the gold standard: More and more consumers and corporations are touting the benefits of "local" foods, often described as "sustainable," "healthy," or "natural." According to the trade publication, Sustainable Food News, "local" as a marketing claim, has grown by 15 percent from 2009 to 2010, and it's likely that number will increase in the coming year. (1) Even supermarket giant and junk food purveyor Wal-Mart, with total sales in 2009 of $405 billion, has jumped on the bandwagon. It has pledged to reduce food miles and increase its purchase of "local" fruits and vegetables to include 9 percent of its produce by 2015.
• Shoppers Wary of GM Foods Find They're Everywhere: You may not want to eat genetically engineered foods. Chances are, you are eating them anyway.






