Monthly Archives: May 2015

Eating more fresh vegetables is one of the simplest choices you can make to improve your overall health. A vegetable-rich diet can help protect you from arthritis, heart disease, stroke, dementia, cancer, and can even help slow down your body’s aging process.

A recent study found that people who consume seven or more portions of vegetables and fruit a day have a 42 percent lower risk of dying from any cause, compared to those who eat less than one portion—and vegetables have the greatest impact…

More than 100 years ago, a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda discovered the secret that made dashi, a classic seaweed soup, so delicious. It was glutamic acid, which, in your body is often found as glutamate.

Ikeda called this new flavor “umami,” which means “delicious” in Japanese, but it wasn’t until 2002 that modern-day scientists confirmed umami to be a fifth taste, along with sweet, sour, bitter, and salty…

Mercury pollution is extremely persistent once in the air, water, and soil, and levels steadily increase over time as it accumulates. A number of industries contribute to mercury pollution, but dental offices are one of the primary culprits.

Dental amalgam, a tooth filling material that is 50 percent mercury—not silver—is the leading intentional use of mercury in the US, and dentist offices are the largest source of mercury in wastewater entering publicly owned treatment works…

Your body’s microbiome—colonies of various microbes that reside in your gut and elsewhere in and on your body—is as unique to you as your fingerprint.

It varies from person to person based on factors such as diet, lifestyle, health history, geographic location, and even ancestry. Your microbiome is in fact one of the most complex ecosystems on the planet…

A new study found that deaths from opioid overdoses have fallen sharply in the 23 US states where medical marijuana is now legal. Coincidence? Not likely.

For those with chronic pain, medical marijuana can be life changing, allowing a safer, natural form of treatment than the conventionally recommended pain-relieving drugs called opioids.

More than one in 10 Americans take an antidepressant, and that number jumps to one in four among women aged 50 to 64.1 They’re the most commonly prescribed class of medication other than antibiotics,2 but despite their overwhelming popularity there’s an important question that needs to be answered: do they work?

Overwhelming evidence shows that antidepressants do not work as advertised. In fact, at best, antidepressants are comparable to placebos…