Dow Jones Factiva

Pattern across five countries and 36,000 participants shows people withlargely plant-based diet have reduced chances of developing condition

Adopting a diet that is heavy on plants, nuts and fish could help ward off depression according to a major review on how the food you eat can affect your mental health.

Compared withstereotypical western diets – heavy on meat, processed foods, saturated fat and sugar –people who more closely followthe classic Mediterranean diet were around 33 per cent less likely to develop depression.

Mental health is a growing priority for the NHS and other health systems and the researchers argue that “dietary counselling” by doctors could help improve wellbeing and reduce costs from treatment and lost productivity.

Read more

There is ‘no evidence probiotic drinks benefit healthy adults’

For better gut bacteria, eat more oily fish

Gut bacteria plays a role in long-term weight gain

The researchers, led by University College London, revieweddietary habits of 36,000 peoplein France, Australia, Spain, the US and UK and found similar patterns around the world.

“There is a robust association between both higher adherence to a Mediterranean diet and lower adherence to a pro-inflammatory diet and a lower risk of depression,” they write in the journal

Molecular Psychiatry.

Inflammation is part of the body’s immune response and can increase withemotionalstateslike stress, as well as diet – with fatty, sugary foods and excessive alcohol being key culprits.

Fruit and vegetables, legumes and nutsall tend to be higher infibre, vitamins, minerals and anti-oxidant dense polyphenols which can reduce inflammation.

“A pro-inflammatory diet can induce systemic [body-wide] inflammation, and this can directly increase the risk for depression,” said Dr Camille Lassale from UCL.

“There is also emerging evidence that shows that the relationship between the gut and brain plays a key role in mental health and that this axis is modulated by gastrointestinal bacteria, which can be modified by our diet.”

However these claims havebeen questioned by other academics who say that robust evidence does not exist yet as large trials where thousands of people are randomly assigned to different diet types are so difficult to conduct.

Read more

What the microbes in your gut can tell you about your general health

Dr Tasnime Akbaraly, from Inserm, France, who co-authored thestudy, said:“There are now strong arguments in favour of regarding diet as mainstream in psychiatric medicine.

“Our study findings support routine dietary counselling as part of a doctor’s office visit, especially with mental health practitioners.

“This is of importance at a patient’s level, but also at public health level, especially in a context where poor diet is now recognised to be the leading cause of early death across middle and high-income countries, and at the same time mental disorders as the leading cause of disability.”

Professor Naveed Sattar, from the University of Glasgow, was not involved with the study but said eating healthier would likely bring manybenefits, butthe mental health claims needed further investigation.

“The only way to prove whether the links are genuine is to conduct large randomised trials in people at risk of depression – such trials would take considerable effort but seem worthwhile to conduct.So far only small trials have been conducted.”

Weed killer might be hurting honey bee populations around the world, according to a new study.

Glyphosate is leaving honey bees more susceptible to infection and death, University of Texas at Austin researchers say in a study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Glyphosate, a herbicide, is the controversial active ingredient in popular weed killers such as Roundup.

Bees that came in contact with the herbicide glyphosate in the study had lower levels of healthy gut bacteria that helps digest food and ward off sickness and were more likely to die from pathogens. About half of the healthy bees survived the introduced pathogen Serratia marcescens. Only a tenth of bees affected by glyphosate survived.

“We need better guidelines for glyphosate use, especially regarding bee exposure, because right now the guidelines assume bees are not harmed by the herbicide,” Erick Motta, a graduate student who led the research, said in a statement. “Our study shows that’s not true. ”

More: Honeybees are in trouble. Here's how you can help

Motto said weed killer isn't solely responsible for a declining bee populations, but is a contributing factor enough that "people should worry about," especially because glyphosate is widely used.

Human health effects of glyphosate have been widely debated. The World Health Organization has determined that glyphosate is "probably carcinogenic to humans," but Monsanto (the company behind weed killer Roundup) says it's not a probable carcinogen.

More: Oatmeal, breakfast foods contain unsafe amounts of cancer-linked weed killer, report says

In August, Monsanto was ordered to pay $289 million to a school groundskeeper who got terminal cancer after using Roundup. That's one of hundreds of lawsuits claiming Roundup causes cancer.

Follow Ashley May on Twitter: @AshleyMayTweets

JIMMY KIMMEL (Jimmy Kimmel Live, ABC): We decided it would be fun to ask kids in both cities who was funnier, kids in New York or kids in L.A. And it wasn`t just an opinion poll. We made the kids prove it, too.

GIRL #1: What did the salad say to the refrigerator?

WOMAN: What?

GIRL #1: Close the door. I`m dressing.

BOY #1: What`s Beethoven`s favorite fruit?

WOMAN: I don`t know.

BOY #1: Ba-na-na-na.

BOY #2: Do you know the guy who invented knock, knock? He won the no-bell, get it, there`s no-bell on the door.

GIRL #2: Why did the cookie go to the doctor?

WOMAN: Why?

GIRL #2: Because he felt crummy.

GIRL #3: Why didn`t the five dollar bill go to the prom?

WOMAN: Why not?

GIRL #3: Because it was hanging out with the singles.

GIRL #4: What does the coat say to the jacket?

NORAH O`DONNELL: Oh, my gosh. So cute. Love all of those jokes. Ba-na-na- na-na.

JOHN DICKERSON: You got one, Gayle?

GAYLE KING: Well, no.

JOHN DICKERSON: No?

GAYLE KING: No.

NORAH O`DONNELL: And I--

GAYLE KING: I`m not good at knock, knock jokes.

NORAH O`DONNELL: I have one. I-- I have one.

GAYLE KING: They were good.

NORAH O`DONNELL: How do you make a Kleenex dance? Put a little boogie in it.

GAYLE KING: Ew. Norah.

NORAH O`DONNELL: It`s a kids` joke.

GAYLE KING: I know. It-- it is a kids` joke.

NORAH O`DONNELL: You know what Geoff--

GAYLE KING: Still ew.

NORAH O`DONNELL: --Geoff at home is saying the same thing, oh, God, Norah, not that joke.

GAYLE KING: Your husband and your children are very proud. But I get. I get it.

JOHN DICKERSON: Yeah. Gayle, two peanuts were walking down the street, one was assaulted.

GAYLE KING: I wish I had one now.

NORAH O`DONNELL: I know.

GAYLE KING: I don`t have one. Sorry.

NORAH O`DONNELL: After the break. Got to stay tuned. She`ll come back with one.

JOHN DICKERSON: That`s right.

GAYLE KING: Yes. Give me one, Norah, quick.

JOHN DICKERSON: Welcome back to Dad Joke Central--

GAYLE KING: Yes.

JOHN DICKERSON: --at CBS THIS MORNING. Right now it`s time to show you some of this morning`s headlines from around the globe.

Fortune released its list of the most powerful women in business this year. Number one is Marillyn Hewson, chairman and president, and CEO of Lockheed Martin, the country`s largest defense contractor. And number two is Mary Barra, chairman and CEO of General Motors. But progress for women appears to have stalled. Last year there were thirty-two female CEOs leading Fortune 500 companies. This year the number dropped to twenty-four.

GAYLE KING: I have one. Knock, knock.

NORAH O`DONNELL: Who`s there?

GAYLE KING: Orange. Orange.

JOHN DICKERSON: Orange, you glad I didn`t--

GAYLE KING: Yes.

JOHN DICKERSON: Sorry. Totally spoiled the party. Sorry, Gayle.

GAYLE KING: Thanks a lot, John. Moving on.

Britain`s Guardian reports new research shows that the world`s most used weed killer may be contributing to the global decline in honeybees-- honeybees. A study published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says the Monsan-- the Monsanto pesticide glyphosate damages beneficial gut bacteria in the bees. That makes them more prone to deadly infections. Monsanto says claims that the weed killer has a negative impact on honeybees are simply not true.

NORAH O`DONNELL: And the Times of London reports on a smashing moment for tennis star Andy Murray. Murray dropped a presentation plate yesterday causing it to shatter. He was being honored for his contribution to tennis in China. Murray shared the video on Instagram writing, "Woops." He`s competing in the Shenzhen tournament.

GAYLE KING: Yeah. His mom posted it, too. She went, "Thanks, son."

The sexual assault accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh started a national conversation about the reliability of past memories. In a recent New York Times op-ed, a Weill Cornell psychiatrist writes, quote, "Neuroscience research tells us that memories formed under the influence of intense emotion are indelible in the way that memories of a routine day are not." Kavanaugh has denied all allegations of sexual assault. Doctor Ted Huey is a professor of psychiatry and neurology at Columbia University. He joins us to explain how the memory works and the impact of trauma. Good morning to you, Doctor Huey.

DR. TED HUEY (Columbia University Psychiatry and Neurology Professor): Good morning. Thanks for having me.

GAYLE KING: We`re glad you`re here. Help us understand this. Because what does a research show when it comes to memory and trauma?

DR. TED HUEY: Well, I agree with the-- the doctor that you had just mentioned there. There`s a misconception that emotion and trauma is bad for memory, that you don`t remember things in those situations. When actually the way our brain tags what`s important to be remembered is emotion.

GAYLE KING: Mm-Hm.

DR. TED HUEY: And actually the hippocampus and amygdala, two areas involved in memory and emotion are very close to each together. And it`s your brain`s way of saying this is very important to remember it. And so, you know, as an example of that, you probably couldn`t tell me what you were doing the morning of September 8, 2001, but I`m sure you could tell me--

GAYLE KING: Yes.

DR. TED HUEY: --what you were doing the morning of September 11th, 2001, which was a very emotionally charged day for all of us.

GAYLE KING: Can-- can two people be at the same-- have the same incident but have different memories and both be telling the truth?

DR. TED HUEY: Very much so. So, you know, just as the example I gave you, a non-emotional or non-emotionally charged incident is less memorable usually. And so if two people come into a situation and for one it`s a very emotionally charged event, for the other person it`s not, often you`ll get a situation years later where the person for whom it was a charged event will say, well, I remember that day vividly or that event vividly. And the other person will say, I have no memory of that.

GAYLE KING: Mm-Hm.

JOHN DICKERSON: Doctor, can you tell us what`s happening in the brain during one of these emotionally charged moments? Literally, what`s happening?

DR. TED HUEY: So, yes. So your-- your amygdala, which is a-- structure is very important for-- for emotional processing, is telling your hippocampus, flag this. This is important. You know, so we can, hopefully, you know, ideally, evolutionarily, avoid this situation in the future. So it`s being flagged as a very important thing. Now at the same time, when you`re in a-- in a highly emotional state, you`re not sitting calmly, rationally saying, well, I`m going to remember this and I`m going to remember that. So what you end up happening is the situation which is often described by trauma survivors or people after very emotional events where they have vivid memories, but strange memories. So they`ll say--

GAYLE KING: Like what?

DR. TED HUEY: --I remember the-- the sweater my attacker was wearing, but I can`t remember his face or, you know, or I remember, you know, the smell but I don`t remember the make of the car. And that`s because when-- even though the memories are very vivid and your memory is actually turned up very high, you know, to remember events, you`re not kind of thinking calmly and rationally about what I want-- should remember and what I shouldn`t remember, so.

NORAH O`DONNELL: And how reliable is the memory after a traumatic event decades later?

DR. TED HUEY: Yeah. And that`s a-- that`s a question that`s, obviously, come up a lot. And, you know, I think one-- one principle about that is it`s hard to give a kind of blanket reliability.

NORAH O`DONNELL: Mm-Hm.

DR. TED HUEY: So what the research shows is that-- that it matters kind of what you`re talking about. So that, you know, more peripheral memories might be misremembered as the decades go on. But, usually, the core is remembered pretty well. So an example would be, if you`re mugged, you might kind of misremember whether it was on 61st Street or 62nd Street if I asked you twenty years later. You`re not going to forget that you were mugged.

GAYLE KING: Mm-Hm.

DR. TED HUEY: So, you know, so when you talk about an accuracy of an old memory, what are you talking about, you`re talking about the core event or you`re talking about the kind of more peripheral.

NORAH O`DONNELL: And you would remember it better especially if you told that story over and over again over the years.

DR. TED HUEY: That`s true. Although, you know, you have to be careful of that. Because memory, you know, people-- another misconception people have is that memory is like a videotape. It`s-- it`s-- really all memory, whether traumatic memory or non-traumatic memory, fragments are pieces we remember, and then we kind of turn it into a narrative afterwards. Sometimes that narrative can have inaccuracies that then become through repeated retelling kind of embedded. But-- but, you know, usually, the elements of it are the-- are the memories we use to structure that memory.

NORAH O`DONNELL: Really interesting. Thank you.

GAYLE KING: Yeah, very.

DR. TED HUEY: Thank you for having me.

NORAH O`DONNELL: Doctor Ted Huey-- no. Thank you. We appreciate that.

DR. TED HUEY: Yeah.

NORAH O`DONNELL: The new CBS drama, FBI, takes viewers inside the inner workings of the bureau. Star Missy Peregrym is in our Toyota Greenroom.

GAYLE KING: There she is. She looks like a star to me, Norah.

NORAH O`DONNELL: Totally. Love it.

But, first, let`s take a check of your local weather.

(LOCAL WEATHER BREAK)

(ANNOUNCEMENTS)

END

The London Goop is offering luxury products - from perfume that smells like "new life unfurling on the forest floor" to £220 pillows

She’s told us our vaginas need to be steamed, introduced us to “earthing” (walking barefoot on the ground, without having to actually walk barefoot on the ground) and tried to make us pay over the odds for the most basic of items... and yet this week Gwyneth Paltrow[https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/gwyneth-paltrow]has made her most offensive move yet.

The first international Goop pop-up shop just opened in London because, according to its chief content officer Elise Loehnen, “it’s the home of Goop”.

Dunno about you but that statement seems wrong in every possible way...

Yes, Goop started life a decade ago as an almost unpastiche-able mailout, written at Gwyneth’s kitchen table in the Belsize Park mansion she was pre-consciously uncouplingly sharing with Coldplay ex Chris Martin.

But today it’s a multi-million-dollar, multi-franchise business, flogging fashion, beauty, vitamins, jade eggs to put in unmentionable places and stuff you could probably get much, much cheaper pretty much anywhere else in the world, even if you flew there first-class.

The first Goop store opened in LA last September selling ayurvedic herbs, wellness supplements, clothing and make-up. Unashamedly promoting Gwyneth’s luxurious, lavish lifestyle, it was widely criticised for its elitism.

Among the most ridiculed items were a $200 bed sheet that can be plugged into a grounding port of an electrical outlet for “earthing”, a $15,000 vibrator, a psychic vampire repellent, a rose gold champagne tumbler for $2,590, a full moon bra burning cleansing ritual and a recipe for “sex bark” containing Ho Shou Wu and Moon Juice’s Sex Dust.

“Sex is something that Gwyneth has been really forward on,” gushes Elise, actually missing a trick by not selling a $3,590 rose gold bucket for people to puke into when reading that sentence.

The UK Goop store is in swanky Notting Hill, perfectly at home alongside expensive designer neighbours like Joseph and Matches, and will be open until January. Put together by London-based designer Fran Hickman, the shop combines elements of California-inspired design and is decorated throughout with plants. Radical.

Apparently, trading was good on the first day, with the Notting Hill set predictably flocking to snap up the rarefied artefacts.

But whether there are enough, er, believers in the area to sustain the store for another four months remains to be seen.

People from other places may conceivably travel to have a look at the store – maybe – but they’re probably unlikely to buy anything... unless they remortgaged before coming, of course.

But what is actually for sale, then?

Well, for starters, plenty of Gwyneth’s fashion favourites – like a G Label military coat for the bargain price of £1,235.

The homeware is just your basic, down to earth old normal stuff we all have in our houses – you know, like cushions made by Argentinean weavers using neutral organic wool, starting at £200. Yes, that’s £200 each. Tsk.

The grey enamelled earthenware is made by premium French label Staub and starts at £150. And, of course, all of Gwyneth’s cook books are there – The Clean Plate, It’s All Easy, It’s All Good, Notes From My Kitchen – alongside a Smile Makers “The Millionaire” vibrator and plenty of sex books.

Gwyneth has always said the name of the Goop game, right from the start, was to create a conversation – and the clickbait that came with it generated sales. So you could argue that the haters have helped to promote her brand, which the New York Times just ­estimated is worth $250million, or £190million. That’s actually even more annoying than Goop.

OK, scrap all the above. Goop is great! You should totally go there and buy everything! Will that do it?

Amber’s verdict: Well, Gwyneth says, “I love that this eternally chic coat is both practical and polished, so you can wear it with both jeans and cocktail dresses.” However, Wallis do a very fabulous version for £60[https://go.redirectingat.com?id=76202X1526515xs=1url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wallis.co.uk%2Fen%2Fwluk%2Fproduct%2Fblack-military-coat-7954635sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mirror.co.uk%2F3am%2Fstyle%2Fshopping%2Fgoop-fans-check-out-gwyneth-13308170]that would look great with my jeans – I’m not too worried about the cocktail dresses.

I have to say, this kettle is beautiful but so is an enamel one I found on notonthehighstreet.com for £37.95[https://go.redirectingat.com?id=76202X1526515xs=1url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.notonthehighstreet.com%2Fallthingsbrightonbeautiful%2Fproduct%2Fenamel-stove-kettlesref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mirror.co.uk%2F3am%2Fstyle%2Fshopping%2Fgoop-fans-check-out-gwyneth-13308170].

Made with quartz crystal to infuse water with positive energy.

According to Gwyneth, “this is the kind of piece you keep on hand for the warm-to-cool transition — it goes over a giant fluffy sweater just as easily as it does a T-shirt”. It’s fabulous but I would never pay £760 for it. I found a lovely khaki jacket in H&M for £29.99[https://www2.hm.com/en_gb/productpage.0653587001.html].

I love the smell of cinnamon so I was immediately drawn to this – but for £288 it’s like burning a stash of money. A stylish Japanese version by la-gent.com is £30[https://www.la-gent.com/products/7-am-incense].

Made by Argentinean weavers from neutral organic wool, this pillow looks very chic. But so do the wide selection of handwoven cushions and pillows on etsy.com[https://www.etsy.com/market/handwoven_pillows]starting at £39.

This Goop pot is packed with naturally fermented prebiotics and probiotics. I’m a big believer in probiotics and swear by Cytoplan Acidophilus Plus, which is packed with every biotic you need – and priced at £17.80[https://www.cytoplan.co.uk/acidophilus-plus].

I saw a set that looked very similar elsewhere for £12.

A super smooth vibrator in a classic bullet shape with four speed settings and two pulse settings.

But the last time I went to a hen do I am pretty sure the chief hen found something cheeky in Ann Summers for less than £20[https://go.redirectingat.com?id=76202X1526515xs=1url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.annsummers.com%2Fsex-toys%2Fshop-by-category%2Fvibrators%2Fsref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mirror.co.uk%2F3am%2Fstyle%2Fshopping%2Fgoop-fans-check-out-gwyneth-13308170].

Billed as “a perfume of cool air, pale sun, new life unfurling on the forest floor”. Not sure you can put a price on that so it may be a bargain!

A lightweight water bottle made from shatter-resistant glass that is perfect for Gwynnie’s wellness fans wanting to look like they went to the shop and live just like her. I still swear by my discreet Joseph “dot” hydration tracking bottle, £12 from Debenhams[https://go.redirectingat.com?id=76202X1526515xs=1url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.debenhams.com%2Fwebapp%2Fwcs%2Fstores%2Fservlet%2Fprod_10701_10001_331028722263BOTT_-1sref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.mirror.co.uk%2F3am%2Fstyle%2Fshopping%2Fgoop-fans-check-out-gwyneth-13308170]. Perfect for days with a raging hangover.

I just went on a beach vacation with my husband, that I half-planned and then almost forgot, after I forgot to plan anything fun, or anything at all, all summer. It was the kind of vacation you might still cancel as you manoeuvre through the door with six backpacks and a Whole Foods bag stuffed with towels, leaving behind errands, laundry, and unknown to you right then, a swimsuit and sunblock. It's only when you get there, driving long, empty arcs of country road from town - sunblock acquired - to beach, that the fields and sky and lake quietly absolve you from your regular life.

"You know ..." I said, my head out the window, hair like machine-spun cotton candy, and that was it, the conversational obsession, for the rest of the trip: What would it be like to move here?

What could we get if we traded our house in Toronto - where my neighbours' cute toddler yells through the backyard fence "I can't see you Kate! Kate, I can't see you!" - for a farmhouse, and more to the point, for land?

The rural fantasy is a gentler but more expensive version of having an affair, so you can play at being someone else; it's the strongest intoxicant, when you've finally decided on something, to consider giving it up. The self isn't static; other versions are always there, latent, and one of mine drives a pickup truck.

Everyone, I think, has a natural habitat, and despite growing up in the suburbs and living in a city ever since, I'm sure that mine is the country: my best memories and rightest feelings are reading uninterrupted for twelve hours at a cottage; anything to do with summer camp; spending weeks in cut-offs and decaying twin braids, the permanent weekend-ness of it all that led me to a no-job career and a generally delayed adulthood. Every stressy city person, suddenly relieved of something they didn't know they were carrying, exhales as they fall out of the rented SUV, highway-hot and reborn, but when I get somewhere with just trees and water, I feel like, yeah. This could be forever.

Living in a city invites delusions of grandeur, like the "Of course I'll live here one day" feeling I get when I find myself in many-mill mansions currently available to me only as venues for private parties sponsored by alcohol brands, even though living like that is not what I want, ever - too much house, and the attendant lifestyle is bad for marriage, families, the environment and the spirit - but experiencing someone else's entirely different circumstances is what cities are for.

Delusions of simplicity, on the other hand, inform the country fantasy. The pieces of city life that both encourage and soothe urban complications don't exist in the country, so it's easy to extrapolate a contained, pastoral heaven, but what you get by living there is easily matched by what you give up: it's so much cheaper, but that much harder to make enough money. Winter isn't shorter three hours north or northeast, and I'd probably have to shovel. Driving somewhere to buy groceries is a novelty, but nothing I actually want to do, especially with twice-weekly organics delivery and markets that sell the good salt and probiotics on my streetcar route.

Back home, aching for the better air I've been breathing, I get how city-spoiled I am (even in Toronto, which still doesn't have adequate breakfast delivery, street style or self-confidence).

I mean, I refused to move to the far-west end, where most of my friends live, because it was too far from my doctor, dentist, therapist; considering the future - where I'll become more aware of my proximity to good schools, hospitals and close friends, and not just my favourite movie theatre and luxury-hotel lobbies - the country fantasy-life's own complications and demands, beyond watching the sun setting over endless green-turning-gold, reveal themselves in full.

There's no practicality to the fantasy, except for the romance - which is practical, if you have an expansive idea of what life is for.

Kate Carraway is a Toronto-based writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @KateCarraway

Scientists find evidence that glyphosate, the active ingredient in many brands, could be killing honey bees

BEES could be dying as a result of exposure to some of Britain's most popular weedkillers, research suggests. Scientists in the US found evidence that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup and many other brands, may be contributing to the decline of honey bees. Glyphosate herbicides are the most widely used in UK agriculture, with 5.4million acres of farmland across Britain treated with the chemical annually.

The study, by the University of Texas, showed worker bees exposed to the glyphosate lose beneficial gut bacteria, which is likely to leave them vulnerable to infections.

Erick Motta, the lead researcher, said: "We need better guidelines for glyphosate use, especially regarding bee exposure, because right now the guidelines assume bees are not harmed by the herbicide. Our study shows that's not true."

In a test case in the US last month a jury found that Roundup would have contributed to former groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson's cancer and maker Monsanto was ordered to pay £226million in damages. The company has vowed to appeal and maintains that its glyphosate products are safe, as do the other manufacturers of the chemical.

In the new study scientists exposed honey bees to glyphosate at levels known to occur in crop fields, gardens and roadsides.

After three days, the exposed bees were found to have significantly reduced levels of healthy gut bacteria compared to non-exposed insects.

The most affected benign bug, Snodgrassella alvi, is critical to bee well-being, helping the insects process food and keep out dangerous infectious agents. Bees with impaired gut "microbiomes" were also far more likely to die when later exposed to a harmful invasive bacterium. Nine out 10 bees died compared to five out of 10 of the insects that were not exposed to glyphosate.

The scientists urged farmers and homeowners to avoid spraying glyphosate herbicides on flowering plants likely to attract bees.

Prof Dave Goulson, from the University of Sussex, said: "Those of us that study bees have long ago come to the conclusion that colony health is adversely affected by a number of interacting stressors, including exposure to cocktails of insecticides and fungicides, impacts of pathogens, and effects of poor nutrition. It now seems that we have to add glyphosate to the list of problems that they face."

But a spokesman for Bayer, Monsanto's parent company, said: "Claims that glyphosate has a negative impact on honey bees are simply not true.

"More than 40 years of robust, independent scientific evidence shows that it poses no unreasonable risk for humans, animals, and the environment generally. Regulatory authorities carefully consider these issues when they approve new pesticides for use."

The research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As Gwyneth Paltrow brings her wacky brand to the UK, Lucy Dunn gets a first peek

You can call Gwyneth Paltrow many things. Wacky. Privileged. On her own planet… But hands-on? Maybe hands-on in an A-lister kind of way - occasionally floating into the office and posing for a selfie (#lovemyjob #Goop and kissy emoji face to 4.5m fans) before vanishing in a waft of Aveda Chakra mist - but hands-on in that attention-to-detail way that every boss at the top of their game seems to have, surely not? "Oh man, is she!" Elise Loehnen, Paltrow's right-hand woman and her lifestyle brand Goop's chief content officer tells me, as she prepares to launch its first pop-up store in London. "It's the same, if not more, than when I first met her. She's on it - she approves every single item of the buy, every story… We'll be in the office and she's like 'guys, drove past that restaurant on the corner and I think they're going out of business so let's make sure we update the site'. I literally don't know how she does it."

It's 10 years to the day since Paltrow started Goop, originally a newsletter sent to a handful of friends from her kitchen in Belsize Park, where she was living with her then husband Chris Martin. Since then, it has exploded into a multi-million-dollar, multifranchise business. Along with the mothership Goop.com, there is fashion, beauty, vitamins and pop-up boutiques… Is there anything still left to be Goop-ed? Well, yes, Notting Hill, which today gets a shop of its own - open until the end of January.

