Health News Roundup

• Eating Mistakes that Age You: Yahoo Shine notes that eating the wrong foods -- or not eating the right foods -- can result in symptoms that most people tend to assume are due to aging. Here are four tips they've assembled to steer you in the right direction.

•  New Research Shows Factory Farms are NOT the Way to Feed the World: One recently published scientific paper urges a fundamental rethinking of the U.S. agricultural-research system, which it calls "narrowly focused on productivity and efficiency" at the expense of public health and ecological resilience. It also calls for a revamping of the Farm Bill, which it argues uses subsidies to "mask market, social, and environmental factors associated with conventional production systems."

• This Should be Banned: Found in 80% of Supermarket Foods: Monsanto may soon be allowed to conduct its own environmental studies. Currently, the USDA is responsible for assessing environmental impacts of new GMO crops, but the agency plans to at least temporarily hand over environmental impact reporting responsibilities to the biotech companies behind GMO crops.

• Are BPA alternatives potentially just as dangerous as Bisphenol-A?: The Atlantic recently posed the obvious but, as yet, unasked question: What is in the new BPA-free plastics that are now flooding the market, and how do we know they are safe?

• Fructose: what is it, and why is it in everything?: We all know fructose is some type of sweetener, we see it listed on so many food label s: ketchup, soft-drinks, energy drinks, cereals, cookies, breads, crackers, ice creams, canned soups, and more. And most of us think fructose has something to do with fruits. So in some way it's okay; it's just some sweetener thing derived from natural fruit sugar.

But it's not. Well it's half true. Fructose is one of the main sugars from fruits, the others being sucrose and glucose, so that's true. But the fructose found in processed foods is an entirely different story.

• NEW Research Explains 61% of Multiple Sclerosis Cases: New research shows that low levels of sunlight, coupled with glandular fever, could increase your risk of developing multiple sclerosis (MS). This could be one reason that MS tends to be more common away from the equator.

• Is it Time to Boycott This 'Anti' Cancer Charity?: The 130-page document linked below explains in detail why the American Cancer Society may be far more interested in accumulating cash than curing any disease. The ACS has close ties to the mammography industry, the cancer drug industry, and the pesticide industry.

• The false claims of GMOs: For years, biotechnology companies have been making lofty, unsubstantiated claims that genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) are the cure for world hunger, and that without them, people will starve to death. But according to many agricultural scientists and researchers, such claims have absolutely no basis in reality, and are nothing more than deceitful marketing. One researcher from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) recently compared the nonsensical industry rhetoric in favor of GMOs to giving cigarettes away free to children -- in other words, claims that GMOs are the answer to world hunger are nothing but a ploy to hook farmers and consumers into taking the deadly bait.

• Home births up 20 percent as more Americans prefer natural child birth: The number of pregnant women who choose to have their babies at home instead of at a hospital has risen by 20 percent over the past four years, according to new statistics released by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Though home births had been on the decline between 1990 and 2004, the period between 2004 and 2008, which represent the newest figures available, saw a sharp increase in home births.