"It's our first international pop-up store," Loehnen explains. "It needed to be London, obviously, not only because of the anniversary, but also it's the home of Goop. It had its first five years here."

Loehnen, 38, a magazine journalist, first met Paltrow five years ago when she was ghostwriting a book for trainer-to-the-stars Tracy Anderson. At the time, Anderson was also working on a fitness studio with Paltrow, and Loehnen found herself liaising with her. One thing led to another and when Paltrow moved back to LA, they met up and started talking about scaling the newsletter into a website. "I really like her curiosity. She's an incredible student. She never approaches any problem thinking she has the answer, and she does everything differently."

Did Loehnen always know that Goop would become so successful? "Yes. I saw that she had these 700,000 readers, who were incredibly engaged. They like her, they don't come because they think 'ooh, I want to be Gwyneth!', they just think she has really incredible taste. It's very clear she's trying everything that she talks about - she goes to those restaurants, tests the recipes… They think: 'If it's good enough for her, I know it's really good'."

According to Paltrow, the company's name is "a nickname, like my name is GP, so that is really where it came from. And I wanted it to be a word that means nothing and could mean anything."

At the same time "wellness" was becoming mainstream and, with it, a raft of New-Age healers and herbalists selling headline-grabbing products like "sex bark" and "moon juice". One of the most infamous: $55 jade and rose quartz eggs sold through the site, which Goop claimed when inserted vaginally, "can balance hormones and regulate menstrual cycles, among other things".

Goop was more than ready to embrace the weird and the wacky. Suddenly, "creating conversation" was the name of the game - clickbait that saw the tills ringing. "I can monetise those eyeballs," Paltrow is reported to have told an audience of Harvard students. "It's a cultural firestorm when it's about a woman's vagina."

For years, apart from some fingerpointing and eye-rolling at the expense of some of the items (rose gold champagne tumbler for $2,590 anyone?), it seemed that Goop could do no wrong. Then, in March this year, a woman died from an allergic reaction to Goop-endorsed "bee sting" therapy. Shortly after came news that a partnership with Condé Nast to publish their magazine had fallen apart over "alleged disagreements about fact checking and endorsing Goop products".

"Just rumours," says Loehnen. "It was always the idea to do a two-issue trial."

Then a growing army of doctors criticised Goop for giving a platform to New-Age practitioners profiting from health claims that weren't sciencebacked. The jade eggs, in particular, Dr Jen Gunter, respected gynaecologist and one of Paltrow's fiercest critics raged, were not only "garbage", but they could lead to toxic shock syndrome.

Early this month, Goop settled a Californian lawsuit for £112,000, in part over the jade eggs editorial. While Goop maintained that the settlement did not indicate any liability but, rather, an "honest disagreement", a spokesman did add: "The law, though, sometimes views statements like this as advertising claims, which are subject to various legal requirements." Loehnen acknowledges that this case has been an "interesting learning" as an editorial team - "we didn't realise that someone's opinion needs to be science-backed when there's a product involved". They are now, she says, a lot more fastidious about which products they endorse: "We've created a whole portal and system, just to dot every 'i' and cross every 't'."

They also put signs on stories - "ancient modality", "speculative but promising" - to indicate where they are not endorsing things they have published. "We wanted to orient people, because although we do talk about things that are incredibly conventional and practised by every single doctor, we also talk about things that are maybe not even in clinical trials, or are completely inexplicable but have done amazing things for people…" So, will we see a more grown-up Goop, I wonder? What about the crazy, frivolous things on the site - the $3,500 gold-plated sex toys, the $27 "psychic vampire" repellents? "Oh, we'll carry on with them," she laughs. She describes the gift guide they do every year as "intentionally ridiculous".

"Our readers like it. I've seen some sneak peeks of the one coming out in November. There'll definitely be some eyebrow-raising, hilarious things. And we also do a sex issue, which is always boundary-pushing. Sex is something that Gwyneth has been really forward on."

So if Goop is to continue pushing boundaries, albeit more cautiously, are there any really bonkers things that it wouldn't touch? "Oh yes, for sure. There are certain things that are like 'the world is not ready for this'. We talked briefly of one - it's called Helminth Protocol - anyway, it's essentially a pill of parasites that you take. It's within the faecal transplant family. And it's not actually 'fringe', it's being aggressively studied… "The idea is that people decimate their microbiome and need to repopulate their microbiome with helpful microbiome, and now they're thinking we have helpful parasites that we've eradicated… It's really interesting… but it's disgusting! I'm sure we'll explore it, but it's definitely cringey for many people. I don't know if the world is ready to eat parasites, but we'll see…!" Goop store opens at noon today at 188 Westbourne Grove, London, W11. 10am-6pm Mon- Sat, noon-6pm Sun; goop.com

'Sex is something that Gwyneth has been really forward on'

Dr Gill Hart claims symptoms can take 72 hours to appear, making it very difficult to pinpoint the offending food

Children branded 'fussy eaters' may actually have a genuine food intolerance, according to a top scientist.

Research shows one in four toddlers in the UK refuse food every day but biochemist Dr Gill Hart claims parents should not automatically assume youngsters are being ‘picky’.

Dr Hart, scientific director at Yorkshire food intolerance testing firm YorkTest, believes a young child refusing to eat certain foods may be their way of communicating an underlying intolerance which they can’t express in words.

She sad: “It’s important parents realise that a fussy eater can sometimes have underlying food intolerances[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/disabled-ryanair-passenger-forced-eat-13218591].

"A child can lose their appetite because they may not be able to articulate to their parents that they are getting tummy pains.

Teenage girl is allergic to her own TEARS because of one-in-230-million people condition[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/teenage-girl-allergic-tears-because-13274513]

And if a child does complain of having a sore tummy, it’s very difficult for the parent to recognise that this may be caused by the food they are eating.

“Also, quite often a child might call their symptoms tummy pains, when they are in fact suffering bloating or bowel problems.”

Research suggests some of the most common food intolerances are reactions to dairy products, chocolate, eggs, food additives, strawberries, citrus fruits and tomatoes.

Symptoms include tummy pain, bloating, wind, diarrhoea, skin rashes and even itching.

Food intolerances are different to allergies, which affect the body’s immune system and often cause almost instant reactions.

In contrast, intolerances can take 72 hours to appear, making it very difficult to pinpoint the offending food.

Dr Hart warns that just because a child doesn’t experience a gut reaction to a food doesn’t mean they are not having a reaction to it. The effects of a food intolerance can be wide-ranging.

Girl, 15, screamed 'daddy, help me, I can't breathe' after fatal allergic reaction to Pret sandwich on BA flight[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/girl-15-screamed-daddy-help-13299405]

She says it’s all down to the food-specific IgG antibody, which YorkTest measures to determine reactions to possible problem foods, revealing: “If you have got any sort of imbalance, the reactions you get with an IgG reaction can cause inflammation and the inflammation could then cause a range of problems in different parts of the body.

“It’s not necessarily related to the gut. It depends on that person’s makeup.

“And when the trigger food is removed from a child’s diet, the ‘fussy’ child could then develop a healthy appetite because he or she is not frightened about eating foods that result in tummy ache.

“In a sense, you can ‘grow out of’ a food intolerance. Once the food has been identified as a problem, the first step is to remove the food that’s causing the inflammation, because it could be presenting a range of different symptoms.

Top Stories from Mirror Online

“And our nutritional therapists can work with people to help heal their guts, frequently using probiotics that can reinoculate the gut with lots of good bacteria.

“They can also offer things like digestive enzymes which can really help you break down your food properly.

“And then, once you have removed the foods that are triggering the reaction and you look after your gut as well, you may start to tolerate the foods which have previously caused problems.

“For me, it’s all about choice. With the right information, people have the knowledge of what works for them and what doesn’t.

“It is then a balance between the reaction and the impact it has on you.”

Figures released by Allergy UK in 2009 estimated as many as 45 per cent of Brits could be affected by food intolerance. ow’s milk is one of the most common childhood food intolerances.

Almost half of Britain's exhausted mums take time out on 'mumshine breaks' to escape kids[https://www.mirror.co.uk/travel/news/almost-half-britains-exhausted-mums-13202774]

Sarah Hughes, Nutritional Therapist at YorkTest laboratories, added: “Parents can become very concerned when a child shows up an intolerance to something, like cow’s milk, because this can be such a staple in their diet..

"But there are many alternatives out there - oat milk, almond milk, coconut milk, hemp milk, hazelnut milk and rice milk. I don’t recommend soya milk to children as it tends to be a more processed milk. Be careful of the sugar content in all the non-dairy milks which can be deceptively high and go for the unsweetened versions.

“If parents are concerned about the child not getting their full quantity of calcium and magnesium when they cut out dairy foods, green leafy vegetables contain high quantities of these minerals.

"Nuts and seeds contain good quantities of calcium especially almonds and sesame seeds, and don’t forget tahini paste which is made of sesame seeds and is an ingredient in humus. Other good sources of calcium are canned fish, such as salmon and sardines, along with dried apricots and figs.

“In this country, we can get very hung up on calcium only being found in milk products but many countries don’t eat dairy and their bone density is higher than ours.

"The main difference with these countries seems to be they eat many more greens. For example, the older generation in Japan eat virtually no dairy and have one of the highest bone density records in the world.

“They do, however, eat large amounts of green leafy vegetables - one study recorded a Japanese person eats on average 17 portions of vegetables per day.

“I therefore suggest you ensure your child is eating at least two portions of green leafy vegetables daily such as spinach, rocket, cabbage, spring greens, watercress, sprouts, bok choi and kale as well as the other calcium rich foods.“

Commonly used household disinfectants could increase the risk ofyoung children becoming overweight by altering the makeup of their gut bacteria during the first few months of life, a study suggests.

The study, published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, analyzed the gut flora of 757 infants at age three to four months and their body mass index, or BMI, at one and three years old, looking at exposure to disinfectants, detergents and eco-friendly products used in the home.

"We found that infants living in households with disinfectants being used at least weekly were twice as likely to have higher levels of the gut microbes Lachnospiraceae at age three to four months," said principal investigator Anita Kozyrskyj, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Alberta.

Lachnospiraceae is one of many non-pathogenic bacteria that naturally inhabit the human gut.

"When they were three years old, their body mass index was higher than children not exposed to heavy home use of disinfectants as an infant," she added.

Researchers from across Canada looked at data on microbes in infant fecal matter among children enrolled in the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development (CHILD) birth cohort. They used World Health Organization growth charts for BMI scores.

Associations with altered gut flora in babies three to four months old were strongest for frequent use of household disinfectants such as multi-surface cleaners, which showed higher levels of Lachnospiraceae.

Kozyrskyj said researchers also found there was a greater increase in levels of those bacteria in children whose parents reported more frequent cleaning with disinfectants.

"As the microbiome develops over the first year of life, these microbes increase in their abundance. So it was a matter of dose," she said in an interview, noting that studies of piglets have found similar changes in the animals' gut microbiome when they were exposed to aerosol disinfectants in their enclosures.

However, the same association was not found with detergents or eco-friendly cleaners, the CHILD study found. Babies living in households that used eco-friendly cleaners had different microbiota and were less likely to be overweight as toddlers.

"Those infants growing up in households with heavy use of eco-cleaners had much lower levels of the gut microbes Enterobacteriaceae (a family of bacteria that includes E. coli). However, we found no evidence that these gut microbiome changes caused the reduced obesity risk," Kozyrskyj said.

One reason could be that the use of eco-friendly products may be linked to healthier maternal lifestyles and eating habits, contributing to the healthier gut microbiomes and weight of infants.

"Antibacterial cleaning products have the capacity to change the environmental microbiome and alter risk for child overweight," write the authors. "Our study provides novel information regarding the impact of these products on infant gut microbial composition and outcomes of overweight in the same population." There are many findings that point to a possible causative role for disinfectants in altering gut flora and subsequently leading to a higher childhood BMI, said Kozyrskyj, noting that in studies of mice, Lachnospiraceae has been shown to cause insulin resistance and increased fat storage.

"I would be comfortable in saying the high use of disinfectants had a contributory role ... My advice would be to not overuse them," she said.

"Some people might say maybe go for an alternative, go for the ecoproduct instead of the disinfectants as a cleaning agent." In a related CMAJ commentary, epidemiologists Dr. Noel Mueller and Moira Differding of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health write: "There is biologic plausibility to the finding that early-life exposure to disinfectants may increase risk of childhood obesity through the alterations in bacteria within the Lachnospiraceae family." They call for further studies "to explore the intriguing possibility that use of household disinfectants might contribute to the complex causes of obesity through microbially mediated mechanisms." Kozyrskyj said there is a need for further research that classifies cleaning products by their ingredients, with an analysis of their potential individual effects.

Glyphosate – the most used pesticide ever – damages the good bacteria in honeybee guts, making them more prone to deadly infections

The world’s most used weedkiller damages the beneficial bacteria in the guts of honeybees and makes them more prone to deadly infections, new research has found.

Previous studies have shown that pesticides such as neonicotinoids[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/29/pesticides-damage-survival-of-bee-colonies-landmark-study-shows] cause harm to bees, whose pollination is vital to about three-quarters of all food crops. Glyphosate, manufactured by Monsanto, targets an enzyme only found in plants and bacteria.

However, the new study shows that glyphosate damages the microbiota that honeybees need to grow and to fight off pathogens. The findings show glyphosate, the most used agricultural chemical ever[https://www.newsweek.com/glyphosate-now-most-used-agricultural-chemical-ever-422419], may be contributing to the global decline in bees, along with the loss of habitat.

“We demonstrated that the abundances of dominant gut microbiota species are decreased in bees exposed to glyphosate at concentrations documented in the environment,” said Erick Motta and colleagues from University of Texas at Austin in their new paper. They found that young worker bees exposed to glyphosate exposure died more often when later exposed to a common bacterium.

Other research, from China and published in July, showed that honeybee larvae grew more slowly and died more often[https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.jafc.8b02212] when exposed to glyphosate. An earlier study, in 2015[http://jeb.biologists.org/content/218/17/2799], showed the exposure of adult bees to the herbicide at levels found in fields “impairs the cognitive capacities needed for a successful return to the hive”.

“The biggest impact of glyphosate on bees is the destruction of the wildflowers on which they depend,” said Matt Sharlow, at conservation group Buglife. “Evidence to date suggests direct toxicity to bees is fairly low, however the new study clearly demonstrates that pesticide use can have significant unintended consequences.”

Prof Dave Goulson, at the University of Sussex, said: “It now seems that we have to add glyphosate to the list of problems that bees face. This study is also further evidence that the landscape-scale application of large quantities of pesticides has negative consequences that are often hard to predict.”

However, Oliver Jones, a chemist at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, said: “To my mind the doses of glyphosate used were rather high. The paper shows only that glyphosate can potentially interfere with the bacteria in the bee gut, not that it actually does so in the environment.”

A spokesman for Monsanto said: “Claims that glyphosate has a negative impact on honey bees are simply not true. No large-scale study has found any link between glyphosate and the decline of the honeybee population. More than 40 years of robust, independent scientific evidence shows that it poses no unreasonable risk for humans, animal, and the environment generally.”

The new research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences[http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1803880115], found that some of the key beneficial bacteria in bees’ guts have the enzyme that is targeted by glyphosate. It also found that the ability of newly emerged worker bees to develop a normal gut biome was hampered by glyphosate exposure.

Harm to gut bacteria by glyphosate exposure has also been shown in a pilot study in rats[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/16/glyphosate-shown-to-disrupt-microbiome-at-safe-levels-study-claims]. “Gut bacteria play a vital role in maintaining good health, in organisms as diverse as bees and humans,” said Goulson. “The finding that these bacteria are sensitive to the most widely used pesticide in the world is thus concerning.”

People are known to widely consume glyphosate residues[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2658306] in food - such as children’s breakfast cereal[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/16/weedkiller-cereal-monsanto-roundup-childrens-food] - but the health impact is controversial. In August a US court ordered Monsanto to pay $289m in damages[https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-trial-cancer-dewayne-johnson-ruling] after a jury ruled that the weedkiller caused a terminally ill man’s cancer. The company filed papers to dismiss the case[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-bayer-glyphosate-lawsuits/bayers-monsanto-asks-us-court-to-toss-289-million-glyphosate-verdict-idUSKCN1LZ0H7] on 19 September.

The weedkiller, sold as Roundup, won a shortened five-year lease in the EU in 2017. In 2015[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/mar/21/roundup-cancer-who-glyphosate-], the World Health Organisation’s cancer agency, the IARC, declared glyphosate “probably carcinogenic to humans,” although several international agencies[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/may/16/glyphosate-unlikely-to-pose-risk-to-humans-unwho-study-says] subsequently came to opposite conclusions. Monsanto insists glyphosate is safe.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin found that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, causes bees to lose good bacteria from their guts

It’s the most widely used weed killer in the world, but it seems that Roundup may be killing more than pesky weeds.

A new study has revealed that the popular weed killer may also be killing bees[https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/bees].

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin[https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/university-of-texas-at-austin]found that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, causes bees to lose good bacteria from their guts.

In turn, this makes them more vulnerable to infection and death.

Bumblebees show signs of pesticide 'addiction' that scientists compare to nicotine addiction[https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/bumblebees-show-signs-pesticide-addiction-13152210]

Erick Motta, who led the study, said: “We need better guidelines for glyphosate use, especially regarding bee exposure, because right now the guidelines assume bees are not harmed by the herbicide. Our study shows that's not true."

In the study, the researchers exposed honey bees to glyphosate at levels known to occur in gardens and fields.

The team painted the bees’ backs with coloured dots, so they could be tracked and recaptured.

After three days, the researchers found that the glyphosate had significantly reduced the bees’ healthy gut microbiota.

Hundreds of animal species face 'imminent' EXTINCTION if we don't take urgent action, scientists warn[https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/hundreds-animal-species-face-imminent-12977465]

Why do wasps attack us?

Professor Nancy Moran, co-author of the study, said: “Studies in humans, bees and other animals have shown that the gut microbiome is a stable community that resists infection by opportunistic invaders.

“So if you disrupt the normal, stable community, you are more susceptible to this invasion of pathogens.”

The researchers hope their findings will encourage people to stop using Roundup.

Mr Motta said: “It's not the only thing causing all these bee deaths, but it is definitely something people should worry about because glyphosate is used everywhere.”

ALTHOUGH supermodel Elle Macpherson has always been "The Body," her body hasn't always felt super.

While living in London five years ago, "I didn't feel very good and I didn't look very good," Macpherson, 54, tells The Post. "I was sleeping only about four hours a night, wasn't drinking a lot of water, was drinking a lot of coffee ... I didn't really eat fruit; I was taking synthetic vitamins ... I didn't even know what a smoothie was!" She finally sought help from nutrition expert Simone Laubscher, Ph.D., who recommended a plant-based diet and daily doses of a green superfood powder dissolved in natural spring water.

Macpherson says she noticed such an improvement in her vitality that in 2014, she and Laubscher decided to bring the supplement to the masses.

Today, it's known as the Super Elixir, the crown jewel of ingestible beauty brand WelleCo, founded by Macpherson with pal Andrea Horwood-Bux, who also serves as CEO.

With online sales booming - Macpherson says the supplement has sold out four times since the company launched - WelleCo opened its first American brick-and-mortar store in Soho on Friday.

In addition to the brand's signature product, shoppers can find a range of pea-based protein powders, as well as beauty goodies like body scrubs and lip balms. Coming next month is a line of Super Booster powder supplements aimed at alleviating woes such as low libido and joint pain.

Still, Horwood-Bux believes the Super Elixir ($135 for 300 grams) will remain the brand's best seller thanks to its 45-ingredient powerhouse blend, formulated to alkalinize the body, soothe inflammation, support gut health and more.

"Our customers report losing weight, increased energy ... less bloating, just general well-being," Macpherson says of the product, which contains ingredients such as turmeric, barley grass and probiotics.

Of course, she herself might be the best billboard for its babe-boosting qualities. "My hair has changed, my skin and my nails ... I don't get colds anymore. I don't get the flu anymore. I never get sick, because my immune system is so supported." In addition to taking the Super Elixir every day, Macpherson consumes mostly "fresh plants, fruits, nuts and seeds." She's also hooked on sprouts. "I have a sprouts dealer that comes Tuesdays," she says. "[He] brings me fresh sprouts, from sunflower to broccoli to wheatgrass." While many customers report getting a healthy glow from WelleCo products, Macpherson says anti-aging isn't the brand's goal.

"It's about feeling good and looking good at whatever age you are. [We thought] there was a correlation between youth and beauty back in the '80s, but today it's about wellness and beauty," she says. "If you look after your body from a cellular level, with good, clean nutrition, it will show on the outside." WelleCo, 39 ½ Crosby Street; WelleCo.com

More green beauty emporiums

THE DETOX MARKET

Founded in LA in 2010, this airy, plant-filled shop and rooftop lounge houses products from more than 150 brands.

Don't miss: Organic French nail polishes by Kure Bazaar ($18)

76 E. Houston St.; TheDetoxMarket.com

ONE OCEAN BEAUTY

This fragrance-free sea-supporting brand just launched and has already donated $250,000 to nonprofit Oceana.

Don't miss: The serum ($98) made with marine ingredients from the Antarctic.

251 Elizabeth St.; OneOceanBeauty.com

CLEAN MARKET

Located next to a SoulCycle (natch!) this modern apothecary has a juice bar, grabandgo meals and an infrared sauna.

Don't miss: A 30-minute glutathione IV ($99) with a firming cryo facial ($55).

240 E. 54th St.; CleanMarket.com

It’s a little unnerving sitting in front of Dr Nigma Talib. Not because she’s the naturopathic doctor to Sienna Miller[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/luxury/travel/sienna-miller-interview-world-away-travel-favourites/] and Penélope Cruz. And not because, with her clear eyes, glowing skin and mane of glossy hair, she looks like a celebrity herself. But because, like some kind of holistic Sherlock Holmes, Dr Talib can read your face and discover your crimes. Dairy face, sugar face, gluten face and the dreaded wine face. If something in your diet isn’t agreeing with you, all will be revealed on your skin, according to Dr Talib, who is able to trace what she sees there back to what you’ve eaten.

Dr Talib first revealed this party trick – although identifying someone as having a wine face probably wouldn’t win friends at any party – in her 2015 book, Younger Skin Starts in the Gut.[https://books.telegraph.co.uk/Product/Nigma-Talib/Younger-Skin-Starts-in-the-Gut--4-Week-Program-to-Identif/18750357] This was before guts got really trendy. Since then, you can’t go anywhere without people talking about their digestion and comparing probiotics.

‘I’ve been doing this for 20 years, and it has been an uphill battle trying to get to GPs and talk to patients about why they should do this,’ she sighs. ‘Now, I don’t have to convince anyone – they have to convince me to let them on as a client. It’s shifted in a way I can’t believe.’

Today, we’re more on board with Dr Talib’s theories about ‘ digest-ageing’[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/beauty/skin/anti-ageing-report-turn-back-genetic-clock/] .

‘Internal wellness shows up on your face,’ she says over an an apple, oat and almond-milk smoothie in her west London clinic. ‘Poor diet can be responsible for lines, wrinkles and a dull complexion or redness.’ Her theory is that, by avoiding certain foods, you can improve your overall digestive health, and look noticeably better.

I love wine. I won’t deprive myself, because life is too short – but you can get into a habit, and then you’re too tired to get out of itSo how strict do you have to be, to reverse the signs of ageing? ‘You have to do it for at least two months. I think once people do it, they feel better, and they’re sold.’

And then lines will disappear? ‘First thing you’ll notice is the de-puff. I was at an event yesterday and met people I hadn’t seen for five years, and what I notice is that people start to puff up in the face – that’s ageing. So that will go first. And the fine lines and wrinkles, absolutely.’

Dr Talib doesn’t want people to inject themselves with Botox[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/beauty/skin/botox-high-street-superdrug-announces-today-will-offer-injectables/], but rather to work from within, by being kind to their digestive system and not overloading it. So, how ‘good’ is she?

The Big Smart Works x Stella Fashion Sale[https://cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk/76e6c7b9-dbec-4bb7-9f8d-3bc423782381.html]‘Eighty per cent of the time, I’m as good as it gets, but my last supper would be a lasagna, a pizza or Indian food,’ she says. ‘I love wine. I won’t deprive myself, because life is too short – but the problem can be that you get into a habit, and then you’re too tired to get out of it. I have to have good food in the kitchen, so that when I’m hungry, I reach for things that are healthy. I have no sugar, fizzy drinks, milk or cheese.’

Yeah, that kind of good. But she says just try this for eight weeks and you’ll see the benefits – certainly, in her mid-40s, she’s a walking advertisement for healthy living. And she purports that the benefits will show up in more areas than your skin.

More from Stella Magazine 19 sEPT 2018[https://cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk/d8725d6a-f349-49cd-8169-7ed2480d644a.html]‘If I have a patient who’s struggling in a relationship, or is depressed, as soon as they turn their health around, things start working out,’ she says. ‘Do you know how many clients I see who have an awful fiancé or job, and after six weeks of working with me, they say they ditched their job, found a new boyfriend… I’m not joking. Because it starts with your health. If you’re not healthy, you can’t think straight, your decision- making is not good. Get your health right and everything else comes together.’

Contact Dr Nigma Talib at healthydoc.com[https://www.healthydoc.com/contact_us.php]

How to read your skin

Gluten face

Puffy red cheeks, dark pigmentation patches or spots around the chin

Gluten is a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. While relatively few suffer from coeliac disease[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/five-things-should-never-say-somebody-coeliac-disease/] (an autoimmune condition in which gluten triggers the body to attack itself), sensitivity to it will increase the chances of inflammation within the body, including the face. It can also disrupt the immune system and reproductive hormones, resulting in spots or dark pigmentation on the chin.

TRY Cutting gluten out for three weeks, drinking more water and eating more fibre. The puffiness will soon disperse.

Dairy face

Swollen eyelids, bags and dark circles under eyes[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/beauty/face/smart-ager-guide-eye-products/], small white spots and bumps on the chin

Lactose in milk is a common food intolerance or sensitivity. The symptoms above could suggest that you are struggling to digest milk and dairy products – including cheese and yogurt. Dairy sensitivities tend to occur around the chin, which is connected in face-mapping to the reproductive organs.

TRY Taking a break from dairy for three weeks and see the impact on your face – but be sure to take a calcium supplement.

Sugar face

Forehead lines/wrinkles, saggy skin; gaunt and/or a grey look to the face

Excess glucose molecules attach themselves to collagen, making these normally elastic fibres rigid. Skin will sag and thin, and lines and wrinkles appear particularly on the forehead and under the eyes. Too much sugar impacts the balance of bacteria in the gut[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/nutrition/the-30-day-gut-makeover/], which can also trigger acne on the face, shoulders and chest.

TRY Cutting your sugar intake in half and gradually weaning yourself off. These symptoms will decrease rapidly.

Wine face

Lines or redness between the eyes, droopy eyelids, feathery lines across cheeks (dehydration), red cheeks and nose, deep nasolabial lines

Alcohol dehydrates the skin, which worsens the look of fine lines and wrinkles. It is high in sugar, which damages the protein collagen that keeps skin elastic. If your liver is struggling to process alcohol, you might have deep lines or redness between the brows.

TRY Taking three weeks off alcohol and then enjoying the odd glass of wine one day a week to see a difference in your skin.

Culture-rich live yoghurt can be put to good use even when it’s past its best

If you leave natural yoghurt at room temperature, it won’t go off. It will start to ferment and thicken into a happy colony of yeast and bacteria that can be used to make your own, thereby turning one pot of yoghurt into a self-perpetuating culture.

Buy live yoghurt without any additives or sugar if you want all of its nutritional benefits, including healthy strains of probiotics such as lactobacillus and bifidus, bacteria essential for our digestive system. Ignore the use-by date. Instead, smell or taste it to see if it’s souring and, if it is, don’t throw it away. Bake it into cakes, use as a sour dressing for cooked vegetables, or strain to make labneh, a creamy dip that’s delectable served with olive oil or rolled into balls and coated with spices such as sumac or za’atar.

To make your own yoghurt, bring one pint of unhomogenised whole milk to a boil, leave to cool to 45-50C, then stir in 50ml live yoghurt, pour into a flask and leave overnight to thicken. Eat while it’s fresh, setting aside 50ml to make your next batch.

Strained yoghurt (labneh) balls

Homemade labneh is a creamy and decadent treat that is very simple to make. Take it a step further with these balls rolled in exotic herbs and spices, for a fun starter or party snack. Makes about 15.

500g live yoghurt

Salt

Herbs and spices – nigella seeds, za’atar, sumac, rose petals, corn flowers, aleppo pepper, urfa chilli flakes

Olive oil, to store

Put a sieve over a bowl and line it with a cheesecloth or clean tea towel. Season some live yoghurt with a touch of salt, then pour into the sieve. Leave at room temperature overnight, or until the yoghurt has become set and very firm. Drink the whey, which will have separated into the bowl, or use to make my soda bread farls[https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/aug/25/dairy-milk-food-waste-not-tom-hunt]. You can serve the strained yoghurt just as it is, as a creamy dip or roll into balls and store in olive oil for a month or longer. The olive oil can be used for dressings after use. Coat the balls in different herbs and spices to serve.

Dogs should be able tomanage onvegetarian diets as long as the essential nutrients they would normally get from meat are present, but balancing this has proven harder than expected

Over the last 10years, it’s estimated there has been a 360 per cent rise in veganism in Britain –

around 542,000 people have “gone vegan”

. As a nation of animal lovers, with around 44 per cent of homes owning a pet – and somewhere in the region of

8.5 million dogs in the UK

– it’s only natural this phenomenon should start to spill over into the pet food world. This has led to a rise in the availability of both vegetarian and vegan dog foods. But before you make the decision for your pet to go meat free, it’s important to consider what effectthis could have.

Cats are obligate carnivores, which means they

need to eat meat to survive

, but dogs can in theory live on a plant-based diet – though that doesn’t necessarily mean they should.

The domestic dog is actually a subspecies of the grey wolf. And while they’re substantially different in many ways, wolves and dogs can still interbreed to produce viable and fertile offspring. This makes them good animals to study to get a sense of what works out in the wild.

Despite being highly successful hunters, the diet of grey wolves varies significantly both with environment and the time of year. Studies of wolves in Yellowstone Park, US, have found that during the summer their diets contain small rodents, birds and invertebrates as well as larger prey like elk and mule deer. Alongside this though, plant matter is actually very common in the diet, with 74 per cent of wolf droppings containing it –

mainly from grasses

.

Bulldog hailed the luckiest dog in Britain after it survived being hit by a car and rolled for 200 yards

A recent review

of the studies published about wolves has shown them eating both grasses and fruits. The difficulty with these studies though, is that they often do not assess how much of the diet is made up of plant matter. So the level towhich wolves – and by extension domestic dogs – are omnivores is still not fully known.

But of course, dogs aren’t exactly the same as wolves. It is estimated that the dog was domesticated around 14,000 years ago – although recent genetic evidence suggests it could have been anywhere

up to 100,000 years ago

. This length of time has allowed for many changes to take place. Over many generations, dogs have become increasingly associated with human civilisation and in turn exposed to human foodstuffs.

Read more

If you’re a compassionate meat-eater, you should oppose live exports

In 2013, researchers in Sweden identified that the dog genome contained increased amounts of the code for dogs to produce an enzyme called amylase which is

key in the digestion of starch

. This change means that dogs are five times better at digesting starch – found in grains, beans and potatoes – than wolves. And the adaption probably allowed the domestic dog to flourish on those human grains and cereals. The researchers also found that domestic dogs had a version of another enzyme important in starch digestion (maltose) that was more similar to the type found in herbivoressuch as cows,and omnivoressuch as rats,than to wolves.

The adaptations of dogs to a more plant-based diet through domestication haven’t just been at the enzyme level. All animals rely to some degree on the bacteria within their gut to help them digest food properly. Only recently, it was shown that the gut microbiome of dogs is quite different to that of wolves, with more evidence of bacteria that can break down carbohydrates and to some degree

produce amino acids normally sourced from meat

.

The very way in which we present food to our pet dogs is also quite different to the way wolves eat. And as a result of domestication, the change in diet, food quantity and quality is likely to have led to the smaller body size and reduction in teeth size.

Recent research

has shown that in North America, domesticated dogs in comparison to wolves have more tooth loss and fractures despite being fed softer food types – probably due to the lack of bonesand the inability to be able to scavenge.

Skull size and shape has profound effects on

chewing capabilities and characteristics

in dogs. My previous work has suggested a link between the

skull shape of dogs and their dental health

. And the increasing trend for dog breeds with particularly shortened muzzles suggests that we are further moving them away from a diet of gnawing on tough bones.

Read more

Pedigree dogs’ lives are full of pain – so why does Crufts glorify it?

There are very few studies published about the use of vegan diets in dogs. As omnivores, dogs should be able to adapt well and manage on well prepared, commercially available vegetarian diets, as long as the essential nutrients they would normally get from meat are present. One study has even shown the ability to maintain active sled dogs on a

carefully produced meat-free diet

. But be aware that not all pet foods are made equal.

A US study

found 25 per cent onthe market did not contain all the nutrients required.

Homemade vegetarian diets for dogs are even more risky

and a study of 86 dogs in Europe found over half deficient in protein, essential amino acids, calcium, zinc and vitamins D and B12. Vegan foods may be even more problematic for dogs.

There’s also the fact that bones, raw hide and meat-based chews can offer significant behavioural benefits to dogs. Chewing can be an immensely satisfying and relaxing experience for dogs. And in a world where many pets experience long periods of time alone, such opportunities can be invaluable.

Wanda McCormick is a senior lecturer in the faculty of science and technology atAnglia Ruskin University. This article originally appeared on The Coversation[https://theconversation.com/vegan-dogs-should-canines-go-meat-free-103404]

Is posting off your bodily fluids to a DIY health-testing company the future of healthcare or just too much information?

On a dark February morning, I wake grainy with sleep and head to the kitchen. Before making toast or coffee, I unscrew the cap from a tiny test tube and spit into it. Over and over, but it’s surprisingly difficult to fill up a whole vial. It takes 10 minutes before my frothy deposit reaches the marked minimum line.

My housemate sips her coffee. “Are you ill?” she asks.

“No,” I say, as I put the pot into a plastic envelope marked “hazard”. “But maybe I could be more well?”

I am healthy. I’m 30, I go to the gym two or three times a week, I eat plenty of vegetables, and I’m lucky to have never suffered from a serious illness. But I also have this nagging sense that I could be fitter, stronger, more resilient to colds. I could be less tired, less prone to mental fogginess. I could be more optimal.

After breakfast, I take my saliva sample to the postbox at the end of my road and send it to 23andMe[https://www.23andme.com/en-gb/] for analysis. It’s the first of many bodily fluids I’ll be putting in the post to the genetics-testing company over the next six months. In the past few years, dozens of startups have capitalised on our physical anxieties, offering tests that bypass the NHS. They provide pay-as-you-go medical testing normally reserved for the unwell, selling a promise that information equals control.

Fitbit made us comfortable with tracking our 10,000 steps. Now we’re ready for the next phase

Self-testing kits are marketed at me everywhere I go. In a train station I walk past a big pink Medichecks[https://www.medichecks.com] stall (“A better you. It’s in your blood”) offering on-the-spot blood tests for everything from cancer markers to thyroid function; on Instagram, Atlas Biomed[https://atlasbiomed.com] (“Two tests to discover yourself”) wants to sell me DNA tests and map my microbiome.

These buzzy new companies can broadly be grouped into three: blood tests to analyse health markers ( Forth[https://thriva.co/] ); DNA tests that assess the “fitness potential” in your genes ( FitnessGenes[https://fitnessgenes.com/], DNAFit[https://www.dnafit.com/about/] ); and microbiome analysis that looks at the individual makeup of your gut ( Viome[https://www.viome.com/uk], Carbiotix[https://carbiotix.com/personal-gut], Atlas Biomed). Each makes broadly similar claims: in exchange for anywhere between £59 and £300, along with a sample of blood, spit or faeces, they will divine the inner workings of your body and advise you on how to improve them. All appropriate the visual language of social media, using pastel hues or young, vital-looking models, or both. This is as much health-for-the-Instagram-generation as a vegan, sugar-free, avocado-chocolate cake. But should you want a slice?

***

Ten weeks after I send off my vial, my 23andMe results are in. The results, it turns out, are innocuous enough, other than the fact that I’m predisposed to age-related macular degeneration. I have to Google the term; it means I may go blind when I’m older. I call my mother. “Your great-grandmother went blind,” she says, before our conversation moves on. Maybe she’s right to be blase: there’s nothing I can actually do with this information at this point. Besides, in the list of possible genetic conditions (such as Alzheimer’s disease, for which 23andMe tells me I have no elevated risk), I feel as if I’ve got off lightly.

A few weeks later, though, the US Food & Drug Administration[http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/using-genetics-fight-cancer-pros-cons-direct-consumer-testing/] authorises 23andMe[http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/using-genetics-fight-cancer-pros-cons-direct-consumer-testing/] – an American company – as a provider of direct-to-consumer testing for BRCA1/BRCA2[https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/predictive-genetic-tests-cancer/] gene mutations, which have been linked to breast cancer. (Once you’ve sent off an initial saliva sample, and your DNA has been sequenced, 23andMe continue to add results to your online profile.) I receive an email from the company: would I like to know if I have the cancer-causing variants? Rationally, I know that a genetic test isn’t destiny. But I also know that the results could open a Pandora’s box, the consequences of which I’m not sure I’m willing to deal with right now. I log off without clicking through on the link.

Am I ready for all this biodata? Last year a study published in the American Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology[http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-48283-003] found that telling someone they’re genetically at risk of depression causes them to think of themselves as more depressed. Simply being told that you’re more (or less) at risk of a given condition can have a powerful distorting effect.

According to Avi Lasarow, the CEO and founder of DNAFit – another of the tests I’m about to try – burying my head in the sand puts me in the minority. “There’s been a huge shift in the world of personalisation and proactive health monitoring,” he tells me. “Fitbit made us all more comfortable with tracking our fitness. It marketed the 10,000 steps so well that, before long, we were all comparing our results. And now many of us are ready for the next phase.”

A week later, I go to my gym and am offered a genetic assessment. It’s an expensive, boutique gym popular with young professionals. Co-founder Dave Thomas tells me about his results, one morning after class: “According to my gene types, I’ll respond better if I work out in the afternoons or evenings, and if I eat more carbs. I gave it three months, put a few small tweaks in place, and it has made a noticeable difference.”

I speak to Steven Diffey, a mobile app project manager, who took a 23andMe test two years ago to find out his genetic fitness profile. “It was just curiosity, really,” the 35-year-old tells me. He’d taken up running at 27 and realised he had a natural propensity for it. “I thought I had a bit of potential, so I got a coach and committed to trying to get to the world triathlon championships.” He started a robust regime that included two workouts each day (swimming, cycling, weights, running) and kept a log of everything from his heart rate to how many watts of power he could push with a single downward stroke of the bike pedal. He saw the DNA test as “just another data point that could help with training”.

Diffey’s results changed his race-day mindset. Most world-class sprinters possess the variant of the ACTN3 genotype[https://www.23andme.com/en-gb/gen101/variation/speed/], which boosts the number of fast-twitch muscle fibres they have (used in powerful bursts of movement). He discovered that he has this variant – something he’d had a hunch about. “Quite often when I race, I still have the ability to sprint at the end. It gives me a little mental boost, though, knowing that my body is perfectly capable of a final burst of speed. I just need to push.”

Talking to Diffey, I get excited about my own DNAFit results, which arrive by email. I’d sent off a cheek swab about 10 days previously – certainly the easiest of the samples I take. I log into my account with a now-familiar twinge of excitement. “Welcome to your genetic journey,” it says. There is a dizzying number of results under the headings of fitness, nutrition and infographic summary. Within fitness there are six tabs, which cover factors such as “training intensity response” and “injury predisposition”. Each gene has a little paragraph of information. I read and reread, but eventually get too frustrated and give up. I don’t understand what “training intensity response” or “reduced toxification ability” means.

We often see people who don't feel as if there’s anything seriously wrong, but they could be feeling considerably better

It takes an hour-long consultation with DNAFit’s head of product, Andrew Steele, to properly interpret my results. It turns out I have very little sprinting ability, but that I’m “quite rare” in another way. In fact, less than 1% of the DNAFit database – which is tens of thousands – has an “endurance response” as high as I do. I’m practically an Ethiopian distance runner. “It just means that when it comes to reaching your training goal – whether that’s to become faster or strong, to run further, or just to lose weight – you’ll reach that goal quicker if you tailor your training towards endurance.” Instead of 30-second rounds of high-intensity interval training, for instance, he prescribes longer, two- to four-minute rounds, where the pace and intensity is slightly more moderate, but sustained over a longer period.

Apparently I’m also a “low responder” to carbohydrates and saturated fat. In terms of carbs, this means that they don’t cause my blood sugar to spike as significantly as someone who is a “high responder”. That night I load up on sweet potato fries and wholegrain bread. “I’m a low responder to carbs,” I tell my housemate. “So this is fine.”

It takes three weeks (and gaining 5lb) to realise that it’s not. By this point, I have also spoken to two independent specialists in human performance and genetics, both adamant that the science isn’t currently sophisticated enough for us to base either training or nutrition on genetics. “[Genetic testing] companies are snake-oil merchants,” says Hugh Montgomery, a professor of intensive care medicine at University College London, who also directs the Centre for Human Health and Performance (he discovered the first gene to be associated with human performance). “Your genetic code is 6bn letters and it’s carved up into roughly 20,000 genes, which are all interacting and producing proteins. It’s impossible to say exactly how many of them actually influence your training response, because at the moment we don’t know.”

Dr Alun G Williams, director of the sports genomics laboratory at Manchester Metropolitan University, likens it to trying to read a book when you can see only four words on every page. “Most traits to do with fitness are 50% genetic and 50% environment. But we simply can’t test the hundreds of genes that add up to that 50% genetic component, because we only know a small handful of them.”

Even though the ACTN3 genotype – the one that Diffey has and I don’t – has been consistently shown to be related to a person’s sprinting ability, it probably accounts for only a 1-2% difference in how good a sprinter someone is. “Perhaps at an elite level, where an athlete is already running 100m in under 11 seconds, taking that 2% into consideration might be useful,” Williams says. “But for the average consumer who just wants to get fit, the advice isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”

A study published in March [https://www.nature.com/articles/gim201838.epdf?referrer_access_token=gL8WAmOOpFsbbh15bQiNfdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0OiG-] in the journal Nature[https://www.nature.com/articles/gim201838.epdf?referrer_access_token=gL8WAmOOpFsbbh15bQiNfdRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0OiG-] found that up to 40% of the analyses of genetic disorders in some at-home testing kits were inaccurate. The study didn’t cover fitness and only looked at 49 samples, so was relatively small; but the advice was that any results had to be backed up by more rigorous testing. It echoes the [https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/how-to-use-self-test-kits-safely/] advice offered by the NHS[https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/how-to-use-self-test-kits-safely/] : an at-home test might be a starting point, but it can’t be used as a diagnostic tool.

***

It takes me three attempts to get enough blood from my fingertips to fill the vial sent to me in the post by Thriva[https://thriva.co/]. The company markets itself as a “preventive health service”: it offers regular blood tests to identify deficiencies and signs of possible health problems. I use a small spring-loaded lancet to prick the third finger on my left hand, then dangle it over the sample collection tube, massaging the blood out with my other hand. It forms a few fat, scarlet droplets and then promptly heals. After two more pricks, I have just enough. I’m slightly bruised, but calm; I’m getting used to giving samples now. Like the others, it goes into an airtight envelope before I post it off for analysis.

The three British founders of Thriva are all in their late 20s or early 30s, and come from a tech background. I tell 32-year-old CEO Hamish Grierson I’m not sure how much to extrapolate from my results because I feel, well, fine. “‘Fine’ is a pretty nebulous concept,” he says affably. “We often see people who have been living without feeling as if there’s anything seriously wrong. They tolerate their day-to-day, but they could be feeling considerably better.” Thriva has recently partnered with Vita Mojo[https://www.vitamojo.com/#/index], a London restaurant and food delivery service that creates bespoke and personalised meals, based on data from your Thriva results or DNA profile. Low in iron? Have a steak! Need some folate? Here are your leafy greens. Vita Mojo co-founder Nick Popovici likens the service to on-demand TV. “Before Netflix came along, we all watched TV and didn’t realise we wanted something more bespoke. Now, we barely ever sit down at a time that someone else has prescribed. With food it’s the same: why eat the same as everyone else?” He has regular blood tests and takes a host of supplements every day, as well as following a diet tailored to his results.

For Grierson, Thriva’s mission is one of empowerment. He sees a future in which questions such as, “Why am I always tired?” and, “Why can’t we conceive?” can be answered quickly, without necessitating a trip to the doctor. And beyond even that, he envisages a future in which we might never have to ask the question. “We have machine learning models that are able to use our existing data to make a predictive assessment. It’ll then send you a message: ‘Hey, Alex, did you know that, based on our data, people like you are at increased risk of… erm,” he casts around for an example. “Heart attack. Or, you know, diabetes. We’re not there yet – the data set isn’t big enough – but we will be in the next 18 months.

A nurse calls with my fertility results. It feels like bad news. I sit down heavily. ‘Is everything...?’

“No one has a big database of bio-grade information on a theoretically ‘well’ population. There is a huge amount of value in it for researchers, who can use it to zero in on the health of various geographies or ethnic groups.” It’s notable that, throughout my months of testing, every company emails me repeatedly – encouraging me to take further tests or update questionnaires about what I’m eating and how I’m exercising. It feels like a reminder that my data is of more value than my subscription fee.

Happily, the Thriva test doesn’t judge me at risk of either heart attack or diabetes. Unhappily, as with DNAFit, I’m not really sure I understand the results, despite the neat interface. Everything from liver function to lipid profile (which indicates your risk of developing heart disease) is presented on a gamified scale that goes from red to green. If a marker is on red, there’s an issue. If it’s green, as all mine are, then your results are within a healthy range. Again, there’s a lot of detail once you start reading. I’m not sure if I need to know that my cholesterol is 4.99 mmol/L. Or that my Total B12 is 273.0 pmol/L.

There’s no way to gamify giving a stool sample, but Atlas Biomed does make it as easy as possible by sending you a paper shelf to attach to the toilet to catch your deposit. It claims that it can map my microbiome[https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/26/the-human-microbiome-why-our-microbes-could-be-key-to-our-health] – the ecosystem of bacteria, fungi, viruses and yeasts that live in my intestinal tract. Lately, the microbiome has been thought of as a key measure of internal health, analysing everything from our immune system to our stress and emotional responses.

Thriva told me what vitamins I may be deficient in; Atlas Biomed promises to help me “optimise” my ability to “synthesise” those vitamins. A few weeks later I get an email to say my results are ready. By this point I’m fairly well-versed in what to expect, but I can’t quite get over the fact that there is an online interface dedicated to my poo. And what a poo! Atlas Biomed even give it a nationality (Danish, because of my “high intake of flour-based foods, meat and fish, which is common throughout Europe”) and a character (village peasant – because I have a moderate amount of diversity in my gut bacteria, but not as much as I may have).

Unlike the other tests, everything does not look fine. I click through to the nutrition tab and find that I have a below-average microbiome ability to take in vitamins B1, B2, B3, B5, B6 and K. When I click on each vitamin I get an explanation of its function, and what could happen if I become very deficient. It tells me, for instance, that “vitamin B2 (riboflavin) participates in the formation of red blood cells and is also important for immune and reproductive health. Symptoms of riboflavin deficiency include painful cracked lips, mouth sores, swollen tongue, cracks in the corners of the mouth, skin lesions and muscle weakness. It may be accompanied by elevated homocysteine levels that can damage blood vessel walls, thus increasing the risk of cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease.”

Skin lesions and Alzheimer’s disease! The more I read, the more worried I am. I call my mother to tell her that it looks as though I’m going to suffer a slow and painful death.

“Are you ill?” she asks.

“No, but I’m not... well.”

She pauses. “You’re becoming very self-obsessed.”

***

My final test is the one I’ve been most curious about and the results are delivered in an almost old-fashioned way – by phone. “It’s the nurse from LetsGetChecked[https://www.letsgetchecked.com/] with your fertility results,” says a silky-voiced woman. I immediately worry. I never thought about children, really, until I got to 27. I wrote a story on the world’s largest sperm bank and the man who founded it told me that I was already old in childbearing terms. “By 30, all you’ve got left is the old rotten eggs,” he said. Charmer.

The LetsGetChecked site claims that testing the anti-Müllerian hormone (AMH) will give an indication of fertility by measuring how many eggs you have left. It’s another finger-prick test – and I dutifully fill up another vial of blood.

But a call feels like bad news. I sit down heavily. “Is everything…?” The nurse rushes to reassure me that everything is perfectly fine. “For AMH, we give you a score. Anything between 6.4 and 70.3 is considered normal,” she tells me. “Your score is 31.9.” I wait a beat. “And that’s good?” She explains that, for someone of my age, it is very good. I feel buoyed, and relieved that I’ve got a bit more mileage, even though I hadn’t given much thought to what I would have done if the test had shown I was low on eggs. I had just started dating someone; how practical is it to have a child with someone you’ve known only six months?

It turns out, however, that the science around AMH is in question, too. Last year the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study[https://www.nhs.uk/news/pregnancy-and-child/hormonal-fertility-tests-waste-time-and-money/] that found AMH levels had little bearing on a woman’s likelihood of conceiving within a year. As the researchers wrote, there “may be little association between a woman’s ovarian reserve and factors affecting fertility, such as egg quality”.

Finally, I decide it’s time to face up to what might be the most important test, the 23andMe test for the BRCA1/BRCA2 gene. I hover over the button for half an hour before finally clicking, and let out an audible sigh of relief when it tells me I do not have them. I feel lucky, as if I’ve won some kind of genetic lottery, and can’t help but relax about my occasional cigarette or night of drinking. But then I dig further; according to Harvard University researchers, 23andMe’s test is incredibly limited in scope, analysing three mutations across the two genes. But there are nearly 200 other mutations, which appear in dozens of other genes, which have also been linked to altered breast cancer risk. What’s more, just 5-10% of breast cancers are considered to be passed on genetically; in the other 90-95% of cases, environmental factors are the cause. Either way, I’m not off the hook.

After almost six months of testing, I am both wiser and more confused about my health. What did I learn? I’ve expanded my diet to include more leafy vegetables, and switched my workout regime to include longer runs and lower weights – and feel brighter and fitter for it. But while I have a lot more information, I’m not sure what to do with it. Even if the technology is cutting-edge, the advice remains broadly the same: there’s either nothing I can do, or I should live a healthier life. And I don’t need an online dashboard – even a very nice, primary-coloured one – to teach me that.

Which test does what?

23andMe genetics[https://www.23andme.com/en-gb/]

Cost £149 (for health and ancestry)

Type of test Saliva

What it promises “90+ personalised reports about your ancestry, health, wellness and more.”

What it delivers The most comprehensive results, but most feel arbitrary – why would I need to know what colour my eyes are most likely to be? You’re unlikely to have heard of most of the genetic conditions, so it’s hard to see how this could be useful to many.

DNAFit genetics[https://www.dnafit.com/]

Cost £179

Type of test Cheek swab

What it promises “Discover how your genes affect your fitness and nutrition... unlock your full health potential.”

What it delivers Data that, on first reading, doesn’t seem to have much real-world application. It includes a very good consultation with a sports or nutrition professional, though, who can help you write a personalised plan.

Thriva[https://thriva.co/]

Cost £69 for an advanced test

Type of test Blood sample

What it promises The advanced test checks for “signs of heart disease, liver disease and diabetes. Plus a look at four key nutrients required for optimal health.”

What it delivers A quick and sleek service, with green for “good”, red for “bad”, plus personalised advice from a GP and tips on what action to take (some of which are a bit patronising).

Atlas Biomed microbiome[https://atlasbiomed.com/uk/microbiome]

Cost £139

Type of test Stool sample

What it promises “Learn how microbes can protect your gut from disease; understand how your diet affects your gut bacteria.”

What it delivers At the very least, you’ll come away with a better understanding of what various vitamins do. Plus the food recommendations are updated weekly and suggest interesting new foods to try.

LetsGetChecked ovarian reserve test[https://www.letsgetchecked.com/gb/en/home-female-fertility-test/]

Cost £119

Type of test Blood sample

What it promises “An insight into how many eggs you have left in your ovaries by testing the anti-Müllerian hormone.”

What it delivers A dashboard that gives you the figure. Also a phone call from a very nice nurse who’ll explain your results before you get them, making everything easier to understand.

• Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com[mailto:], including your name and address (not for publication).

• This piece was amended on 22 September to correct the costs of the Thriva and DNAFit tests

THOUSANDS of infertile couples could be helped to have children without resorting to gruelling IVF treatment, thanks to a tiny device developed by British scientists.

Doctors and engineers at the University of Southampton have created a sensor the size of a 5p piece that could diagnose the cause of unexplained infertility.

Infertility is a huge problem in Britain, with one in six couples struggling to conceive. Yet in a third of infertility cases doctors can find no cause.

So thousands of couples turn to expensive and difficult IVF in a bid to start a family. Of the 68,000 cycles of IVF conducted in the UK every year, 32 per cent, more than 22,000, have no diagnosis of the cause of the infertility. But the Southampton team believe their new device, which is to undergo its first major NHS-backed trial next year, could plug this gap and bring down the number of couples undergoing unnecessary IVF.

The gadget monitors temperature and pH and oxygen levels in a woman's womb - elements which have been proven to have a major impact on fertility.

Remarkably, until now fertility doctors have had no reliable way of investigating these factors. The sensor, which measures just 3.8mm - less than a sixth of an inch - across, is inserted into the womb by a nurse or doctor in a matter of minutes in the same way a contraceptive coil is implanted.

It then monitors conditions in the womb for seven days, sending data wirelessly to a small transmitter, worn on a piece of underwear, which transfers the information to a smartphone or computer.

Crucially, if there is a problem it is relatively easy to change the conditions of the womb with something as simple as aspirin.

Ying Cheong, professor of reproductive medicine at Southampton University, said: 'If the pH levels are not in the right range there might be something wrong with the microbiome, the bacteria in the gut. It might be as simple as treating that with probiotics.

'For oxygen levels or temperature, a vasodilator or aspirin, which increases blood flow, could be effective options.' With the NHS increasingly rationing funding of IVF, and private treatment costing upwards of £5,000 per cycle, such simple solutions could save couples thousands of pounds.

For most women it takes two or three IVF cycles before they become pregnant - an often gruelling process which involves daily injections of ovarian stimulation drugs and repeated testing.

Professor Cheong devised the device with bioelectronics engineer Professor Hywel Morgan. They have now founded a Southampton University spin-out company, called Vivoplex Medical, to take on its development.

The National Institute for Health Research - the research branch of the NHS - has provided an £850,000 grant to fund a clinical trial of the device, which will start in the next few months. If the trials are successful, the team plan to apply for a safety licence next year.

© Daily Mail

There may soon be a simple way to identify children at risk for developing obesity later in life.

Researchers from Pennsylvania State University analyzed the bacteria in the mouths of 226 2-year-olds and found that a child’s oral microbiota can be used as a tool to predict weight gain during the first two years of life.

The study is part of a project of 300 children at the Penn State Health Milton S. Hershey Medical Center that seeks to identify biological and social risks for obesity. The results were published Wednesday in the journal Scientific Reports.

“One in three children in the United States is overweight or obese,” said Kateryna Makova, a biology professor at Penn State and senior author of the paper. “If we can find early indicators of obesity in young children, we can help parents and physicians take preventive measures.”

The children, who were from central Pennsylvania, had experienced rapid weight gain as infants, which is a strong indicator for childhood obesity.

Researchers also found that the oral microbiota among these children contained fewer types of bacteria. A larger diversity of bacteria helps protect against inflammation and is important for the stability of digestion.

“A healthy person usually has a lot of different bacteria within their gut micro-biota,” said Sarah Craig, a postdoctoral scholar in biology at Penn State and first author of the paper.

While previous studies in adults and adolescents have linked obesity to gut microbes, this is the first time a relationship between the oral microbiota and weight gain in children has been explored, the researchers said.

“The oral microbiota is usually studied in relation to periodontal disease, and periodontal disease has in some cases been linked to obesity,” said Craig.

The researchers did not investigate how diet or environmental changes over time could affect the link between oral bacteria and obesity. mschaefer@phillynews.com

215-854-4908

uBiome, a San Francisco startup that sells commercial tests that use DNA sequencing to identify what microbes are in a person’s stool or, for one test, in the vagina, has raised $83 million from venture capitalists to fund an entrée into drug development. It’s also signed up a board member with pharma expertise: former Novartis chief executive Joseph Jimenez.

Jimenez said in an interview that after meeting with more than 30 companies, uBiome is one of “a small handful” in which he will take a role. “I believe uBiome is a company that is well positioned to break new ground scientifically,” Jimenez says. He points to the DNA sequences that the company has from 250,000 patients—expected to reach 1 million next year—and the 200 patents it has either been granted or that are under review.

“Joe just stunned us with his brilliance,” says Jessica Richman, one of uBiome’s founders. “We loved his approach, his thinking about things, we really enjoyed talking with him.”

The idea behind uBiome is that the microbes in the gut or elsewhere in the body play an important role in all sorts of diseases, including inflammatory bowel disorders, metabolic disorders, and cancer. But the exact role of these microbes is still uncertain, and it’s still a guess whether changing microbial balances with drugs will be able to affect a disorder like diabetes or Crohn’s disease. Richman agues that uBiome’s broad database, built from a combination of research studies and sales, “will lead to insights and treatments that have not been possible.” As part of the drug discovery effort, she says that the company is looking to make some key hires. It is also opening an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the biotech hub where Novartis also has one of its main research labs.

Jimenez’s last moment in the public eye was in May, when it emerged that under his watch Novartis had hired Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former lawyer, as a consultant, only to let the relationship lie fallow because, Novartis says, Cohen could not do the job. Novartis still paid Cohen $1.2 million. But Jimenez says that news has not slowed his efforts to find his next act. “No,” he says. “I think it’s just old news. It’s old news.”

Richman says the Cohen story did not worry her. “We looked into that a little bit,” she says. “I can’t say we did a full background check. My understanding is that was not as extensive as portrayed and that there wasn’t any wrongdoing on their part.”

Jimenez says he’s still figuring out what he’s going to do next. “I’ve passed on a number of options,” he says. But he’s looking forward to seeing what he can do outside a big pharmaceutical company.

“There are certain things you can do as a large pharma company, and there are certain things you can’t do because of your infrastructure,” he says. “It’s easy to want to talk about becoming digital and wanting to transform your company, but you’ve got a lot of infrastructure, you’ve got a lot of people who are interested in maintaining the status quo.” He says he looks forward to working with companies like uBiome, which don’t have the baggage of the past 50 years of drug development.

As with any drug development effort, there are many ways to fail. But Jimenez says that so long as uBiome “follows the science,” it will be on a “very, very good track.”

Investors in uBiome’s funding round include OS Fund as well as 8VC, Y Combinator, family offices, and additional new and existing investors.

* Microbiome startup uBiome, best known for its tests that sequence the bugs living in us, is expanding into drug development.

* Boosted by $83 million in series C funding, the San Francisco-based startup plans to take the information it's gathered to create therapies that act on the microbiome to treat conditions like cancer and metabolic disorders.

* The team has also recruited former Novartis CEO Joe Jimenez to its board and plans to open up a therapeutics headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The bugs that live in our gut might one day soon be used to guide the way we treat everything from infections to cancer.

Now, uBiome, a startup that sells tests that sequence the microbiome, or the assortment of bacteria and other microbes that live in us, is getting in on the action. It plans to use the information it's assembled from its tests to go on the hunt for therapies that could treat conditions like cancer[https://www.businessinsider.com/link-between-microbiome-cancer-immunotherapy-skin-cancer-2017-2?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest], autoimmune diseases, and metabolic disorders.

To assist in that endeavor, the San Francisco-based startup said Friday that it had raised $83 million in a series C round led by OS Fund, along with 8VC, Y Combinator, and Dentsu Ventures. In total, uBiome has raised $105 million. The team has also recruited former Novartis CEO Joe Jimenez to its board and plans to open up a therapeutics headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"Our mission at uBiome is to advance the science and make it useful" uBiome CEO Jessica Richman told Business Insider.

That started by better understanding the microbiome, then it led to the clinical tests — like the company's SmartJane test looks at the vaginal microbiome to test for sexually transmitted diseases as well as chronic vaginal infections — and now it'll be through finding drug candidates.

The microbiome

Scientists have been working on ways to use the microbiome to unlock new treatments for difficult diseases. It's led to new companies — both on the medical side and in agriculture[http://www.businessinsider.com/healthcare-and-biotech-unicorns-to-watch-2018-1/?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest#11-indigo-agriculture-14-billion-5]— that are taking a range of approaches to looking at the microbiome. It's often seen as the "forgotten organ.[https://www.businessinsider.com/microbiome-based-drugs-in-development-seres-second-genome-2018-2?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]"

Read more: The microbiome has been called the forgotten organ — and it could hold the 'next paradigm shift in science and medicine'[https://www.businessinsider.com/microbiome-based-drugs-in-development-seres-second-genome-2018-2?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

It's this world that uBiome wants to tap into, going beyond decoding the bugs that live within you and instead leveraging them into potential treatments for cancer, metabolic conditions and autoiummine diseases.

Here's how that will play out. All of the data will stay in-house, and users of the different tests can opt in to sharing their data for research purposes. From that data, uBiome has already started finding potential drugs that can then start to be developed, either by uBiome or in collaboration with outside partners.

The drug candidates can be in one of three groups: bugs as drugs (microbes added to a person's system to treat a condition), drugs for bugs (treatments that target microbes), or drugs from bugs (treatments derived from a particular microbe).

So far, Richman said, the company has collected 250,000 microbiome samples from users, and she expects that sample count to hit 1 million in 2019. Richman said uBiome plans to launch additional clinical tests in addition to SmartJane and SmartGut, which is used to map out the organisms in your gut for people with gut conditions like irritable bowel syndrome.

uBiome isn't the only testing company that's moved into drug development. Consumer genetics company 23andMe[https://www.businessinsider.com/why-23andme-is-developing-drugs-based-on-its-data-2017-9?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest] has been partnering with pharmaceutical companies which mine 23andMe's database of users who've consented to share their data. Then in 2015, 23andMe started getting into drug development on its own, hiring a former Genentech executive, Richard Scheller,[https://www.businessinsider.com/23andme-launches-drug-development-2015-3?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]to lead the team. Most recently, pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline made a $300 million bet[https://www.businessinsider.com/why-gsk-invested-300-million-in-23andme-genetic-drug-discovery-collaboration-2018-7?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest] on 23andMe's approach to finding new medicines. Much of the approach is different from uBiome, which isn't sharing its data with partners, just potential therapies after they've been discovered.

And there's an interesting difference between a genetics test and a microbiome test: Unlike your genome, the genetic information you're born with, the microbiome can change over time. It offers the possibility that by changing up diet or other factors, you may be able to get your microbes back to a healthy state. For uBiome's purposes, monitoring changes in the microbiome could also hint at whether a drug candidate is doing what it's meant to be doing.

"The way we look at it in the same way that a heart rate and blood pressure blood draw would be considered primary care, we think the microbiome should be on the same level," Bryan Johnson, co-founder of OS Fund told Business Insider.

See also:

* Meet the 30 healthcare leaders under 40 who are using technology to shape the future of medicine[https://www.businessinsider.com/30-under-40-health-tech-leaders-2018-6?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

* How cells engineered to make everything from medicine to perfume will change the way we see our world[https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-synthetic-biology-how-it-will-affect-you-2018-2?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

NOW WATCH: 3 surprising ways humans are still evolving[https://www.businessinsider.com/how-humans-still-evolving-2018-8?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

See Also:

* The CEO of The Gates Foundation says we’re approaching a dangerous tipping point in global poverty. We still have time to reverse it.[https://www.businessinsider.com/gates-foundation-goalkeepers-2018-report-ceo-sue-desmond-hellman-2018-9?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

* Silicon Valley's top biotech VCs share the biggest mistakes startups make when they pitch[https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-biotech-vcs-biggest-mistake-startup-founders-make-pitch-2018-9?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

* 40 AND UNDER: The Silicon Valley biotech stars who are backing startups aiming to cure disease, prolong life, and fix the food system[https://www.businessinsider.com/silicon-valley-life-science-biotech-vc-investor-list-2018-8?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

Silicon Valley millionaire Serge Faguet thinks pills, injections and implants will turn him into a superhuman. Could they?

In September last year, the young Silicon Valley entrepreneur Serge Faguet posted an article[https://hackernoon.com/im-32-and-spent-200k-on-biohacking-became-calmer-thinner-extroverted-healthier-happier-2a2e846ae113] on the tech website Hacker Noon. It was headlined: “I’m 32 and spent $200k on biohacking. Became calmer, thinner, extroverted, healthier & happier.” Significantly more intelligent, too, he added, with an increased sex drive that dovetailed nicely with his newfound ease at “picking up girls”.

These last two points especially grabbed the attention of the site’s hundreds of thousands of mainly male readers. The comments section under Faguet’s story is full of admiration for his data-driven, problem-solving approach. though a handful of others dismiss Faguet as a psychopath, the embodiment of “Silicon Valley’s toxic machiavellian bro culture”. The article currently has 15,000 upvotes. His follow-up[https://hackernoon.com/biohack-your-intelligence-now-or-become-obsolete-97cdd15e395f] about increasingyour intelligence by having sex and micro-dosing MDMA is the site’s second most read article of 2018.

The goal is to reduce the chances of having a heart attack in the next, you know, 80 years

In his working life as CEO, or former CEO, of a string of international startups, Faguet is ruthlessly pragmatic. He applies the same approach to his sole hobby: extreme biohacking. Biohacking is a buzzword that unites the hi-tech, wellness, anti-ageing and science communities; at its most basic, it means doing things to your body or mind to make them function better. This could be as simple as eating more oily fish. But purist biohackers set themselves apart from the average person intent on self-improvement. Theirs is a hyper-technical approach that seeks to understand and “fix” the body with all manner of technologies: if we can hack the world’s most sophisticated computer systems, the thinking goes, why not ourselves?

Faguet intends to live for ever, merging with robots and becoming an ultra human. If that goal sounds creepy, laughable or unrealistic, it’s helpful to remember that it is one shared by many influential figures in Silicon Valley. Tesla’s Elon Musk[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/elon-musk] has repeatedly argued that humans need to become cyborgs to survive the inevitable robot uprising, and hopes to usher in an era of transhumanism with his new brain-computer interface company, Neuralink[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/28/elon-musk-merge-brains-computers-neuralink]. Bill Maris, founder and former CEO of Google Ventures, the search giant’s venture capital arm, went on to launch Calico[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/apr/09/silicon-valley-wants-to-cheat-grim-reaper-google] (an acronym for California Life Company), the sole aim of which is to “solve death”. Last November, Sean Parker, the former Facebook president, described his vision of the future[http://time.com/money/5016960/sean-parker-healthcare-immortal-overlords/] thus: “Because I’m a billionaire, I’m going to have access to better healthcare so… I’m going to be, like, 160 and I’m going to be part of this class of immortal overlords.” As much as Faguet likes to think of himself as a rebel pioneer, he’s an emblem of a far wider movement in the wealthy world he inhabits.

“You hear about all these tech billionaires who do these crazy things, but you don’t really know what they do, right?” Faguet says. “Because they don’t talk about it.” Though a mere millionaire, he is unusual in that he does talk about it – very frankly. And some of what he says is deeply unsettling.

It’s 11am in a messy hotel suite in Palo Alto, California. Faguet, it must be said, does not look superhuman. He wears the sportswear uniform of male tech workers everywhere: an old grey hoodie over a white T-shirt, plus the scraggly beginnings, or the end, of a beard. There are faint shadows under his eyes. He is 5ft 6in, weighs 69kg, and is fit but far from ripped. Today, he wears an Oura smart ring[https://ouraring.com/] on his left forefinger to measure his sleep patterns. To enhance his already perfect hearing, he inserts a $6,000 pair of hearing aids when in public. A monitor that continuously measures his glucose levels, sending data to his smartphone, is implanted under the subcutaneous fat on his belly. Every now and then, usually when he’s talking about world domination, he flashes a big, hungry smile.

Faguet hums quietly as he fetches the disposable syringe he uses to administer daily injections of somatropin, a hormone that promotes muscle growth. “People think, ‘Oh my God, injection!’” he says. “But the molecule is larger than what can typically be absorbed through the stomach.” There is a big bag of assorted pills in his room, ranging from standard natural supplements, such as garlic capsules, to prescription medications – SSRI antidepressants, lithium, oestrogen blockers. He takes 60 pills a day.

This morning, after his daily meditation session, but before his breakfast of avocados, olive oil, omelette, grapefruit and green tea, Faguet washed down 40 pills. (He eats only once a day, fasts three times a week and tries to follow a ketogenic, or low-carb, diet.) The pharmaceutical oestrogen blockers he takes can boost testosterone by 50%; developed to treat breast cancer, they are increasingly being used by men to boost their fertility – though Faguet believes they help him perform better (more aggressively) in business. He started taking thyroid hormones because his levels are below average, and has since noticed an improvement in his moods. He takes metformin, a drug used to treat type 2 diabetes, because clinical trials point to it being a powerful anti-ager[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-42273362]. He also takes a small dose of statins to lower cholesterol, usually given only to older or high-risk patients. “The goal is to reduce the chances of a heart attack in the next, you know, 80 years,” Faguet says.

I don’t want my hair to fall out. I don’t want to have cancer when I'm 80

With such precautions in place, he works with 50-year goals in all areas of his life, including sex and emotional wellbeing. He has completely cut out sugar, pornography, masturbation, all menial jobs, alcohol, processed food, news and social media from his life. Also lying, due to potential stress, because in today’s world all your secrets will come out anyway. When I ask why he takes SSRIs if, as he says, he has never been depressed, he replies: “It’s better to have mental clarity and not be bothered by emotions, et cetera.” What he wants instead is “good mood, confidence, focus, energy, willpower, stress resilience, brainpower, calm, health, longevity, removal of social anxieties and inhibitions. All the time. With minimal investment of time and minimal risk.”

In his teens, Faguet was sent from Russia, where he grew up, to Hampshire, where he boarded for two years at Winchester College, the all-boys private school. He dropped out of Stanford University in the US to run his video chat company, TokBox[https://tokbox.com/about], before setting up a Russian online booking agent, Ostrovuk[https://ostrovok.ru/?sid=eca2761a-c3df-4b27-9715-71ac5931c869]. His adult life has been spent living out of a suitcase, mainly in hotels in the US, Russia and the far east, where his business is based; he’s currently working on a project he says he can’t talk about. He tells me he doesn’t understand why people would want to have their own home; he doesn’t get attached to things or people. When was the last time he did anything irrational, I ask? Faguet looks startled. Irrational, I repeat – like falling in love? “Ha! I’m not sure. I mean, I certainly do... I’m not sure I can answer that question.”

***

Faguet’s interest in extreme biohacking began five years ago. Based mainly in Moscow, he was setting up his online travel company, an extremely stressful job: back then, he says, he was a person with “a lot of challenges” – anxieties, insecurities, introversion, weight, focus, anger management and procrastination issues. “At first, I just started reading a lot of scientific research, and basic things stood out: don’t eat sugar, do take vitamin B.” He ran a series of biomarker tests to establish just how averagely human he was. (In Russia, this kind of medical testing is much cheaper and easier to come by.) He was tested for insulin resistance, hormone levels, the state of his microbiome, toxins, athletic capabilities, body fat, mercury and allergies.

“Gradually, I just started asking myself more complex questions. ‘How can I optimise my hormones?’ That is kind of risky to do without a doctor. I had a long list of questions that I would assemble, then I would go find doctors who claimed to have the answers. I would send them this huge agenda, saying, ‘Hey, here are 40 big questions I have. I want to sit down with you for a long time and talk about them.’ It was almost an exam to figure out who knew what they were talking about and who I would engage with.

“I had experiences with more traditional doctors where I would say, ‘Hey, I would like my blood sugar to be lower than average at the age of 27’ or, ‘I have slightly elevated mercury. We should fix that.’ And the traditional doctor would say, ‘Oh, mercury? Your hair isn’t falling out.’ So I didn’t really know what to do with that. ‘Come back when your hair is falling out’ is not a very good proposition. I don’t want my hair to fall out. I don’t want to have cancer when I’m 80.”

Back in the US, Faguet began amassing what he calls his “medical team”, various established Stanford and Harvard neurologists, cardiologists, endocrinologists and psychotherapists. “They have a small number of clients for whom they do this kind of work,” he says. “One of the biggest challenges for the regular person wanting to do preventive medicine is that there are very few doctors in the world who think this way. The primary diseases that people die from are cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. They do not happen acutely – they happen over 40 or 50 years of your life. By the time you are having any symptoms, it’s too late, because a lot of different systems in your body have been exposed for decades.”

So every few months, Faguet undergoes new tests. He estimates that “there are less than 1,000 people out of the 7 billion on the planet who know as much about their health as I do”. His biohacking spend now amounts to more than $250,000 (“if we do not count the time invested”), most of that on elite doctors who charge $500 an hour. How do his doctors justify prescribing him so many medications, when many of them have been approved for conditions he doesn’t suffer from? “They feel I will benefit.”

***

Biohackery is a large, varied but predominantly male global community. There are punk biohackers who want to look like aliens[https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2015/aug/14/body-hackers-the-people-who-turn-themselves-into-cyborgs] and implant ears into their backs, and stunt biohackers like the former Nasa biochemist Josiah Zayner[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/24/josiah-zayner-diy-gene-editing-therapy-crispr-interview], who injected a muscle-building DIY gene therapy into his arm live on camera. There are high-achiever biohackers who write bestsellers on how to reduce your workload[https://fourhourworkweek.com/]. There are biohackers who are really just gadget freaks, and others whose primary focus is nutrition, looks and fitness, who make huge sums selling superfoods, drinks and pills.

Faguet is different, in that his goals and sensibility are focused on long-term power and achievement. There are people like him all over Silicon Valley, microdosing [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/01/first-ever-trials-on-the-effects-of-microdosing-lsd-set-to-begin] LSD[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/01/first-ever-trials-on-the-effects-of-microdosing-lsd-set-to-begin] to boost their productivity. Faguet claims to have permanently enhanced his intelligence by taking a massive 900–1,000mcg dose of LSD[https://hackernoon.com/how-taking-900mcg-of-lsd-permanently-accelerated-my-personal-growth-52935c848f9c]. He has used MDMA, too, as a way of emotionally connecting with his family back in Russia, and once to work out a disagreement with a colleague.

Children don’t feel like something that would contribute to my life goals. Friends who have them say it’s harder to focus

“People here [in Silicon Valley] have a technical mindset,” he explains, “so they think of everything as an engineering problem. A lot of people who are not of a technical mindset assume that, ‘Hey, people have always been dying’, but I think there’s going to be a greater level of awareness once results start to happen. What’s going to be compelling for the average human is when you see people who are 80 years old but look 30 and are in very good health. It’s a complicated process that’s well under way, but for the vast majority of humanity it’s completely incomprehensible.”

What if the US introduced legislation to curb genetic innovation? No country is “going to tell me when I am going to die”, Faguet says. “If they do, I’ll just move to another country.” It’s an above-the-law attitude that is not uncommon in Silicon Valley.

Few areas of Faguet’s life better demonstrate his high-handed attitude to the rest of humanity than his approach to the opposite sex. In his extensive research on sleep, he discovered that wearing orange-tinted glasses to filter out blue light for three to four hours before bedtime can be a useful tool, but there is a downside. “If I’m going to a place in the evening where I can pick up girls,” he wrote last year, “I don’t wear orange glasses because I feel a bit insecure about them in a sex-related context.” There aren’t many women in Faguet’s life, and he has no interest in a relationship. “I do have some women I date from time to time. This is a longer conversation, but I just want to spend my time with people I enjoy who energise me. And if you don’t want to engage in that sort of thing [relationships] and you still want to have sex, which is what humans want, then it’s a question of just how do you fix that without spending too much time on it?”

How do you do that, I ask. Faguet says he prefers to “hire sugar-baby-models for sex”, stressing that they are “not prostitutes. Many wealthy people keep mistresses and pay for their expenses or rent their apartment. These are girls who have $20k Hublot watches and vacation in Monaco.” He’s decided against having children, because they are “not a good ROI” (return on investment).

Can he understand how emotionally cut off he might seem to other people? “Look. I think ultimately it’s what your objectives are in life and how it advances your objectives. And children – there’s not that much time to do everything.” (This despite the fact that Faguet is going to live for ever.) “Children don’t feel like something that would contribute to my life goals. Some of my close friends who have children will say privately that they regret it, because it’s much harder for them to focus – it’s really taken away from the things they cared about. It’s just a rational analysis and choice.”

Faguet’s life is colonised by men. He works in an industry where women form less than 20% of the workforce. His business partners have all been men. Why is biohacking such a male scene? “It’s a good question,” he says. “I feel women typically are more conscientious about their health, and more disciplined. But I don’t know many who have an interest in it.” Does that mean women will get left behind, the only people to die off? “I have no idea. I haven’t thought about it that way. But women today live somewhat longer than men. Yeah. I’m not sure what’s going to happen in that regard.”

People will be upset by the fact that the world will be run by a small number of superhumans, who will upgrade themselves

Faguet has thought more about the broader issue of biological inequality, which he describes as the biggest social-justice issue of the future. Even so, he has little concern about how it might play out in practice. “There are going to be plenty of economic resources. People will have a higher standard of welfare and wealth, because it’ll be cheaper to produce high-quality food and electronics. But if you don’t want to upgrade yourself, you’re not going to have a lot of influence in society. People will certainly be upset by the fact that the world is going to be run by a small number of superhumans, who will upgrade themselves and own the various conglomerates that provide these services. The average non-upgraded human will just not have any political influence.”

Has he never watched Black Mirror[https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/black-mirror] ? He doesn’t find any aspect of this deeply dystopian? “Why worry about it if you think it’s going to happen anyway?” he says, unfazed. “I’m quite convinced that it is inevitable. And the second bit is, it’s really hard to predict what the world is going to be like. People might spend most of their days playing around in supercool virtual worlds and be happy. There are going to be a small number of superhumans who go off to other star systems – because once you’re immortal and super-intelligent, you don’t really care about ruling the rest of humanity. Why would that matter? You might as well go off and build what you want to build. The desire to dominate other people, it comes from our monkey past.”

What will he do with his extra years? “Ultimately, the real value is being able to upgrade yourself and become something much better and smarter, and live for millions of years and explore other planets.”

Until then, Faguet will keep taking his pills and doing his research and wearing his orange-tinted, sleep-optimising glasses. He is almost emotionally invulnerable. His biomarkers are doing tremendously. At the bottom of the comments section on the article he posted last year, one woman wrote that she wouldn’t put herself through all this, because “I wouldn’t be the real me. I can’t help but feel sad that you dislike yourself so much that you put yourself through this.” Faguet responded coolly: “Oh I definitely dislike the unenhanced myself… [but] science clearly shows that a ‘real you’ doesn’t exist.” There’s no love or radical acceptance in Faguet’s self-help prescription: it’s either upgrade, or fail.

• Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print?, please email weekend@theguardian.com[mailto:weekend@theguardian.com], including your name and address (not for publication).

I am often asked if there are foods that can help support mental health, memory, or even minimize signs of aging. Our brain cells are our largest cells and they have high energy and nutrient needs, which makes them susceptible to damage if we don't provide the right kind of fuel: high-quality foods with vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants. These compounds provide energy for the brain and protect it from damage.

While food isn't a magic cure for forgetfulness as we age - and no matter how hard we try, a life full of laughter will probably lead to a few wrinkles under our brows and around our smiles - there are many foods and nutrients that can help support a healthy mind.

How does food affect our brain and mental state? Sometimes food affects our mood, behaviour and brain function very quickly - for example, think about the "hangry" effect. A "hangry" state is fairly easy to identify: it's the irritability, lack of ability to focus or concentrate on a task (our minds are naturally wandering toward food) and overall heightened anxiety that many of us experience when we're in need of fuel.

What we eat can also have a longer-term effects on the development, structure and function of our brain. Our digestive tract interacts and communicates with our brain on several levels. The gut is actually known as a "second brain" in the word of science, because there are so many links between intestinal bacteria and our brains.

Good bacteria in our gut work with amino acids (the building blocks of protein) to activate the brain pathways that produce important hormones like serotonin and norepinephrine, and in turn, what we eat affects both the bacteria in our gut and the amino acids that are present there.

So how do we choose foods to support a healthy mind long-term?

Start by choosing a dietary pattern that emphasizes whole, unprocessed fresh foods such as vegetables, fruits, grains, fish, nuts, seeds and legumes. By choosing whole foods, we are automatically setting ourselves up to get more nutrients and less sodium, sugar and artificial ingredients.

Here are my top five Healthy Mind Foods:

1. Fermented foods

Fermented foods, like sauerkraut, kefir and yogurt help provide natural probiotics, which are the good bacteria in our digestive system that support brain and gut health. Probiotics also work to reduce inflammatory stress throughout the body, and support energy levels.

2. Fatty fish

Fatty fish, like salmon, provide both protein, which is integral to cell structure and function, and Omega 3 fats. Omega 3 fats are vital to brain structure throughout the life cycle, from brain development as an infant, to maintaining concentration and memory as we age.

The average adult needs about 0.3-0.45 grams of EPA and DHA per day (this is the Omega 3 in fatty fish), which is equivalent to about 2 servings of Omega 3-rich fish per week. Other fish sources include mackerel, anchovies, Arctic char and trout.

If you don't eat fish, focus on plant-based sources of Omega 3 such as flax seeds, walnuts, chia seeds and soybeans. Plant-based Omega 3 comes in the form of ALA. Aim for at least 1.6 g ALA per day, which is about 2 tsp ground flax or 1 tbsp chia seeds.

3. Beans, legumes, and green vegetables

Beans, legumes and greens provide many vitamins and minerals, but specific to brain health, they give us folate, a B-vitamin that supports concentration and memory. Folate also helps support the serotonin pathway and has been linked to reduced irritability and headaches.

Almost all beans and legumes are packed with folate, from lentils to chickpeas and kidney beans. Folate-rich greens include spinach, broccoli, asparagus, Brussels sprouts and avocado. We need about 400 mcg of folate per day, which is equivalent to ¾ cup cooked beans plus 1 cup cooked spinach, or 4 to 8 asparagus spears.

4. Whole grains

Whole grains provide a lot of value when it comes to brain health. They are a prebiotic food, which means they feed the probiotics in our gastrointestinal tract and support good bacteria in the digestive system.

Whole grains are also high in fibre and folate, which is beneficial for brain health as well as heart health. Some whole grains are even a good source of Omega 3, such as bread with flax or chia seeds.

Last but not least, by choosing whole grains over refined carbohydrate choices, we can mitigate excess inflammatory stress throughout the body, including the brain.

5. Red and purple fruits

Dark red and purple fruits, like blueberries, are an excellent source of antioxidants, vitamins and fibre, which makes them a superstar when it comes to brain health. These fruits contain a polyphenolic compound called anthocyanins, which gives them their vibrant colours.

Anthocyanins are known for both antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, and have been linked to improved cognitive functioning, motor skill function and memory. Fruits with anthocyanin include blueberries, black currants, elderberries, strawberries, grapes, cherries and black plums.

Making diet changes is always challenging, so if there are a lot of foods above that you don't include in your diet now, but you want to eat for a healthy mind, try incorporating one new food to support brain health each week.

If you're already eating several of these foods, challenge yourself to combine them in meals in a new way or seek out something unique, such as a new kind of fish or non-traditional leafy green vegetable. After all, variety is the spice of life!

Nicole Pin is a registered dietitian in Burlington whose practice embraces the principles of mindful and intuitive eating to achieve sustainable lifestyle change with clients. For more information visit enjoyyourfoodrd.com.

Have questions? Nicole has answers! Submit your questions about food, nutrition or cooking to enjoyyourfood.rd@gmail.com.

Special to The Hamilton Spectator

Those who have certain reactions to different foods may be surprised to learn that their symptoms may stem from problems with their digestive system rather than airborne irritants. Armstrong Health in Hamilton, Ontario, can help with naturopathic food sensitivity and allergy testing.

The digestive system is the core of all other body systems including the immune system and conditions such as leaky gut and abnormal gut flora, or bacteria, can be a cause of food intolerance.

Common food sensitives are reactions to dairy products and eggs, but more and more people are also discovering digestive problems from today's wheat and grains that differ from the past in the way they are modified and processed. This has created an awareness to the effects of gluten on the digestive system and a trend towards gluten free diets but testing for allergies is the best way to isolate and cure digestive problems.

Leaky gut is when the lining of the digestive tract becomes inflamed and porous. The obvious symptoms can include heartburn, gas, diarrhea or constipation, and even food intolerances. It's important to note that leaky gut is not a formal medical diagnosis.

The gut plays an important role in the body's immune system. There are good bacteria in the gut or gut flora, that helps the immune system function but when bad bacteria outnumber the good, inflammation and allergy symptoms can occur requiring a boost to gut flora with probiotics.

Armstrong Health can get to the source of food allergies and digestive problems through comprehensive food sensitivity and allergy tests including diet elimination, electro dermal food allergy testing and immunoglobulin sensitivity testing. This can help isolate the allergy and develop a strategy to help the gut heal and return to normal through a naturopathic approach.

For more information about leaky gut, gut flora and the connection to food sensitivities and allergies, contact clinics where Armstrong Health services are offered by email at info@monarchwellness.ca or call 905-304-6556 in Ancaster, Ontario or 905-388-2400 for the Hamilton clinic.

Sidebar:

Visit Our Profile Page.

Look at discounted cash flow

Elanco Animal Health, the premier animal-health company being spun out of Eli Lilly (LLY, US) , is expected to begin trading on Thursday.

In selling shares at $24 apiece, above the estimated range, the offering could raise up to $1.74 billion. Even at the midpoint of its $20-$23 price range, however, the stock(ELAN, US) earned our Unattractive rating[https://www.newconstructs.com/stock-rating-methodology/].

Elanco enters the public market with significant revenue ($2.9 billion in 2017) but falling after-tax profit (NOPAT), and negative GAAP net income. As with any health-care firm, the valuation is based less on current profitability and more on the strength of its product/vaccine portfolio (and their patents) and its success in researching and developing (or acquiring) new animal-health products.

This report aims to help investors sort through Elanco’s financial filings to understand the fundamentals and valuation of this IPO.

Profits are not as bad as they appear

Elanco earns revenue through the sale of animal-health products in categories such as flea and tick, vaccines, osteoarthritis and pain, animal only-antibiotics, probiotics, and food animal products. The company notes it is the fourth-largest animal health company in the world, based on revenue in 2017. Globally, Elanco is No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 in medicinal, poultry, and cattle-feed additives, respectively, based on 2017 revenue.

At first glance, Elanco’s GAAP net loss ballooned from $48 million in 2016 to $311 million in 2017. NOPAT, while positive, fell, from $289 million in 2016 to $184 million in 2017.

Reported non-operating items overstated ELAN’s GAAP losses in both 2016 and 2017, which caused the greater decline in accounting results versus NOPAT. We remove both non-operating income and expense when calculating NOPAT to get at the true recurring profits of the business.

Our Robo-Analyst[https://www.newconstructs.com/technology/] uncovered non-operating items in 2017, such as:

• $375 million (13% of revenue) in asset impairment, restructuring, and other special charges[https://www.newconstructs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewConstructs_Models_ELAN_AssetImpairmentCharges_2018-09-17.png];

• $43 million (1% of revenue) in cost of sales due to the write-up of inventory[https://www.newconstructs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewConstructs_Models_ELAN_CostOfSalesAdjustment_2018-09-17.png];

• $33 million (1% of revenue) in provisional benefits[https://www.newconstructs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewConstructs_Models_ELAN_ProvisionalTaxBenefit_2018-09-17.png] due to re-measurement of deferred taxes;

• $6 million (1% of revenue) in change in total reserves.[https://www.newconstructs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewConstructs_Models_ELAN_ChangeInReserves_2018-09-17.png]

After all adjustments, we removed a net $495 million in non-operating expenses in 2017[https://www.newconstructs.com/reported-net-non-operating-items/], which resulted in positive NOPAT compared to negative GAAP net income.

With only two years of history, it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions about the long-term trend in profitability, but our adjustments show that NOPAT is falling, but at slower a rate than GAAP would indicate.

Red flags for capital allocation

As we wrote in our Long Idea on PetMed Express[https://www.newconstructs.com/creating-value-for-all-stakeholders/](PETS, US), we see significant growth in the animal-care market for the foreseeable future. Investors in Elanco must believe that it can capitalize on this growth while controlling costs to improve profitability. However, costly acquisitions have hampered Elanco’s ability to grow profits and create true shareholder value, even in a growing market.

Over the past three years, Elanco has spent over $6.2 billion on acquisitions. Most recently, in 2017, Elanco acquired Boehringer Ingelheim Vetmedica’s U.S. feline, canine and rabies vaccine portfolio for $882 million. In total, invested capital[https://www.newconstructs.com/education-invested-capital/] grew 7% in 2017, while NOPAT fell 36%. NOPAT margin fell from 10% in 2016 to 6% in 2017. This increase in invested capital, without a similar increase in profits led to Elanco’s return on invested capital (ROIC[https://www.newconstructs.com/education-return-on-invested-capital/]) falling from an already low 4% to 2% over the same time.

Read:These 4 major health-care stock spinoffs could make you money

Traditional metrics obscure an expensive valuation

Figure 2 shows Elanco’s price-to-sales ratio is actually below that of its publicly traded competitors, as named in ELAN’s S-1. However, it is worth noting that each of these firms looks vastly overvalued relative to the overall market, measured by the S&P 500(SPX, US), which has a price-to-sales ratio of 2.3. It’s also worth noting that from a profitability standpoint, Elanco earns the least NOPAT and has the lowest NOPAT margin of the four companies in Figure 2.

Our discounted cash flow model reveals how overvalued Elanco is

When we use our dynamic DCF model[https://www.newconstructs.com/education-close-the-loopholes-how-our-dcf-works/] to analyze the future cash flow expectations baked into the stock price, we find that Elanco is overvalued at the midpoint of its IPO, despite what traditional metrics show.

To justify the midpoint IPO price of $21.50 a share, Elanco must immediately achieve 12% NOPAT margins (slightly below the 15% average of peers in Figure 2) and grow NOPAT by 10% compounded annually for the next 15 years. See the math behind this dynamic DCF scenario[https://www.newconstructs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewConstructs_DCF_ELANjustification_2018-09-17.png]. This scenario implies immediate and drastic improvements in profitability.

Even if we assume Elanco can earn a 10% NOPAT margin (achieved in 2016), the stock still holds significant downside. If we assume the company achieves a 10% NOPAT margin and grows NOPAT by 5% compounded annually for the next decade, the stock is worth just $10/share today — a 52% downside from the IPO midpoint. See the math behind this dynamic DCF scenario[https://www.newconstructs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewConstructs_DCF_ELANvaluation_2018-09-17.png].

Each of these scenarios assumes Elanco can grow revenue by 5% compounded annually, which is the estimated growth rate of the industry through 2023, according to Vetnosis[http://www.vetnosis.com/], and noted in Elanco’s S-1[https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1739104/000104746918005982/a2236595zs-1a.htm]. For comparison, Elanco’s revenue has declined about 1% compounded annually since 2015.

IPO investors get no say

Immediately following the completion of Elanco’s IPO, Eli Lilly(LLY, US) will own 82.3% of the outstanding stock in the company (80.2% if underwriters exercise their option to purchase additional shares). While this ownership is different from dual class structures we’ve seen in recent IPOs[https://www.newconstructs.com/snapchat-shows-the-problems-with-visionary-founders-and-dual-class-share-structures/] (Snap Inc. (SNAP, US) or Dropbox (DBX, US), for instance) the effect on voting rights is the same: IPO investors get virtually no vote.

Post-IPO, Eli Lilly will control the majority of voting power and the outcome of any actions requiring shareholder approval. Furthermore, it will be entitled to designate or nominate the number of board members proportionate to its ownership of voting shares. As long as Eli Lilly owns at least a majority of Elanco’s voting shares, it will be entitled to designate the chairman of the board and a majority of the members on the board.

While Ely Lilly has indicated that it plans to divest its interest in Elanco over time, it is under no obligation to do so. We’ve certainly seen worse corporate governance when it comes to voting rights (such as one person holding all the rights), but Elanco’s structure still give investors no say in corporate matters until Eli Lilly divests majority of its interest in the company.

Critical details found in financial filings by our robo-analyst technology

As investors focus more on fundamental research[https://www.newconstructs.com/iss-buying-eva-dimensions-signals-more-focus-on-fundamental-research/], research automation technology is needed to analyze all the critical financial details in financial filings[https://www.newconstructs.com/danger-zone-fund-managers-that-dont-analyze-details-in-10-ks/]. Below are specifics on the adjustments we make based on Robo-Analyst findings in Elanco Animal Health’s S-1:

Income statement: We made $513 million of adjustments, with a net effect of removing $495 million in non-operating expense (17% of revenue). You can see all the adjustments made to Elanco’s income statement here[https://www.newconstructs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewConstructs_Models_ELAN_IncomeStatementAdjustments_2018-09-21.png].

Balance sheet: We made $1.3 billion of adjustments to calculate invested capital with a net increase of $405 million. The most notable adjustment was $358 million in deferred tax assets[https://www.newconstructs.com/deferred-tax-assets-and-liabilities/]. This adjustment represented 4% of reported net assets. You can see all the adjustments made to the balance sheet here[https://www.newconstructs.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewConstructs_Models_ELAN_BalanceSheetAdjustments_2018-09-21.png].

Valuation: We made $515 million of adjustments with a net effect of decreasing shareholder value by $133 million. Apart from $191 million in excess cash[https://www.newconstructs.com/excess-cash-2/], the largest adjustment to shareholder value was $127 million in underfunded pensions[https://www.newconstructs.com/pension-net-funded-status/]. This pension adjustment represents 2% of Elanco’s proposed market cap.

David Trainer is the CEO of New Constructs[https://www.newconstructs.com/], an independent equity research firm that uses machine learning and natural language processing to parse corporate filings and model economic earnings. Kyle Guske II and Sam McBride are investment analysts at New Constructs. New Constructs doesn’t have a position in Eli Lilly or Elanco and doesn’t do any business with Eli Lilly. The firm doesn’t perform any investment-banking functions and doesn’t operate a trading desk. Follow them on Twitter @NewConstructs[https://twitter.com/NewConstructs].

Researchers have found a way to solve one of the big problems of sodium-based batteries

Lithium is an important component in almost all modern rechargeable batteries. The problem is that the world's supply of it is limited, it's expensive and has a negative impact on the environment.

Sodium, on the other hand, is abundant and cheaper. But batteries based on sodium-ion technology have so far not proved to be practical.

The problem with sodium batteries so far has been that that the ions get "lost" during the first few charging cycles, getting stuck to the anode within the battery.

Scientists develop a DRUG that prevents weight gain, in a 'major step' towards combating obesity[https://www.mirror.co.uk/tech/scientists-develop-drug-prevents-weight-13116426]

This creates a buildup which in turn prevents the ions from being able to travel back to the cathode. This means the batteries can't be charged again.

Researchers at Purdmiue University have been granted a provisional patent on a method that prevents this happening.

The used an ultrasound to melt sodium chunks into a milky purple liquid. When it cooled into a powder the scientists placed it in a suspension and then applied it to the battery's electrodes.

The process allowed the battery cell to charge and discharge with more stability and at higher capacities.

Sodium-ion batteries would be heavier than their lithium-ion counterparts, so they may not be suitable for all applications. They would, however, be useful for storing energy generated by renewable sources.

Household cleaning products can make children gain WEIGHT by altering their gut bacteria[https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/household-cleaning-products-can-make-13272563]

Creepy robot child bleeds and moans with pain to help train doctors

A key problem with solar and wind power is that they aren't constantly available. Using massive batteries to store power until it's needed would help make renewable energy more reliable.

They could also be used for in-home power storage for people using solar roof panels. These are becoming more popular thanks to advances in technology which allow them to generate more power.

Two decades ago, scientists started to tinker with biology like engineers with electronics. Now, they’ve created a ‘living medicine’ to cure a rare genetic disorder. But what does the future hold?

In a study carried out over the summer, a group of volunteers drank a white, peppermint-ish concoction laced with billions of bacteria. The microbes had been engineered to break down a naturally occurring toxin in the blood.

The vast majority of us can do this without any help. But for those who cannot, these microbes may someday become a living medicine.

The trial marks an important milestone in a promising scientific field known as synthetic biology. Two decades ago, researchers started to tinker with living things the way engineers tinker with electronics.

Read more

Thousands call for Science Museum to drop controversial Shell sponsors

They took advantage of the fact that genes typically do not work in isolation. Instead, many genes work together, activating and deactivating one another. Synthetic biologists manipulated these communications, creating cells that respond to new signals or respond in new ways.

Until now, the biggest effect has been industrial. Companies are using engineered bacteria as miniature factories, assembling complex molecules like antibiotics or compounds used to make clothing.

In recent years, though, a number of research teams have turned their attention inward. They want to use synthetic biology to fashion microbes that enter our bodies and treat us from the inside.

The bacterial concoction that volunteers drank this summer – tested by the company Synlogic – may become the first synthetic biology-based medical treatment to gain approval fromthe Food and Drug Administration.

The bacteria isdesigned to treat a rare inherited disease called phenylketonuria, or PKU. People with the condition must avoid dietary protein in foods such as meat and cheese, because their bodies cannot break down a byproduct, an amino acid called phenylalanine.

As phenylalanine builds up in the blood, it can damage neurons in the brain, leading to delayed development, intellectual disability and psychiatric disorders. The traditional treatment for PKU is a strict low-protein diet, accompanied by shakes loaded with nutritional supplements.

But in experiments on mice and monkeys, Synlogic’s bacteria showed promise as an alternative treatment. On Tuesday, company investigators announced positive results in a clinical trial with healthy volunteers.

The researchers are now going forward with a trial on people with PKU and expect to report initial results next year.

Tal Danino, a synthetic biologist at Columbia University, says that a number of other researchers are working on similar projects, but no one has moved forward as fast as Synlogic. “They’re leading the charge,” he says.

One of Synlogic’s cofounders, James Collins, a synthetic biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, published one of synthetic biology’s first proofs of principle in 2000.

He and his colleagues endowed Ecoli bacteria with a way to turn a gene on and off when they were exposed to certain chemicals – “like a light switch for genes”, Collins says.

At first, the scientists envisioned using rewired bacteria as environmental sensors – perhaps detecting airborne biological weapons and producing a chemical signal in response. But then came the microbiome.

Drugs that can drive down levels of phenylalanine only work in a fraction of patients (

Shutterstock

)

In the mid-2000s, microbiologists began charting our inner menagerie of microbes, the vast diversity of organisms that live inside healthy people. The microbiome is continually carrying out complex biochemistry, some of which helps shield us from diseases, scientists found.

Synthetic biologists soon began wondering whether they could add engineered bacteria to the mix – perhaps as internal sensors for signs of disease, or even as gut-based factories that make drugs the body needs.

“You can’t overestimate the impact of the microbiome work,” says Jeff Hasty, a former student of Collins who now runs his own lab at the University of California, San Diego. “That, in a nutshell, changed everything.”

Collins and Timothy Lu, another synthetic biologist at MIT, cofounded Synlogic in 2013, and the company began looking for diseases to take on. One of their picks was PKU, which affects 16,500 people in the United States.

Drugs have recently become available that can drive down levels of phenylalanine. But they only work in a fraction of patients, and they come with side effects of their own.

“The current tools that we have available are not good enough,” says Christine Brown, the executive director of the National PKU Alliance.

For years, researchers have explored treating PKU with gene therapy, hoping to insert working versions of the defective gene, called PAH, into a patient’s own cells. But the approach has not moved beyond studies in mice.

To Synlogic, PKU looked like a ripe opportunity to use synthetic biology to create a treatment that might gain government approval.

Company researchers selected a harmless strain of Ecoli that has been studied for more than a century. “Most people have healthy, good Ecoli in their intestinal tracts,” says Paul Miller, the chief scientific officer of Synlogic.

The researchers inserted genes into the bacteria’s DNA so that once they arrived in the gut, they could break down phenylalanine like our own cells do.

One of the new genes encodes a pump that the bacteria use to suck up phenylalanine around them. A second gene encodes an enzyme that breaks down the phenylalanine into fragments. The bacteria then release the fragments, which get washed out in urine.

The Synlogic team wanted the microbes to break down phenylalanine only in the right place and at the right time in the human body. So they engineered the bacteria to keep their phenylalanine genes shut down if they sensed high levels of oxygen around them.

Only when they arrived in a place with little oxygen – the gut – did they turn on their engineered genes.

To test the bacteria, the researchers created mice with the mutation that causes PKU. When the mice received a dose of the bacteria, the phenylalanine in their blood dropped by 38 per cent, compared with mice without the microbes.

The researchers also tried out the bacteria on healthy monkeys. When monkeys without the microbes ate a high-protein diet, they experienced a spike of phenylalanine in their blood. The monkeys with engineered bacteria in their guts experienced only a gentle bump.

For their human trial, Synlogic recruited healthy people to swallow the bacteria. Some took a single dose, while others drank increasingly large ones over the course of a week. After ingesting the bacteria, the volunteers drank a shake or ate solid food high in protein.

On Tuesday, Synlogic announced that the trial had demonstrated people could safely tolerate the bacteria. In addition, the more bacteria they ingested, the more bits of phenylalanine wound up in their urine – a sign the bacteria was doing its job.

The next step will be to see if the microbes can lower phenylalanine levels in people with PKU.

“I’m amazed at how fast we got to where we are,” says Collins, who was not involved in Synlogic’s PKU research.

In July, Danino and his colleagues published a review in the journal

Cell Systems

, cataloguing a number of other disorders that researchers are designing synthetic microbes to treat, including inflammation and infections.

Read more

Healthy people may be ‘resistant’ to ‘good’ bacteria in probiotics

What is E coli and what are the symptoms of infection?

Superbug warning as bacteria resist strong alcohol hand sanitisers

​Danino and Hasty are currently collaborating on another project: how to use synthetic biology against cancer.

One huge challenge in developing drugs for cancer is that they often fail to penetrate tumours. But microbiome researchers have discovered that natural bacteria regularly infiltrate tumours and grow inside them.

Now scientists are engineering bacteria that can also make their way into tumours. Once there, they will unload molecules that attract immune cells, which the researchers hope will kill the cancer.

“I think anywhere there are bacteria in the body is an opportunity to engineer them to do something else,” says Danino.

©

The New York Times

VANCOUVER—Doctors at a Vancouver lab are developing a treatment for Crohn's disease that they say could lead to a permanent cure — and it all began when a pancreatic cancer patient made a mysterious recovery.

The second phase of trials are currently underway in B.C. and Ontario.

Dr. Hal Gunn, professor and founder of biotech company Qu Biologics, said the results from the first phase have shown surprising promise.

Seven of the 12 patients went into remission after treatment was stopped, and three are still in remission — evidence of the possibility of a cure, he said.

“We believe it has the potential to be transformative in Crohn's disease,” Gunn said.

“We have the potential here to create sustained remission or even a cure, for patients who have gone off the medication.”

Affecting one in 150 Canadians, Crohn's disease is a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that can cause abdominal pain, diarrhea and bloating and can be debilitating to some patients.

The disease is caused by an immune disorder, and many patients must take immune-suppressing medications for life in order to control the disease, sometimes leading to negative side effects.

The idea for the new medication came about unexpectedly.

At the InspireHealth cancer care centre, which Gunn also founded, he noticed a curious occurrence: A patient with pancreatic cancer seemed to be getting sicker and sicker — until the person came down with an infection. Then the tumours surprisingly shrank.

They discovered the patient was one of three people whose cancer spontaneously regressed following an infection and fever.

This was an indicator that causing an immune response could help restore the function of the immune system and fight disease — and Gunn began to look into other illnesses that could benefit from the discovery.

“It is a very different way of thinking about treating the disease,” said Gunn. “We think we've discovered the underlying mechanism.”

Gunn said the treatment works in a similar way to vaccines, by forcing the immune system into a beneficial response.

The new Crohn's drug is derived from “a component of E. coli,” which is used to prompt an immune response in the gut.

Called QBECO SSI (Site Specific Immunomodulators), the treatment is intended to restore normal immune function and ideally reverse the chronic inflammation causing Crohn's.

The drug comes in an injectable form that is self-administered every two days.

While the first phase of the clinical trial has shown good results, other IBD experts warn patients not to expect a cure to hit the market any time soon, as many trials can initially show positive results.

“It is extremely premature to call it a cure for Crohn's just yet. There are hundreds of trials, and while many are positive, most don't make it to market,” said Dr. Laura Targownik, the director of gastroenterology at the University of Manitoba.

“As scientists, we are always excited when people are looking at novel ways of treating a disease,” she said.

“But I wouldn't say it's the only one that's unique. There are a lot of different treatments being explored ... There is a lot of work happening with fecal transplantation or probiotic therapies, for example.”

Cherise Seucharan is a Vancouver-based reporter covering health and safety/youth. Follow her on Twitter: @CSeucharan[https://twitter.com/CSeucharan]

VANCOUVER—Doctors at a Vancouver lab are developing a treatment for Crohn's disease that they say could lead to a permanent cure — and it all began when a pancreatic cancer patient made a mysterious recovery.

The second phase of trials are currently underway in B.C. and Ontario. Dr. Hal Gunn, professor and founder of biotech company Qu Biologics, said that the results from the first phase have shown surprising promise. Seven of the 12 patients went into remission after treatment was stopped, and three are still in remission — evidence of the possibility of a cure, he said.

“We believe it has the potential to be transformative in Crohn's disease,” Gunn said. “We have the potential here to create sustained remission or even a cure, for patients who have gone off the medication.”

Affecting one in 150 Canadians, Crohn's disease is a type of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) that can cause abdominal pain, diarrhea and bloating and can be debilitating to some patients. The disease is caused by an immune disorder, and many patients must take immune-suppressing medications for life in order to control the disease, sometimes leading to negative side effects.

The idea for the new medication came about unexpectedly. At the InspireHealth cancer care centre, which Gunn also founded, he noticed a curious occurrence: a patient with pancreatic cancer who seemed to be getting sicker and sicker — until they came down with an infection. Then the tumours surprisingly shrank.

They discovered that the patient was one of three people whose cancer spontaneously regressed following an infection and fever. This was an indicator that causing an immune response could help restore the function of the immune system and fight disease — and Dr. Gunn began to look into other illnesses that could benefit from the discovery.

“It is a very different way of thinking about treating the disease,” said Gunn. “We think we've discovered the underlying mechanism.”

Gunn said the treatment works similar to vaccines, by forcing the immune system into a beneficial response.

The new Crohn's drug is derived from “a component of E. coli,” which is used to prompt an immune response in the gut. Called QBECO SSI (Site Specific Immunomodulators), the treatment is intended to restore normal immune function and ideally reverse the chronic inflammation causing Crohn's. The drug comes in an injectable form that is self-administered every two days.

While the first phase of the clinical trial has shown good results, other IBD experts warn patients not to expect a cure to hit the market any time soon, as many trials can initially show positive results.

“It is extremely premature to call it a cure for Crohn's just yet. There are hundreds of trials, and while many are positive, most don't make it to market,” said Dr. Laura Targownik, the director of Gastroenterology at the University of Manitoba.

“As scientists we are always excited when people are looking at novel ways of treating a disease,” she said. “But I wouldn't say it's the only one that's unique. There are a lot of different treatments being explored ... There is a lot of work happening with fecal transplantation or probiotic therapies, for example.”

Cherise Seucharan is a Vancouver-based reporter covering health and safety/youth. Follow her on Twitter: @CSeucharan[https://twitter.com/CSeucharan]

Dear Dr. Roach: I am a faithful reader of your column, but I don't read many questions about brain tumours. I am 53 years old, diagnosed almost four years ago with multiple meningiomas.

I had an atypical meningioma removed, followed up with gamma knife. My question is whether I will be at a greater risk for Alzheimer's disease or Parkinson's disease because of these brain tumours.

J.Z.

A meningioma is a type of tumour of the lining of the brain. It is considered a brain tumour, but is most commonly benign. You had an atypical meningioma, which, though still benign, is closer to a rare (one to three per cent) malignant (cancerous) meningioma. Meningiomas, even those that are malignant, rarely spread, but they are harder to completely eradicate.

Treatment for benign meningiomas is with surgery, usually preferred if the tumour is in a location where surgery is possible, or with radiation if surgery is difficult or impossible. Gamma knife is a precision type of radiation treatment. Atypical meningiomas often are treated with both surgery and followup radiation to reduce the risk of recurrence.

Because the tumours are on the outside of the brain, not brain tissue itself, the tumours and surgery should not increase your risk of Alzheimer's or Parkinson's disease. However, a review of studies showed that many people with meningiomas do have some decrease in some areas of brain function before treatment. This may be due to pressure of the tumour on the brain.

Brain tissue is relatively resistant to radiation. Although high doses of radiation to the whole brain can cause memory issues (but still not Alzheimer's disease), the smaller amount of radiation from gamma knife and the limited area of the brain affected make development of dementia (like Alzheimer's) or Parkinson's unlikely. In the same large study on meningioma patients, treatment actually improved brain function.

Dear Dr. Roach: Your recent column regarding probiotics was very interesting. While I would think that following the Mediterranean diet is excellent advice, for folks like myself, with IBS, it isn't a totally doable thing. Therefore, the questions asked by the writer are important: "Does the number of bacteria matter more than the types listed on the container? Does one take them daily, for a brief time period, or for extended time periods?

" P.J.S.

My column on healthy bacteria in the gut noted that a healthy diet, such as the Mediterranean diet, induces a change in the microbiome associated with better health outcomes. But P.J.S. is right that this diet isn't right for everyone.

I do not recommend probiotics for everybody. In fact, for people with no gut symptoms, probiotics are unnecessary. However, they have been shown to be useful in some gastrointestinal conditions, such as inflammatory bowel disease and irritable bowel syndrome.

There are no good studies to directly answer your question about type versus concentration of bacteria. However, my suspicion is that the type of bacteria is more likely to matter: Examples of probiotics that have some evidence showing improvement in IBS include Bifidobacterium infantis and Lactobacillus salivarius. Other species of the same bacterial genus also have shown benefit. My clinical experience with probiotics is that what works for one person may not work for another.

The trials using these probiotics generally lasted four to eight weeks. As the goal is to change the types of bacteria living in the gut, a general recommendation is taking them only four to eight weeks. At least one study showed that symptoms continued to improve a year after finishing the probiotics.

A new study has revealed that these cleaning products disrupt children’s gut flora, which in turn can make them gain weight

If you regularly use household cleaning products, you could subconsciously be making your children[https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/babies]gain weight[https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/obesity].

A new study has revealed that these cleaning products disrupt children’s gut flora, which in turn can make them gain weight.

Researchers from the University of Alberta[https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/university-of-alberta]analysed the gut flora of 757 children at age 3-4 months, and weight at ages 1 and 3.

They also looked at which disinfectants, detergents and eco-friendly products were used in the children’s homes.

People with deep forehead WRINKLES are more likely to die of heart disease, study reveals[https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/people-deep-forehead-wrinkles-more-13152816]

The analysis revealed that babies living in homes that frequently used disinfectants had higher levels of Lachnospiraceae bacteria, but lower levels of Haemophilus and Clostridium bacteria.

And when these babies were 3 years old, they were heavier than children not exposed to disinfectants.

Anita Kazyrskyj, who led the study, said: “We found that infants living in households with disinfectants being used at least weekly were twice as likely to have higher levels of the gut microbes Lachnospiraceae at age 3-4 months; when they were 3 years old, their body mass index was higher than children not exposed to heavy home use of disinfectants as an infant.”

Jet-air hand dryers spread more germs than hand-towels and should be BANNED, scientists claim[https://www.mirror.co.uk/science/jet-air-hand-dryers-spread-13206472]

This Morning: Plus-size model Tess Holliday hits back at Piers Morgan who branded her Cosmopolitan cover 'celebrating obesity'

However, babies growing up in houses using eco-friendly alternatives did not see the same weight-gain effects.

Ms Kazyrskyj added: “Those infants growing up in households with heavy use of eco cleaners had much lower levels of the gut microbes Enterobacteriaceae. However, we found no evidence that these gut microbiome changes caused the reduced obesity risk.”

The researchers hope the findings will encourage more households to switch to eco-friendly alternatives.

Seemingly "healthy" organic and children's yogurts contain the highest amount of sugar, a new study published yesterday in BMJ Open[https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/8/e021387] has warned.

Scientists from the University of Leeds and the University of Surrey analysed 921 yogurts available in UK supermarkets, and found that a typical yogurt contains more than half an adult’s daily recommended sugar allowance.

Almost no products marketed at children are low in sugar (some even may contain more sugar than Coca Cola[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/09/19/supermarket-yoghurts-contain-sugar-coke-study-warns/] ), and apart from dessert-style puds, those labelled as organic contained the most (an average of 13.1g per 100g).

With the exception of natural, Greek and ‘Greek-style’ yogurts, the average sugar levels in yogurt were well above the 5g of sugar per 100g threshold required to be classed ‘low sugar’.

"Items labelled ‘organic’ are often thought of as the ‘healthiest’ option, but they may be an unrecognised source of added sugars in many people’s diets,” said lead author Dr Bernadette Moore, from the School of Food Science and Nutrition[https://physicalsciences.leeds.ac.uk/info/5/school_of_food_science_and_nutrition] at the University of Leeds.

Only two of 101 children’s yogurt and fromage frais products surveyed could be classified as low in sugar“Many of the products suggested for children’s lunchboxes were high sugar," she added. The NHS recommends[https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/how-does-sugar-in-our-diet-affect-our-health/] that four to six-year-olds should have no more than 19 grams of sugar a day.

Only two of 101 children’s yogurt and fromage frais products surveyed could be classified as low in sugar, with the majority having an average of 10.8 grams per 100 grams.

A single pot of yogurt can contain the entirety of a child's daily sugar allowance, health officials have warned previously[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/23/single-yoghurt-can-max-out-childrens-daily-sugar-allowance-officials/], and a number of major brands have been found by Public Health Liverpool to contain the equivalent of almost five sugar cubes.

At a time when obesity[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obesity/] is on the rise, rotting teeth cost 60,000 school days[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/06/rotting-teeth-now-costs-60000-school-days-year-says-government/] a year and the Soft Drinks Industry Levy[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/can-sugar-taxes-solve-obesity-diabetes/] (also known as the sugar tax) is whipping Britain's drinks industry into shape, should we all be just as wary about the amount of yogurt we're consuming as we are fizzy drinks and chocolate bars?

The new study highlights the mixed messages that come from the marketing of yogurt products, so it pays to be sleuth-like in the supermarket aisle. But should you strike it off the shopping list completely - and if not, how can you tell deceptively high sugar yogurt from low sugar yogurt?

Yogurt itself is a nutritional powerhouse as part of a balanced diet, so there's no need to cut it out: according to the study co-author Dr Barbara Fielding, from the University of Surrey, yogurt can be a great source of protein, calcium, iodine and vitamin B12.

Fermented dairy products have long been considered to be beneficial to digestive health, and yogurt has even been associated with lower risk of obesity and cardiometabolic risk in both children and adults.

Natural, ‘plain’ and Greek-style yogurts were found to have a dramatically different nutrient profile from all other categories, containing much higher levels of protein, lower carbohydrates level and the least amount of sugar, with the average of five grams per 100g, largely made up of naturally-occurring lactose.

It could be wise to stick to these. According to registered nutritionist Clarissa Lenherr[http://www.clarissalenherr.com/], it's not yogurt itself that's the problem, but what's added to it. "Avoid any yogurt that claims to taste like a dessert, especially one that says it is fat-free but that it tastes like banoffee pie," she says. "The reason these yogurts taste 'good' is that they have been packed full of sugars and/or sweeteners to replace the fats that have been stripped from them.

At a glance | How much sugar is there in your yoghurt?[https://cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk/93dbb2b0-1fbc-4959-a7e1-3d618bf9bf70.html]"Commercial yogurts tend to be pumped with sugar and fruit purées to make them taste more like a dessert and less like a breakfast staple. By adding sugars to the mix, you are potentially causing your blood sugar levels to rise, which will start your day on a blood sugar rollercoaster, leading to less energy, more cravings and of course, hunger."

Lenherr says you should look for yogurts that contain 4-6g of sugar per 100g serving, as this is roughly the amount of natural sugars that are present in dairy products. Anything over that is most likely added 'free' sugar. "The best option is to choose plain, unsweetened, whole fat yogurt and top with fresh fruit," she adds.

The nutritionist says we should be wary of yogurts purporting to be flavoured with 'real fruit': "This often comes from concentrated fruit sources which still represent a significant amount of sugar. Watch out for the other names for sugar such as dextrose, maltose, and barley malt, to name a few.

Pure yogurt is supposed to have two ingredients: organic milk and live cultures"Most commercial yogurts are also packed with additives such as stabilisers, colour and artificial flavouring. Avoid products that have ingredients you can’t read or recognise. The less, the better.

"Pure yogurt is supposed to have two ingredients: organic milk and live cultures."

The good news is that yogurt in its most simple form can be good for you: "Yogurt can be a fantastic addition to a healthy and well-balanced diet, as long as you choose the right kind, and don’t suffer from an allergy, intolerance or condition that might be worsened by consuming dairy. It's a great choice for breakfast, as it offers a source of protein, fats and vitamins.

"Yogurt with live cultures offers us a rich source of probiotics, which are crucial for our gut health, and strengthen our digestive system and gut flora by providing good bacteria to help populate the gut. This supports digestion, immune system health and the creation of certain essential vitamins, such as Vitamin B12,[https://www.telegraph.co.uk/health-fitness/body/vitamin-b12-symptoms-deficiency/] that we need for balanced bodily function."

But it's these "good for your gut" live cultures which produce a natural sourness - which might be why sugar is so often over-used as a sweetener.

"Children are more likely to crave added flavour when it comes to yogurt, but adding fresh fruit or pure honey yourself is the best way to flavour it," suggests Lenherr. "In many Middle Eastern countries, full-fat yoghurt is eaten with olive oil, herbs and seasoning, which is a great healthy option for those without a sweet tooth."

What about full fat versus low fat? "The fat in dairy products is what makes them satiating, and by stripping dairy products of their fat, you are also reducing the amount of Vitamin A and D that they contain. Both are crucial vitamins and both are fat-soluble, which means that they need fat to be absorbed.

"So, even when you choose low-fat dairy products that have been fortified with these vitamins, you may not even be absorbing them, due to the fact that the product has little fat left in it.

Are you vitamin deficient? The small signs that indicate your body is craving a vital nutrient[https://cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk/7048f660-2192-4fcc-a43a-09986d862779.html]"Studies suggest that those who regularly consume high-fat dairy products are likely to experience a higher level of weight loss, than those who opt for lower fat dairy or dairy alternatives such as margarine."

Despite the worrying amount of sugars added to some yogurts, Lenherr stresses that there are naturally occurring sugars in yogurt, which aren't so much of a concern. "Don’t take every gram on the label to heart," she urges. "Dairy products have naturally occurring sugars in them, so even some plain unsweetened yogurts will still have an amount of sugar in their nutritional breakdown."

This piece was originally published in 2017 and has been updated and republished to include new research out this week.

This morning, Indigo Agriculture[https://www.indigoag.com/] closed its Series E funding, bringing in $250 million and officially launching the Indigo Marketplace[https://www.indigoag.com/indigo-marketplace], a digital market that directly connects farmers and buyers.

It’s an ambitious next step for a company that made its name by bucking the norm. Founded in 2014, Indigo set out to apply advances in microbiology to agriculture. Just as the human microbiome provides a wealth of symbiotic benefits, Indigo worked to develop bacterial microbiomes for crops to ensure strong yields with fewer inputs. If biotech research and digital marketplaces seem to fall into different worlds, they’re both working toward the same goal: shaking up the dominant trends in agriculture to benefit farmers, consumers and the environment.

“The current system of agriculture was created about a hundred years ago,” says David Perry, Indigo’s CEO. “We’ve come a long way since then. Indigo’s core hypothesis is ‘We don’t have to do it that way anymore.’”

The Indigo Marketplace is intuitive. Growers register and provide information on their crops, and buyers build profiles with their specific preferences. They’re matched based on location, supply and demand and then agree on price and quantity. The pitch is straightforward. For growers, the marketplace promises greater transparency, making them less captive to opaque local prices. It also lets them connect with specialty buyers willing to pay more for a particular variety. For buyers, it gives them the chance to directly source crops with extraordinary amounts of detail. That translates into profits for both.

“Consumers are increasingly interested in where their food comes from and how it’s produced. The evidence for that is ‘organic.’ The consumer has much more information at the time of purchase: Was it treated with chemicals? Was it irrigated?” Perry says.

Mark Bryant, who farms outside Washington Court House, Ohio, has worked with Indigo for a year and half. “We’re early adopters. We were involved with Granular when it started. We helped beta test it. We’ve always looked for companies that think outside the box. That’s what really intrigued us about Indigo.”

Earlier this summer, Bryant registered with the Marketplace, a process that took only three days after he’d conducted a full inventory. Once his grain was tested by Indigo’s partner lab, he was ready to start selling. (The process is similar for buyers; Indigo estimates a registration period of three days for financial due diligence.)

The process might seem familiar to users of a different sort of matching app. The grower sets a radius, and the app begins connecting them to potential buyers in the selected area. Also like dating apps, the Marketplace employs a freemium model. The base platform is free to use for buyers and sellers, with additional pricing and matching services for a fee.

Bryant’s not alone. Since the early rollout in June, Indigo says thousands of growers and over a thousand buyers have registered with the Indigo Marketplace. “I’ve been in farming since I got out of high school in 1983. It’s amazing to me the splash that Indigo has made in the agriculture community,” Bryant says.

There are still substantial barriers. Traditional retailers and buyers are often in the same community as growers and have long-standing business relationships. Plus, they’re looking to go digital as well.

“Growers are consumers, too. They’ve had experience with Amazon. They’ve grown used to online commerce,” notes Rob Dongoski, a partner at EY Agribusiness. “[For retailers], it’s not a question of ‘Should we do digital?’ [They] have to be digital.”

With traditional markets stepping up their game, Indigo will have to keep elevating its own. It already provides agronomic assistance, quality testing, and farm storage for partners, and Perry hints at more services down the line. If this latest round of funding is any indication, investors are confident it will deliver.

Sept 18 (Reuters) - Coca-Cola Co said on Tuesday it bought Australia-based Organic & Raw Trading Co, known for its Mojo brand of kombucha tea, extending its push into healthier drinks.

The world's largest drinks company has been increasingly diversifying its portfolio to include healthier options such as sparkling waters as consumers move away from sugary sodas.

Organic & Raw's Mojo kombucha is a naturally fermented tea.

Coke has been on a deal spree, ranging from a $5.1 billion acquisition of coffee chain Costa to a minority stake in a Kobe Bryant-backed sports drink brand BodyArmor last month. The company is also among the bidder for GlaxoSmithKline's Indian Horlicks nutrition business, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

The soda maker also said on Monday it was closely watching the fast-growing marijuana drinks market for a possible entry.

The latest deal, the terms for which were not disclosed, will allow Coca-Cola to add Mojo brands to its portfolio of 165 products and 25 brands across Australia.

"The addition of Mojo kombucha fits perfectly with the growing popularity of organic, probiotic drinks," Vamsi Mohan, president of Coca-Cola Australia, said in a statement. (Reporting by Soundarya J in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel)

* Coca-Cola [https://www.businessinsider.com/category/coca-cola?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]has acquired Australian kombucha-maker[https://www.businessinsider.com/category/kombucha?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest] Organic & Raw Trading Co, which produces MOJO kombucha.

* The purchase of the company marks Coca-Cola's first ever acquisition of a kombucha brand.

* Coca-Cola is increasingly diversifying its portfolio and investing in brands that are seen as healthier alternatives to soda as drinkers ditch sugary beverages.

Coca-Cola has acquired a company that makes kombucha, a fermented tea beverage that contains living bacteria.

On Tuesday, the soda giant announced it had acquired Organic & Raw Trading Co., which makes the MOJO brand of Kombucha. The purchase of the maker of MOJO, which is best-known in Australia, marks Coca-Cola's first ever acquisition of a kombucha brand.

Coca-Cola has been increasingly diversifying its portfolio beyond soda beverages in recent years.

In August, the company announced it is taking a minority stake in sports-drink brand BODYARMOR, the beverage giant announced on Tuesday. Other investments include Topo Chico,[https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-secret-weapon-is-topo-chico-2018-6?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest] a sparkling-water brand, and Zico, a coconut-water brand.[https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-bets-on-coconut-water-2018-3?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

The investments come at a time when people are increasingly moving away from sugary sodas.

Coke[http://markets.businessinsider.com/stocks/ko-stock?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest] and Pepsi[http://markets.businessinsider.com/stocks/pep-stock?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest] brands declined 2% and 4.5%, respectively, by volume in the US in 2017, according to Beverage Digest. Meanwhile, other beverages that are seen as healthier or that present certain health benefits, such as bottled water, are experiencing significant growth.

While kombucha is still on the cusp of mainstream growth, sales have exploded in recent years. In the US, retail sales of refrigerated kombucha and other fermented beverages grew a whopping 37.4% to $556 million in 2017, according to a conference of kombucha brewers[https://www.foodnavigator-usa.com/Article/2018/02/13/Fermentation-on-fire-US-retail-sales-of-kombucha-and-other-fermented-beverages-surged-37.4-in-2017#] (called KombuchaKon) organized earlier this year.

Kombucha fans have been drawn to the beverage in part because it is rich in antioxidants and probiotics, living bacteria with positive health benefits. However, the drink isn't without its skeptics, [https://www.businessinsider.com/is-kombucha-good-for-you-2018-7?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]who point to the fact that some of the benefits have been over-hyped and that certain brands contain a surprising amount of sugar and small amounts of alcohol.

NOW WATCH: How Publishers Clearing House makes $1 billion a year[https://www.businessinsider.com/publishers-clearing-house-1-billion-company-sweepstakes-lawsuit-data-digital-direct-mail-2018-8?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

See Also:

* Zara has completely altered daily life for this sleepy Spanish town. Here's what residents think about it.[https://www.businessinsider.com/zara-transforms-life-in-la-coruna-2018-9?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

* We visited 123-year-old luxury store Henri Bendel the day after it announced it would close, signaling the end of an era for retail[https://www.businessinsider.com/henri-bendel-closing-as-retail-changes-2018-9?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

* Walmart and Amazon are doubling down on fashion, setting the scene for their next big battle[https://www.businessinsider.com/walmart-and-amazon-go-head-to-head-on-fashion-2018-9?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

SEE ALSO: Coca-Cola is using a sparkling-water brand with a cult following to take over a $16 billion industry[https://www.businessinsider.com/coca-cola-secret-weapon-is-topo-chico-2018-6?utm_source=dowjones&utm_medium=ingest]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:00:00] KRISTIE LU STOUT, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Kristie Lu Stout in Hong Kong and welcome to "News Stream."

Digging for survivors. Crews in the Philippines search for dozens of miners missing in the wake of typhoon Mangkhut.

The accuser speaks out. A claim against Brett Kavanaugh threatens to hinder his U.S. Supreme Court confirmation.

And a star (inaudible) missing. Why the disappearance of one of China's most famous actresses has some pointing the finger at the communist party.

The strongest storm the world has seen this year is carving a deadly path through southeast Asia. In the Philippines, dozens are feared buried in a landslide after typhoon Mangkhut slammed the country. The official death toll stands at 54. The typhoon moved north over the weekend lashing Hong Kong with winds of over 175 miles an hour and flooding the streets of the casino hub Macau.

On Sunday it mad landfall in mainland China, four deaths reported so far there. Now authorities say they have evacuated more than three million people, more the devastation in China and Hongkong in just a moment. But first, let's get an update on the ongoing rescue operations in the Philippines.

And we are joined on the line by national program officer of the international organization of migration Conrad Navidad. He is in the city of Baguio not far from the epicenter of the landslide in Itogon. And Conrad, thank you for joining us. Talk about what is happening in Itogon. We have this desperate rescue operation underway to find dozens of people buried under the mud there. Do you believe that some of the missing could still be found alive?

CONRAD NAVIDAD, NATIONAL PROGRAM OFFICER, IOM (via telephone): Hello Kristie. So, we went to Itogon, Benguet this morning and we talked to the officials on this thing but it's only a miracle if, you know, some of these missing persons have survived, but as of this afternoon they have declared -- they have announced that there were -- there are 25 -- 35 deaths and 68 persons missing.

LU STOUT: Unfortunately, it feels as if the death toll is only going to rise. We need a miracle here in this rescue operation. (Inaudible), could you tell us more about who was involved in this rescue effort and what are they doing, what kind of tools are they using to try find the missing?

NAVIDAD: So right now it's the government who is leading the search and rescue operations, assisted by some volunteer groups. And as you can see in the videos, in the pictures, so they're doing it most of the time manually because of the difficulty of transporting the excavators and heavy equipment into the bottom of the valley where the destruction happened.

Like where the bunk house are buried by landslides. So right now the search and rescue operation is ongoing and it's a very difficult process and it's led by the government.

LU STOUT: Yes, a very difficult, delicate process is being led by the government right now. I'm trying to understand why these people found themselves in this situation where they would be vulnerable to a landslide and being buried alive. Leading up to the super typhoon residents they were urged to evacuate. Did many people just not listen to that advice and why?

NAVIDAD: Yes, the government did very well in providing early warning to the population and in this particular town we were told by one local official that no less than the mayor himself and his DRR officials trained for that place and asked the people to evacuate.

But apparently they were met with some men in that place saying that they're going to evacuate, but they lied. During the typhoon they invited some members of their family, around 40 to 50 people in that bunk house and that's when the disaster struck.

LU STOUT: Understood. Conrad Navidad of the IOM joining us live on the line from Baguio. Thank you so much for giving us an update on this urgent happening right now. Rescue operation under way in the northern Philippines in the aftermath of that super typhoon. Thank you, sir, and take care.

[08:05:04] Now here in Hong Kong, meanwhile, we're facing a major cleanup from the storm. And earlier today, we went out to survey the damage.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

LU STOUT (voice-over): Nature's turn to defy gravity in high-rise Hong Kong. Four story waves licked the sides of skyscrapers as typhoon Mangkhut struck here on Sunday. Fresh water cut off, but residence of this towers emerged on Monday unscathed after the most intense storm on earth this year.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We imagined that if people are around certainly they are going to draw back to the city and they are not going to survive that.

LUS TOUT: Hong Kong's steel and concrete skyline largely stood up to typhoon Mangkhut. A very different reality outside the, big city. Here at beach side villages like Shekou which bore the brunt of typhoon Mangkhut, buildings here turned to rubble, the first indication that Hong Kong's cleanup will be long and arduous.

And that traditional seaside communities may have lost the most. Betty Tsang has lived at the beach at Shekou for 65 years, nowhere to go in the storm, she watched as it destroyed the only home she has ever known. She says she cannot begin to consider the future.

BETTY TSANG, SHEKOU RESIDENT: (Inaudible)

LU STOUT: Many from Hong Kong's fishing communities emptied into typhoon shelters unsure of whether seaside shacks and cottages could survive. As Mangkhut moved west of Hong Kong the weakening storm remains deadly. At least four killed in Guangdong Province on the Chinese mainland.

In Macau, as the streets empty of floodwaters, the lights of casino town are beginning to blink back on and an entire region begins to count its losses.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

(on-camera): Many across the region coming to terms with devastating loss. Now, let's get the very latest on the storm with Chad Myers. He joins us from the World Weather Center. And Chad, let's talk about Mangkhut. Where is it now and what's left of the storm?

CHAD MYERS, CNN METEOROLOGIST: There is not much left to be very, very honest and it's no southern China. Now, there are still some showers along the coast, part of those outer arms of any type of typhoon, cyclone or hurricane, but really the intensity of the wind is over and for a while hitting Luzon in Philippines was 270 kilometers per hour.

Hard to imagine the destruction there, and also the waves that were coming on shore there in Luzon as well. So tere it goes, it is moving away. I guess this is just the remnants here, a couple of showers still around Hong Kong still, but that's it. The rest of the accumulation is going to be less than 100 millimeters.

So likely no more additional flooding but there are areas that are still very wet. You get another 50 millimeters, it still could mud slide. Here's that building you were showing here on your video with all of those windows absolutely missing. Many times what happens is that you pick up the stones from the ground and you can blow those stones in the air and they act like missiles knocking those windows out.

Here is what's left of a bamboo scaffold, had no choice but to fall down there. Obviously a lot of water also in Hong Kong, China, as well. Now, the storm was a big story for many people. This was a wide arm storm, almost 1,000 kilometers across at one point in time. Water (ph) 205 kilometers per hour in downtown Hong Kong because of that wind tunnel effect, those tall buildings making the wind funnel in between them and the wind really picked up there. We also picked up almost 300 millimeters of rainfall.

Now we take you back to where it really struck first. This is where we got the 270 kilometer per hour wind and the rain and the destruction and what we're going to see over the next few days is what we're still going to see. Look at this storm as it's moved on by. The water coming out of the ocean, the rain coming out of the clouds just making incredible amounts of devastation here.

I'm going to take you the area in case you're not familiar with it. We're going to go from Manila on up towards Luzon because what we're seeing here is not so much of (inaudible) storm is because it did have some water in the streets because of an inverse surge, but we are talking about the area here, the mountainous, (inaudible). This is the area -- notice the topography here.

And this is why it slid and this is why the landslides are maybe even continuing for a while. And this is where the miners are trapped and this is what we're going to see, people trying to evacuate this area, watch for more mudslides coming down because this may not be done. There's so much water on these mountains that this soil is a mud hole and this mud I going to want to slide back down because of gravity, Kristie.

LU STOUT: Yes, so much water there in the northern Philippines. It presents additional dangers, more dangers to come. Chad Myers,m reporting for us live. Thank you so much.

In the United States tropical depression Florence continues to hammer the Carolinas, pushing swollen rivers and streams and the emotions of those living near them to the breaking point. Three days after Florence slammed into North Carolina as a hurricane one official says the worst is yet to come.

[08:10:05] Erica Hill traveled to the Carolinas where she got an up close look at the devastation.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

ERICA HILL, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Rain measured in feeet. Rivers levels far above flood stage. Entire towns cut off. Florence pounding the Carolinas, leaving destruction and uncertainty in its wake.

ROY COPPER, GOVERNOR OF NORTH CAROLINA: Floodwaters are still raging across parts of our state and the risk to life is rising with the angry waters. This storm has never been more dangerous than it is right now.

HILL: Roads in and out of the city of Wilmington, home to nearly 120,000, impassable.

BILLSAFFO, MAYOR OF WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA: For those residents that are trying to get back to Wilmington, I know there are a lot of them, we ask you not to come at this time. Every single road coming back into the city of Wilmington, the county of New Hanover, is impassable.

HILL: In many areas, the all volunteer Cajun Navy stepping up to help along with teams from across the country, working with local officials and crews to answer calls for help. Through Sunday more than 900 water rescues in North Carolina alone.

SCOTT BUSCHMAN, COAST GUARD: As of this morning we have nine helicopters in the air and dozens of shallow water boats out there assisting people.

HILL: After days of pounding rain, there is little relief in sight. Lumberton, North Carolina, bracing after water seeps through a patched up gap in a temporary levee on Sunday afternoon. The Lumber River expected to crest today above 25 feet, inundating a city still recovering from hurricane Matthew two years ago.

The floodwaters engulfing entire neighborhoods and forcing closures on major interstate highways. Officials advising travelers to avoid driving through the state.

KARL SCHULTZ, COMMANDANT, COAST GUARD: We have not seen the worst of the flooding. People need to heed the warnings from their local emergency management experts and stay in safe grounds.

HILL: In Fayetteville where residents in a one-mile radius of both the little and Cape Fear Rivers are under evacuation orders, the mayor was clear. This is not the time to be complacent.

What's your biggest concern?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Biggest concern is what we see behind us, the pace in which this water moves is deadly.

HILL: South Carolina residents anxious to get home as well, facing long lines and questions about their future as rivers continue to swell. Rescues throughout the weekend, ferrying people and pets to safety. Grateful resident moving to higher ground. Some unsure of when or if they will ever return home.

(on camera): Those mandatory evacuations are crucial and in place because of what they learned, too, after hurricane Matthew here a couple years ago. At that point the Cape Fear River crested at 53 feet, this time they are expecting 62 feet which means the damage could reach much further than it did the last time around. We should also point out the president is expected in the region later this week. Kristie?

LU STOUT: Erica Hill reporting. Thank you.

You're watching "News Stream" and still ahead, some lawmakers are calling for a vote delay after an allegation of sexual assault is leveled against President Trump's Supreme Court nominee. The accuser's lawyer speaks to CNN. Stay with us.

And Pope Francis expels a Chilean priest accused of sexual abuse. We are live in Rome with the details, next.

[08:15:00] (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LU STOUT: Welcome back. Now, a bombshell accusation could delay a confirmation vote on President Trump's Supreme Court pick. Democrats even some Republicans say Thursday's judiciary committee vote on Brett Kavanaugh should be postponed after a woman came forward to accuse him of sexual assault dating back to the 1980s.

A source says this is what Christine Blasey Ford wrote in a letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein, "Kavanaugh was on top of me while laughing with (REDACTED] who periodically jumped onto Kavanaugh. They both laughed as Kavanaugh tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state, with Kavanaugh's hand over my mouth I feared he may inadvertently kill me."

In a statement on Friday, Kavanaugh responded saying this, "I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time." In the last hour Ford's attorney told CNN's Alisyn Camerota that her client would be willing to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Coittee.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN HOST: Will your client, Christine Ford, be willing to testify in public to the judiciary committee?

DEBRA KATZ, ATTORNEY OF CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD: The answer is yes.

CAMEROTA: She is willing to do it. Has she been asked by any of the lawmakers to do that?

KATZ: That's interesting. The answer is no.

CAMEROTA: Would you be willing to release the results of that polygraph?

KATZ: I will, to the appropriate authorities who wish to see it, yes.

CAMEROTA: And who would those appropriate authorities be?

KATZ: Well, at this point it's the Senate Judiciary Committee that has a constitutional obligation to vet this nominee.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LU STOUT: All right. Let's get more on the story now as CNN's Abby Phillip joins me live from Washington. And Abby, just days ago Kavanaugh was seen as a shoe in. How could these accusations derail his nomination and Trump's push to fundamentally change the makeup of the court?

ABBY PHILLIP, CNN WHITE HOUSE CORREPONDENT: Well, Kristie, these allegations have really emerged very quickly just in the last few days and they are very serious in nature. Christine Blasey Ford is alleging that Brett Kavanaugh tried to rape her essentially in high school.

And the White House is very cognizant of how serious that is, especially in this era at a time when we're talking more and more about women accusers and whether or not they should be believed about widespread sexual harassment in all levels of society and perhaps also in government.

And so in the last couple of days this has gone from an unnamed accuser to a named accuser to someone with a face and name and profession who is providing some of the corroborating evidence that she says she has to back up her claim. She's saying that she told her therapist about this several yes ago during a marital counseling session. She talks about talking to her husband about it at the time.

So we're getting more and more information which is making these allegations even more real causing a lot of senators to have questions about whether or not this nomination can move forward or at least whether it can move forward as quickly as the White House had hoped that it could.

LU STOUT: And leading up to, Abby, this is the MeToo era after all. You know, what is the White House inoculating Kavanaugh with a pro women stance long before these accusations came out?

PHILLIP: Yes, absolutely -- you are absolutely right. The Kavanaugh nomination from the very beginning you heard things about how more than half of his clerks, for example, were women, how he always sought to promote women to advance them in the legal profession. They focus so much on Kavanaugh's role as a father to his two daughters.

There was a lot of focus on his personal story and his efforts to make his world around his legal profession more equal for women, but it's not clear whether or not they were doing that because they knew this was in his background or because there was a larger issue at hand about the future of Roe versus Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

So, both issues are now coming into play where Kavanaugh is facing all of these questions about his past, about his stance toward women and the White House in recent days have also come out with a letter from 65 women who went to women's schools, private schools in the area where Kavanaugh went to high school attesting to his character.

[08:20:05] You know, it's not clear whether or not they are in a position to know what happened that night, but clearly the White House, Kavanaugh's allies trying to do as much as they can to make it clear that this is, in their opinion, not in his character. Obviously his accuser disagrees about what happened on that night 35 years ago, Kristie.

LU STOUT: Yes. And with this confirmation battle it is certainly heating up. Abby Phillip, reporting live from the White House. Thank you.

Pope Francis has expelled a Chilean priest accused of sexually abusing children. Cristian Precht Banados is among several clergy men who are under investigation in Chile, but he has not been criminally charged. He has previously denied the accusations.

The defrocking comes as the church faces a public outcry over its handling of abuse scandals dating back decades. Our Vatican correspondent Delia Gallagher is (inaudible). She joins us now, and Delia this is a very big move by the Catholic Church.

DELIA GALLAGHER, CNN VATICAN CORESPONDENT: Well, that's right, Kristie. You know, father Precht is a high profile figure in Chile. He was known as something of a hero for the left for having defended human rights abuses under the Pinochet dictatorship. And he had already been sanctioned by the Vatican for five years for sex abuse from 2012 until 2017.

And then a new investigation has now caused Pope Francis to definitively expel him from the priesthood. We don't know the exact nature of the charges because this was a church process so it's completely confidential and as you say there has been no civil case lodged against him right now.

So the move on the part of Pope Francis to finally expel this priest is obviously a clear sign for the Chilean church of zero tolerance, albeit a bit late because he had already been sanctioned previously, but the Chilean church, you know, Kristie, has really been traumatized for years over the question of sex abuse.

You will remember just earlier this year in March the entire Bishop's Conference, 34 bishops in Chile offered their resignation to Pope Francis as kind of a sign of trying to turn over a new leaf. Pope Francis has so far only accepted five of those resignations. So it's clearly an ongoing investigation in Chile, both on the part of the Catholic Church and on the part of civil authorities to try and clean up what has been happening there in the past decade, Kristie.

LU STOUT: Could you elaborate further into that, just how this move, the defrocking of a Cchilean priest, how that is put into context with the overall global crisis that the Vatican is currently facing?

GALLAGHER: Well, it plays into it because this is part of what people would like to see. That is part of this crisis has been caused by the fact that there doesn't seem to have been follow through from the point of allegations from survivors to a bishop in the country, from that bishop to the Vatican. Follow through in terms of actually making either a priest who has committed sex abuse or a bishop who has covered up pay for those crimes.

And so what we are seeing increasingly now just in the last few months we've seen the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, different countries coming out with their reports and there will surely be more to follow, but these are reports of allegations and cases and there is a whole mixed bag of what has happened within all of those cases.

So there's going to need to be huge investigations into every single case and what has been the follow through and what's been the final judgment. So really that's what people are looking for now.

What is -- what are the consequences that both the priests are having to pay and the bishops who covered up. Pope Francis has called for an international meeting of bishops at the Vatican in February to try once again to deal with this issue, Kristie.

LU STOUT: And the Vatican is taking action. Delia Gallagher, reporting live from Rome for us. Delia, thank you.

Now, two years after workers at the U.S. embassy in Cuba first complained of what would later be called sonic attacks, the president of Cuba says his government had nothing to do with it and he says any claims to the contrary were an effort by the U.S. to defame his country. Our CNN's Patrick Altman is in Havana and joins us now live. And Patrick, Cuba's president denying having any role in these sonic attacks. How is he backing up that denial?

PATRICK ALTMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Absolutely. And Miguel Diaz Canel has been president of Cuba since April. This is his first sit-down formal interview since becoming president, and you could sense his frustration. It's a frustration that the Cuban officials also share that they have to sort of disprove a negative that they have to show that something didn't happen.

After they left the FBI investigator (ph), after they say they've carried out their own investigation, but this question came up at the end of this hour long interview and Miguel Diaz Canel said that these strange incidents were, as you mentioned, more than 20 U.S. diplomats over a period of about a year began complaining of these mysterious symptoms.

[08:25:03] That they would feel in their homes like a beam of energy had been focused at them, that the could hear strange sounds when this was going on, that they had headaches, that there'd be hearing loss and other symptoms and that they could essentially walk in and out of this beam and felt that some sort of mystery weapon was being used against them.

Well, Miguel Diaz Canel, when he was asked about this last night in their interview he said, one, that it' not true and that it is hurting the U.S.- Cuba relationship.

(BEGIUN VIDEO CLIP)

MIGUEL DIAZ CANEL, PRESIDENT OF CUBA (through translator): They have started threatening again. They've started to impose. And in the middle of all of this they have created this fallacy, this defamatory story of alleged acoustic incidents. We don't agree because we have not attacked anyone. They started with one story, but Cuban and American scientists have debunked it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ALTMAN: And interestingly enough, next week, Miguel Diaz Canel is expected to go to the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Kristie. This would not only be his first trip as president of Cuba to the United States but his first trip ever. He was asked last night as well if he thought there might be an opportunity to meet with Donald Trump or other high ranking U.S. officials and he knock that down fairly quickly.

He said that as the current relationship stands, as Donald Trump has put more sanctions on Cuba, that until the Trump administration is willing to treat Cuba as equal, to let go of this story line that Cuba has been involved in attacks on its diplomats that he doesn't think there can be any progress in the relationship.

LU STOTU: From sanctions to sonic attacks, it's going to be very difficult to shore up this relationship between U.S. and Cuba. Patrick Altman, reporting live from Havana. Patrick, thank you.

You're watching "News Stream." And still ahead right here on the program, Mangkhut carving a trail of utter devastation. We will be speaking to the head of the Philippine Red Cross there about the challenges the country is facing at this very moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

LU STOUT: I'm Kristie Lu Stout in Hong Kong. You're watching "News Stream" and these are world headlines.

U.S. senate Democrats and even some Republicans want to delay a planned vote on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. A woman has publicly accused Kavanaugh of sexual assault dating back to the 1980s when he was in high school. He denies the accusation. A lawyer says she is willing to testify before Congress.

There have been more than 1,000 water rescues in North Carolina as tropical depression Florence continues to drench the southeastern U.S. And with floodwaters expected to rise, officials are advising residents to stay off the roads. At least 18 people have been killed as a result of the storm.

[08:30:06] And At least four people have been killed in Southern China as typhoon Mangkhut moved north over the weekend. Three million people have been forced from their homes. The Philippines has been the hardest hit country so far with at least 54 people believed to have died.

Idlib Province is Syria's last major rebel stronghold and Russian and pro- government forces have been bombing and shelling there for weeks. Now, that has led to medical workers demanding protection.

In this march on Sunday, some 300 doctors and nurses called on the global community to safeguard hospitals and medical staff. Western countries accuse Russia and Syria of targeting civilians in Idlib and other areas, but that is unlikely to stop a looming ground assault.

CNN's Jomana Karadsheh hast this story of one man doing all he can to protect his family.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOMANA KARADSHEH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: There are so many ways to die in Idlib. But only the most primitive methods for survival. Hudhafa al-Shahhad is preparing for a regime onslaught in Idlib. This makeshift shelter may be the difference between life or death for his family.

HUDHAFA AL-SHAHHAD, IDLIB RESIDENT (through translator): We have moved some supplies, food, and water in case of an emergency, God forbid. Because Russia is striking with highly explosive bombs that houses cannot withstand. God willing, the cave will protect us from that.

KARADSHEH: The regime's offensive to recapture the last major rebel stronghold hasn't officially started yet, but bombs have already been raining down on Southern Idlib. Al-Shahhad hopes the cave would shelter his family from the worst of the conventional weapons. But in Syria, even a breath of fresh air is an uncertainty.

AL-SHAHHAD (through translator): We made the gas masks to protect our children, god forbid, if a chemical attack happens, to protect their eyes and ears. It is the least we can do.

KARADSHEH: Upstairs in their living room, preparing for the worst is all they can do. Residents here fear the possibility of another chemical attack. Following instructions he found online, al-Shahhad uses what he can find. Colorful paper cups, cotton, bandages, charcoal, and plastic bags to create his family's survival kit, these improvised gas masks.

Al-Shahhad walks his children down into the darkness to inspect their underground hideaway. With nowhere left to run when the battle begins, this could be their only sanctuary.

Jomana Karadsheh, CNN, Istanbul.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LU STOUT: All right. From red carpets to runways, movie screens to magazines, the actress and mogul, Fan Bingbing, is usually one of China's most prominent figures. But over the past few months, she's making headlines for the exact opposite reason because no one seems to know where she is.

The superstar who you may know from films like "Lost in Beijing" and "X- Men" movies hasn't been seen in public since June. Some are wondering if she could be in state custody. For more, Matt Rivers is live in Beijing. Matt, you've been watching and monitoring this story for a while now. Bring us up to speed. What happened to Fan Bingbing?

MATT RIVERS, CNN INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: You know, that is the question that millions and millions and millions of people are asking here in China because she's incredibly popular. You could argue she is the most famous person in this whole country, and everyone is asking the same question, Kristie, where is she? We've got some clues, but there's certainly no definitive answer.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

RIVERS (voice over): She's not a household name worldwide, but in China, you don't get more famous than actress Fan Bingbing. She's not A-list, she's A-plus list, think Jennifer Lawrence or Meryl Streep, which is why the fact that she hasn't been seen in public since June is a big deal.

Back in May, Fan was accused of getting paid on so-called Yin-Yang contracts. Essentially, you sign a smaller contract and report that income to the government. But you also sign a bigger contract and get paid the additional tax free.

One of Fan's alleged Yin-Yang contracts was leaked on social media in late May. She immediately denied the allegations, but the country's tax authority urged investigators to look into the practice more broadly. One industry source told CNN that tax avoidance scheme is universal in China's entertainment world.

As for Fan, she hasn't been heard from or seen since posting these photos of a children's hospital in Tibet back in June. CNN asked both China's tax authorities and media regulators for comment on the case, but hasn't heard back.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the only department to take media questions every day. Asked about the actress, here is a spokesman. Does that sound like a foreign affairs issue to you, he said sarcastically. In other words, no comment. CNN tried to reach Fan herself to no avail.

[08:35:00] Our only clue to her status comes from this. An article posted on September 6th on a state-run media website that said Fan has been brought "under control" and is about to receive legal judgment. That article was quickly deleted, though, and state media has been virtually silent about the actress since.

Certain social media posts about Fan on Chinese internet have also been censored by officials. So for now, the mysterious case of China's highest paid actress continues. We know she's missing, we just don't know why.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

RIVERS: And Kristie, you know, if you needed any more clues as to the fact that the government is very sensitive about this, our signal here in China, the CNN signal, has been cut throughout the day as it always is. But usually it's cut when we talk about human rights or Tibet, not about actresses, but it gives you an idea.

And look, this isn't just about an actress. People get disappeared by the government all the time here in this country. It's a very murky legal system. Usually it's political activists, human rights activists and not actresses, but it shows you that no one is above the lawn her in China.

When China's government wants you gone, you will be. And look, the government -- we can't prove that's where -- where Fan Bingbing is. We have no confirmation of that. But, in China, despite her fame, Kristie, it's certainly possible that that's what happened to her.

LU STOUT: Yeah, what a mystery, and what a stunning story. Matt, thank you for your reporting. Please, keep us updated. Matt Rivers reporting live from Beijing, thank you.

Now, let's turn back to one of our top stories, the aftermath of typhoon Mangkhut and the massive impact its having on the Philippines. We are going to bring up Richard Gordon, chairman and CEO of the Philippine Red Cross.

Richard, welcome back to the program. We spoke to you earlier last week --

RICHARD GORDON, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, PHILIPPINE RED CROSS: Thank you, Kristie.

LU STOUT: -- about how you were getting ready for the super typhoon. Now, it's the aftermath. What is your number one priority right now?

GORDON: Number one priority is get the people quit from having a pity party and get back on their feet. We have to make sure that we get them roofing for those whose roofs are partially taken out. We can provide roofs right away. We can provide livelihood support right away. Maybe get them seedlings as well as fertilizer so they can plant right away.

In the meantime, they can have their housing. You can just imagine somebody who lost his house, lost his fields, where is he going to get money for the school? Where is he going to get money for the food? So we want to get them back on their feet right away.

LU STOUT: Absolutely. And the need is so great across the Northern Philippines. What's your thinking about the overall response to the super typhoon? The Philippines is used to responding to natural disasters, whether it was super typhoon Haiyan or Mangkhut. Do you feel that the Philippines is getting better and stronger at disaster response?

GORDON: We are getting better and stronger, but the typhoons are getting stronger and better as well. So, you just have to keep up by many (ph) changes upon us. They're stronger. Look at what is happening in typhoon Florence -- cyclone Florence in America, all these other disasters. And now, here, super storm just a few years after Haiyan.

So, we just have to keep on ratcheting up, making sure preparations are in order, get people out of harm's way. Don't dilly dally. Make sure you know where you're going so that people will be alive and safe.

LU STOUT: Richard Gordon of the Philippine Red Cross. Thank you so much for joining us. Wishing you and your teams the best of luck during this sensitive time. We know the risk of landslides is very, very high right now in the Philippines in the aftermath of the super typhoon. Richard, take care.

You're watching "News Stream." We'll be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:40:05] LU STOUT: Welcome back. Now, all this week, CNN is exploring the growing trend of wellness tourism in India, but there is much more than just meditation and yoga. In fact, some people are heading to the world's seventh largest country to learn all about eating their way to better health one spoonful at a time. Here is "Destination India."

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you ready? OK, hand me the soup.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It's organized chaos for lunch service inside the kitchen of the Atmantan Resort in Pune. Vegetables are prepped and orders start to come in from the guests of this luxury wellness retreat located about three and a half hours from Mumbai.

Here, even during the rainy monsoon season, the landscape may be calming, but it's the spa cuisine prepared by executive chef Ishika Kunar (ph) that is healing.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: (INAUDIBLE) that is all about you (ph), that we understand what this food is all about.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: When guests first arrive at Atmantan, they meet with the wellness director, Dr. Manoj Kutteri.

MANOJ KUTTERI, WELLNESS DIRECTOR: When it comes to wellness, the gut health has been highly regarded across the globe. Everyone talks about, you know, gut is considered as your second brain, so anything that happens in your gut can have an influence on your entire body.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Dr. Kutteri evaluates each guest to help determine their body type. According to the ancient art of Indian medicine known as "Ayurveda," there are three. Vata, which is air and ether, Kapha which is earth and water, and Pitta which is fire and water.

At Atmantan, they believe eating to compliment your body type known as "Dosha" can have positive wellness effect. That's why meals at the resort are individually designed for each guest.

KUTTERI: The food that you consume would be something that actually favor your own constitution and which actually just helps you reach a balance of your human.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The goal is not to just improve diet while you are at the resort, but to also take the concept of spa cuisine home.

KUTTERI: What you do here is something that is educational for you. You will be able to go back to your home and cook the same food and without having a regret that you're missing something because we give everything.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: A sacrifice-freeway to wellness, one spoonful at a time.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

LU STOUT: Looks like a good recipe to me. That is "News Stream." I'm Kristie Lu Stout. But don't go anywhere. "World Sport" with Alex Thomas is next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:45:00] (WORLD SPORT)

END

1:05 p.m. ET: Grafs 20-22, adds comments from the American Cleaning Institute

(CNN) -- Multi-surface cleaners and other commonly used household disinfectants could be making children overweight by altering the bacteria found in their guts, a new study published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal suggests.

Infants living in households where antimicrobial disinfectants are used at least weekly were twice as likely to have higher levels of the bacteria Lachnospiraceae at ages 3 to 4 months than children whose homes did not frequently use disinfectants, the Canadian researchers found. When those children with higher levels of Lachnospiraceae were 3 years old, their body mass index (BMI) was higher than children who do not live in homes that frequently use disinfectants, the study also showed.

The bacteria Lachnospiraceae are "a normal component of our gut microbiota," Anita Kozyrskyj, senior author of the study and a University of Alberta pediatrics professor, said in a CMAJ podcast.

However, she explained that it is known "from animal studies that higher levels of Lachnospiraceae have been associated with higher body fat and insulin resistance."

'Culprit' linking disinfectant use and weight

The new report uses data from the Canadian Healthy Infant Longitudinal Development study, which began in 2009 with researchers actively following participants as they grow and develop, from mid-pregnancy into childhood and adolescence.

When infants were 3 or 4 months old, their parents provided a poop sample for each infant and answered questions about their home, explained Kozyrskyj. Samples from 757 infants were profiled and analyzed along with BMI data at older ages and parental use of disinfectant products.

One of the study's findings is that roughly 80% of Canadian households use disinfectant products, most often multi-surface cleaners, at least once weekly, said Kozyrskyj.

While the researchers found an increase in Lachnospiraceae bacteria with more frequent cleaning with disinfectants, they did not see the same association with washing detergents without the bacteria-killing ingredients found in disinfectants or eco-friendly cleaners.

"These results suggest that gut microbiota were the culprit in the association between disinfectant use and the overweight," said Kozyrskyj.

Gut microbiota refers to the community of bacteria that live harmoniously together in our digestive tract, explained Kozyrskyj. This community develops during infancy when we gain a larger number of bacterial species, with each species decreasing or increasing in number over time.

"We each possess a unique gut microbiota but there are common patterns, there are common microbes that are expected to be found in childhood and in adulthood," said Kozyrskyj. "I would say around 3 years of age we have a bacterial composition that we can call our own. And it stays with us for the remainder of our life."

This is important because past research has drawn a connection between gut microbiota composition and weight in adulthood.

Spotting risk factors for obesity

Though the study results highlight the connection between disinfectants and the gut microbiota, Kozyrskyj noted that "it still is a big leap to use the word causation."

That said, some of the evidence clearly points to a direct cause-effect relationship between disinfectants and higher levels of the common gut bacteria, she said. For example, animal studies have found similar changes in the gut bacteria of piglets when exposed to disinfectants, she said.

And "higher frequency of use of disinfectant was associated with higher abundance of Lachnospiraceae," said Kozyrskyj. Still, she warned that more research is needed to confirm these results and establish a causal relationship.

Richard Sedlak, executive vice president at the American Cleaning Institute, said in a statement that the institute was "disappointed at the sensational claims" made by the study authors. The study's flaws include no accounting for the diets of the children, said Sedlak, who was not involved in the new study.

"Proper use of household cleaners and disinfectants is an important contributor to infection control and healthy homes," he said. "These products are trusted by families to effectively clean, sanitize and disinfect areas of their homes, reducing opportunities for children at these young ages to suffer significant illnesses."

"Proper use of EPA-registered disinfectants plays an important role in helping prevent the spread of flu," added Sedlak, who quoted the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, which advises people to "clean and disinfect surfaces and objects that may be contaminated with germs like flu."

In a published commentary, Moira K. Differding and Noel T. Mueller, both of the Department of Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, wrote that the study results were "biologically plausible."

Why? The bacteria that we are exposed to during our infancy both educates our immune system and programs our metabolic system, explained Differding and Mueller, neither of whom participated in the new study. And in previously published studies researchers have found that disruptions in the natural development of the infant gut bacteria -- due to a cesarean delivery, prenatal and postnatal antibiotics, or formula feeding -- have been associated with a higher risk of childhood obesity, they said.

"The prevalence of childhood obesity continues to rise globally," wrote Differding and Mueller, adding that it is "more important than ever" to identify obesity risk factors and ways to prevent high weight gains in children.

Kozyrskyj said one finding in the new study surprised the research team. Babies living in households that used eco-friendly cleaners had different microbiota -- much lower levels of Enterobacteriaceae -- and were less likely to be overweight as toddlers. Yet, an analysis of the data did not show that this altered bacterial community was linked to the reduced obesity risk in the children.

"The eco-friendly product-using mothers may be more healthy," she said, adding that the mother's overall healthier lifestyle and eating habits may benefit both the gut bacteria and the weight of their children.

Because the results have yet to be confirmed, Kozyrskyj is not yet ready to recommend consumers buy eco-friendly products. However, she said the study did open her mind to using green products, including DIY vinegar cleaning solutions, in her own home.

Anti-inflammatory diets can be beneficial for those suffering from conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis

Activities touted as having the ability to reduce one’s risk of an early death, such as catching up on sleep[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/weekend-sleep-catch-up-lie-in-premature-death-reduce-risk-study-karolinska-institute-a8365026.html] at the weekend and drinking three cups of coffee[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/weekend-sleep-catch-up-lie-in-premature-death-reduce-risk-study-karolinska-institute-a8365026.html], seem to appear on a daily basis.

However, a new study is claiming that an anti-inflammatory diet that includes chocolate, red wine and beer could be the key to a longer lifespan.

Researchers at the Warsaw University of Life Sciences in Poland carried out a study of around 70,000 men and women whose lifestyles were closely examined during a 16-year period.

Read more

Mediterranean diet significantly reduces risk of mortality in elders

The study, published in the

Journal of Internal Medicine

, compared the mortality of those who followed an anti-inflammatory diet and those who didn’t.

The team concluded that those who followed an anti-inflammatory diet, regularly eating foods such as fruits, vegetables, tea, coffee, nuts, chocolate and moderate amounts of red wine and beer, had an 18 per cent lower risk of death by any cause.

Furthermore, they also had a 20 per cent lower risk of cardiovascular mortality and a 13 per cent reduced risk of death caused by cancer.

Of the people who smoked, those who followed an anti-inflammatory were also recorded as having a reduced risk of an early risk compared with the smokers who didn’t.

Following an anti-inflammatory diet can be beneficial for people who suffer from a myriad of health conditions, as Fran McElwaine[https://www.ukhealthcoachesassociation.co.uk/coach/frances-mcelwaine/], director for the UK Health Coaches Association, explains.

“As inflammation lies at the root of most chronic, lifestyle-related disease, including arthritis, dementia, some cancers and cardiovascular disease, a diet that reduces inflammation can only be a good thing,” she tells

The Independent

.

“There are plenty of foods which reduce inflammation - dark chocolate, which is a rich source of magnesium, zinc and other important trace minerals, and red wine, a source of the phyto-nutrient resveratrol included.”

Read more

Meat only 'carnivore diet' condemned by health and nutrition experts

Interest in foods that have anti-inflammatory properties has increased exponentially over the course of the year, as outlined Hitwise[https://www.hitwise.com/gb/].

According to the marketing company, internet searches for “anti-inflammatory food” have risen by 274 per cent since the beginning of 2018, with searches for “gut microbiome” increasing by 311 per cent and searches for “gut health” rising by 293 per cent.

While this study was carried out with a large sample of people, Harley Street nutritionist Rhiannon Lambert[http://rhitrition.com/] warns that it’s essential to be wary when taking note of dietary advice, as no one diet will ever be suitable for everyone.

“It is important to remember that studies will never be able to accurately represent everyone and their own unique lifestyles and diets,” she says.

“So many factors must be taken into account. Sleep, activity levels, genetics and your job are just a few factors that can impact our health.

“Diet is of course a large component for good health and longevity but focusing on foods as good or bad isn’t helpful either.”

Earlier this year, a study[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/chocolate-bars-heart-failure-risk-reduced-health-study-new-york-a8511386.html] presented at the European Society of Cardiology claimed that eating up to three chocolate bars every month can drastically reduce your risk of experiencing heart failure later on in life.

In years past, Obamacare was the stuff of Republican attack ads. No more.

This cycle, even Democrats running in red states are unapologetically putting health care at the center[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/01/upshot/democratic-candidates-midterms-health-care.html] of their campaign messages. There’s a reason: Republican efforts to overhaul the health care system last year were deeply unpopular.

A lawsuit brought by several states[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/health/obamacare-mandate-texas-case.html] imperils the health law’s protections for people with pre-existing health conditions, the law’s most popular provision. Recent polls show growing numbers of Americans rank health care as a top issue, and coverage for pre-existing conditions as an important policy[https://www.kff.org/health-costs/poll-finding/kaiser-health-tracking-poll-late-summer-2018-the-election-pre-existing-conditions-and-surprises-on-medical-bills/].

A recent analysis from the Wesleyan Media Project showed that health care was the most common subject[http://mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/releases/issues-090618/] of televised campaign advertisements by Democrats in both the House and the Senate. “This is the uniform issue across a lot of the states, and then these candidates will talk about things that are particular to their constituents,” said Lauren Passalacqua, the communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Some ads focus on a personal connection to the issue, like the health history of a candidate or a candidate’s relative. Some focus on an opponent’s role in the lawsuit. Many House campaigns are using health care as part of attack ads against Republican incumbents who voted last year for the American Health Care Act, which would have unwound major parts of the Affordable Care Act. Some ads talk about the Affordable Care Act directly, but many gesture at it more obliquely, with talk of pre-existing conditions alone.

Health care still comes up in some Republican ads. But unlike in past cycles, when ads promising to “repeal and replace” Obamacare were standard fare, health care has been pushed down the priority list, behind taxes and immigration. (Obamacare figures in only 1 percent of Republican ads, according to the Wesleyan count.) Here are what some of the new Democratic health care ads are saying, and what they’re leaving unsaid:

[Video: Watch on YouTube.[http://youtube.com/embed/tNte7Vr-IJg]]

The Democratic candidate: Senator Joe Manchin is running for re-election in West Virginia, a state President Trump won by more than 41 points.

The ad: Reprising a 2010 special election ad in which he shot a hole[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIJORBRpOPM] in a cap-and-trade climate bill and promised to “repeal the bad parts of Obamacare,” he now shoots a hole in a lawsuit that could eliminate the protections for pre-existing conditions that are part of the Affordable Care Act. His opponent, the state’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, is a party to the lawsuit. “That’s just dead wrong, and that ain’t going to happen,” Mr. Manchin says, before firing.

The strategy: In 2010, Mr. Manchin’s pro-West Virginia iconoclasm meant standing up to his party’s leadership. Now, it means protecting a core provision of the Affordable Care Act. The words “Affordable Care Act” don’t appear in the ad — neither does Obamacare. But the Manchin campaign has bet big that health care politics in the state have changed[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/08/us/politics/manchin-west-virginia-healthcare.html]. Instead of vowing to repeal part of Obamacare, he’s promising to protect its most popular provision. In fact, West Virginia has benefited more[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/31/upshot/up-uninsured-2016.html] than nearly every other state from the health care law, and it’s the state with the largest share of residents with pre-existing health conditions, according to estimates[https://www.kff.org/health-reform/issue-brief/pre-existing-conditions-and-medical-underwriting-in-the-individual-insurance-market-prior-to-the-aca/] from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

[Video: Watch on YouTube.[http://youtube.com/embed/oCBpo4sCW_c]]

The Democratic candidate: Clarke Tucker, a state legislator and lawyer, is running against French Hill, a two-term incumbent in Arkansas’s Second Congressional District. Mr. Tucker was treated for bladder cancer last year.

The ad: Mr. Tucker takes viewers on a brief tour of important places in his life, with stops at the baseball field, the church where he was baptized, his Little Rock high school, a farm where he grew up, the State House, and the cancer hospital where he was treated. He describes himself as “one of the million Arkansans with a pre-existing condition.”

The strategy: Even in a strictly biographical ad, Mr. Tucker gestures at health policy. When he got sick, Arkansas political observers thought his career would stall. Now, he presents his pre-existing health condition as a qualification for office.

[Video: Watch on YouTube.[http://youtube.com/embed/PqvnDhr3cbk]]

The Democratic candidate: Senator Heidi Heitkamp is running for re-election in North Dakota, in what is expected to be a tough race against Kevin Cramer, the state’s three-term congressman.

The ad: A constituent, Denise Sandvick, chops vegetables in her kitchen as Ms. Heitkamp’s voice explains how both the constituent and the candidate have pre-existing conditions. Then Ms. Sandvick speaks to the camera, expressing her disappointment that Mr. Cramer voted for the Republican health bill last year. “I know Heidi would never do that,” she says.

The strategy: Ms. Heitkamp highlights her own history of breast cancer and establishes empathy with a constituent with a similar history. Like Mr. Manchin, Ms. Heitkamp declines to mention the Affordable Care Act directly, describing Mr. Cramer’s vote simply as a choice to overturn protections for pre-existing conditions. The truth is a bit more complicated. The bill, which did not become law, could have substantially weakened[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/upshot/freedom-caucus-health-care-pre-existing-conditions.html] pre-existing protections, but only in states that chose to do so. The bill would have also made major cuts to Medicaid and to subsidies that help middle-income Americans buy health insurance.

[Video: Watch on YouTube.[http://youtube.com/embed/Y45hIPuUtGM]]

The Democratic candidate: Elissa Slotkin, a former intelligence analyst who worked for the C.I.A. and the Defense Department, is running to unseat the incumbent, Mike Bishop, in Michigan’s Eighth District.

The ad: Ms. Slotkin describes her mother’s breast cancer, a later loss of a job and of health insurance, and then her ovarian cancer, in the years before the Affordable Care Act became law. “It could be about anyone’s mom,” Ms. Slotkin said, while criticizing Mr. Bishop’s vote for a bill last year that would have unwound large parts of the Affordable Care Act.

The strategy: Ms. Slotkin has said Republican efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act inspired her to run for office, and her ad, which includes footage of her ailing mother delivering a toast at Ms. Slotkin’s wedding, is focused on the personal stakes of the policy debate. She is one of several Democratic candidates using family stories about illness and insurance coverage to explain their commitment to consumer protections.

[Video: Watch on YouTube.[http://youtube.com/embed/zwlN9tKD-wA]]

The Democratic candidate: Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri is running for re-election against Josh Hawley, the state’s attorney general, in a state President Trump won by more than 18 points.

The ad: “Two years ago I beat breast cancer,” Ms. McCaskill says, talking directly into the camera. “Like thousands of other women in Missouri, I don’t talk about it much.” She links her own pre-existing condition to the current anti-Obamacare lawsuit, where Mr. Hawley is a litigant.

The strategy: As a senator, Ms. McCaskill has tended to focus on consumer protections in health care. This summer, she began asking constituents at campaign events to stand up[https://twitter.com/jmannies/status/1010693719178338304/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1010693719178338304%7Ctwgr%5E373939313b73706563696669635f73706f7274735f616374696f6e&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2018%2F08%2F01%2Fupshot%2Fdemocratic-candidates-midterms-health-care.html] if they had pre-existing conditions. And her campaign has begun a series of 30 video interviews with supporters who have pre-existing conditions (Here’s one[https://twitter.com/McCaskill4MO/status/1036966698728005632].) She tries to link Mr. Hawley’s support for the lawsuit to industry — the “insurance companies” — rather than ideology. Like many other Democrats in Republican territory, she is not pledging broad support for Obamacare, but focusing on its most popular provision.

[Video: Watch on YouTube.[http://youtube.com/embed/gCjNFYNrEPo]]

The Democratic candidate: Senator Joe Donnelly is running for re-election in Indiana, another state Mr. Trump won handily. His opponent, Mike Braun, is the C.E.O. of a distribution company and a former state legislator.

The ad: Mr. Donnelly shuffles papers around in a copy shop, as he praises the work ethic of his constituents and his own work on their behalf. A voice-over notes his support for President Trump’s proposed border wall and for “protecting health care for Hoosiers with pre-existing conditions.” Then, a worker in the shop tells him his “break’s over.”

The strategy: As with Mr. Manchin, Mr. Donnelly’s overall strategy has been to appear pragmatic and nonpartisan, distant from Democratic leadership. On the issue of the wall, he’s in Trump’s corner. But on health care, he highlights his vote against Republican attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare last year. The contrast reveals how he thinks the issues are likely to play in a red state.

[Video: Watch on YouTube.[http://youtube.com/embed/gmC8o6PknYI]]

The Democratic candidate: Jacky Rosen, a congresswoman representing Nevada’s Third District, is running to unseat Dean Heller, one of the most vulnerable Republican senators this cycle.

The ad: Ms. Rosen walks amid retractable dividers defining an empty, snaking line, leading to an unmanned reception desk. She notes that Mr. Heller initially promised to oppose a Senate bill to overhaul Obamacare, while ultimately voting for its final version. Her description is interspersed with footage of Mr. Trump joking with Mr. Heller and news footage describing his change of heart. “Dean Heller got back in line,” she says.

“I’ll work to fix Obamacare, and I won’t walk the party line,” she says, opening up the divider tape and heading for the exit.

The strategy: Ms. Rosen is unusual in stating her support for Obamacare specifically, though she says that she wants to “fix” it, not preserve the status quo. Mr. Heller’s various positions on the Republican repeal effort, which he initially warned would harm the state, are the focus of this ad, and another[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0AOqRX08FE&feature=youtu.be], in which Ms. Rosen’s campaign compares him to an inflatable tube man, bending in the wind.

[Video: Watch on YouTube.[http://youtube.com/embed/9XQtsIx4TXo]]

The Democratic candidate: Kim Schrier, a pediatrician, is running for an open seat in Washington’s Eighth District. The seat is held by Dave Reichert, who is retiring. Her opponent, Dino Rossi, is a former state senator.

The ad: Footage of Dr. Schrier shaking hands in a diner, talking to people around a table and examining a child while wearing a white coat and stethoscope is interspersed with black-and-white clips of Republicans voting on the American Health Care Act. “When D.C. politicians voted to gut health care for people with pre-existing conditions, I decided to run for Congress myself,” she says.

The strategy: Dr. Schrier is one of the candidates who say they were motivated to run by the recent G.O.P. attempts to overhaul health care. Her ad presents her as an outsider — a doctor, not a “D.C. politician.” She pledges not to accept corporate PAC donations so she can be free to stand up to health industries. Her message is less about fixing health care than protecting current programs. But she still never mentions Obamacare.

Vaccine contains live bacteria which allows it to work far quicker than an injected vaccine

A drinkable cholera vaccine containing live bacteria – similar to a probiotic yoghurt drink – could potentially help save thousands of lives in disaster zones and possibly revolutionise how we vaccinate people.

Conventional vaccination can take weeks to be effective because the immune system needs time to respond. But the new approach could provide protection within 24 hours.

While it has yet to be tested on humans, the results in trials on rabbits suggest it has the potential to save lives. “We think this is going to be a very good vaccine, and could induce immunity after a single dose,” says the study’s lead investigator, Professor Matthew Waldor, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard Medical School.

He adds: “We have many different engineering steps to make this an incredibly safe, genetically stable, live vaccine.”

New flu jab for over-65s set to save 700 lives and prevent 30,000 GP appointments this winter[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/new-flu-jab-over-65s-13229189]

The study found that rabbits infected with the cholera vaccine didn’t get sick a day after being vaccinated despite their immune systems not having had a chance to build up immunity to ward off cholera invaders.

The Harvard team don’t fully understand why it works this fast, but it could be that the vaccine’s bacteria suppress the deadly strains competing for the same resources, or perhaps interfere with their toxin production.

We know that our gut bacteria, the microbiome, is crucial to our health and is an important part of our immune system.

Probiotic yoghurt drinks, which claim to load the body with “good bacteria”, attest to that. The vaccine seems to work similarly. “It’s a living therapeutic that has good effects on health,” says Professor Waldor.

The team are now looking to set up human trials to test its safety, and are considering how to extend the shelf life of this living colony of bacteria to make it useful in disaster zones when it’s needed.

People who are already unwell are particularly hard hit by the infection, which lodges in the small intestine, causing diarrhoea and vomiting, which can lead to fatal dehydration – and spreads the bacteria further.

In Yemen, currently in its third year of civil war, a child dies every 10 minutes from cholera.

A fresh warning of the disease’s resurgence was issued as the rainy season begins and inadequate sewage systems overflow again.

The outbreak’s death toll exceeded one million last year and is on track to be the worst in history.

This new way of vaccinating would be a godsend.

Toddlers exposed to bacteria-killing products more susceptible to obesityasgut organisms altered,study suggests

Everyday disinfectants and surface cleaners could be making children overweight by altering the bacteria in their guts, a new study suggests.

Babies exposed to household disinfectants have a higher body mass index (BMI) at the age of three, while excess weight is less common in toddlers from homes that clean with eco-friendly products, researchers have found.

Although the scientists warned that no causal link had been proven, they said the results suggested gut microorganisms were “the culprit” in the link between disinfectant use and children becoming overweight.

Read more

The secret to why you're not losing weight

The Canadian experts took samples from 757 infants for their study, during which they followed participants as they grew from the womb,into childhood and adolescence.

Babies from homes where antimicrobial disinfectants were used at least once a week were twice as likely to have higher levels of a bacteria linked with obesity when they were three or four months old than those whose families did not frequently use disinfectants, the study found.

When the children with higher levels of the bacteriaLachnospiraceae were three years old, their BMI was higher than that of their peers, according to the report in the

Canadian Medical Association Journal

.

Higher levels of Lachnospiraceae are linked with higher body fat and insulin resistance, although it is normal to find them in the gut, said Anita Kozyrskyj, senior author of the study.

The human gut hosts tens of trillions of microorganisms, including an estimated 1,000 species of bacteria.

The researchers did not find any links betweenobesity andthe use of washing detergents that did not contain bacteria-killing ingredients such as bleach and hydrogen peroxide.

Ms Kozyrskyj, a paediatrics professor at the University of Alberta, said the results suggested that gut microbiota – groups of microorganisms – were the culprit in the association between disinfectant use and becoming overweight.

Read more

Toddlers 'consume four times too much protein on average'

Past research has drawn a connection between gut microbiota composition and weight[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/gut-bacteria-plays-a-role-in-long-term-weight-gain-a7632031.html] in adulthood.

Piglets born indoors and raised in conditions where disinfectant aerosols are frequently used have perturbed gut microbial balances compared with those not reared under such conditions, the scientists noted.

They said babies living in households that used eco-friendly cleaners had different microbiota and were less likely to be overweight as toddlers.

“The eco-friendly product-using mothers may be more healthy,” the professor said, adding that the mother’s overall healthier lifestyle and eating habits may benefit both the gut bacteria and their children’s weight.

It is possible that some disinfectant products containedtriclosan, which is no longer used in UK cleaning products

Sally Bloomfield

Ms Kozyrskyj said she could not recommend buying eco-friendly products as a direct result of the study, since a causal link had not been confirmed, but she said the findings had opened her mind to using green products such as homemade vinegar cleaners in her own home.

Sally Bloomfield, honorary professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said more questions needed answers before conclusions could be drawn.

“This study must be regarded as only a preliminary indication that disinfectant use might be a contributory factor to reducing gut microbe diversity, alongside factors such as c-section birth, overuse of antibiotics etc," she said.

"A major flaw is the non-homogenous nature of the products in each category.In some cases, the commercial products were categorised into disinfectants or detergentswithout detailed knowledge of ingredients."

It is likely that the chemical nature of the microbiocidal and other ingredients of theproducts would have varied significantly, she said.

"To draw any real conclusions, answers are needed to questions such as 'what biocides were in the products and where were products used?'It is possible that some disinfectantproducts contained triclosan, which is no longer used in UK cleaning products."

She added that it must be remembered that failure to use disinfectants when there is significant risk is linked with increased risk of the spread of infection.

Late this spring, off a nondescript hallway in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences building at Stanford University, inside a small, windowless office -- standing desk; sitting desk; bookcase; chair -- the 42-year-old physician Daniel Mason revealed some unease about what we were doing. ''I come from a tradition,'' Mason said, in his swift, reassuring cadence, ''in which some people go into the room without a ring on. So this kind of disclosure is deeply foreign to the kind of work that I do.''

The tradition Mason was referring to is psychiatry; the room in question was the one in which a clinician would encounter distressed patients (in Mason's case, the inpatient psychiatric unit of Stanford Hospital, where he works as a psychiatrist); the ring was a wedding band; and the kind of disclosure Mason had in mind was his having agreed to answer my questions -- the third day of them; the 17th hour of them, by then -- questions about his life.

''Some people of an earlier generation would reveal absolutely nothing,'' Mason continued, one leg of his long, lean frame crossed loosely over the other. ''And I think that, generally, what we're taught is that if a person asks a personal question, the important thing to ask is why they want to know and what they think.''

So why, exactly, would a married doctor enter a room without a ring?

''The theory behind the ring,'' Mason said, his own wedding band visible on the hand resting on his knee, ''is if a psychiatrist goes into a room without it, that's going to change what the patient's going to share. Much more information is going to come when a patient meets a doctor who's not wearing a ring and, according to people who believe this very strongly, the patient asks: 'Are you married?' That's a moment when a psychiatrist responds: 'We could talk about that. But maybe more important right now is what you were feeling when you asked that.' And then, this door opens -- hopefully: We're always looking for a door that might open -- and a patient might say, 'Well, I imagine that you are married because I imagine that everybody is happily married except for me.' That's Answer A. Answer B is: 'I don't think you're married because you're attracted to me.' Answer C is: 'I have no idea. I don't feel like I can read anybody now. I don't understand anybody. I didn't understand my wife, apparently. I don't understand you.' Each one of those leads the psychiatrist down these totally different paths. That's really helpful information.''

Mason wears his ring while seeing patients, as do many of his colleagues. But despite that measure of clinical transparency, he was clear during our conversations that it was essential to his ability to practice medicine that certain details of his personal life beyond the most basic published facts -- he is married to the novelist Sara Houghteling -- remain unavailable to his patients. He acknowledged the awkwardness of this preference -- I was there, wasn't I, to profile him? -- but it couldn't be helped, given that he has been, as he says, ''negotiating two worlds'' throughout his professional life. In one, he serves on a team of clinicians that includes psychologists, social workers, nurses, occupational and physical therapists, residents and medical students, treating people admitted for acute mental illnesses or crises. And in another, he is a fiction writer who, nearly two decades ago, published, at 26, while still in medical school, his first novel, ''The Piano Tuner,'' which describes the journey of a man sent by the British War Office to the Burmese interior in 1886 to repair a piano. It became an international best seller, was translated into 28 languages and adapted as an opera. His third novel, ''The Winter Soldier,'' which took 14 years to complete -- his first about a doctor and, in part, a coming-of-age story about what that profession can demand and return -- arrives this month and with it, for Mason, no little inner negotiation: It will be his first book to appear since he began practicing psychiatry, a vocation which maintains that the practitioner's face is best kept blank.

In part, Mason has displaced this concern by locating the novel in history. Mason's original idea, a decade and a half ago, the story of an early psychiatrist practicing in Freud's Vienna, involved the relationships that form between a female patient, who is an artist, her doctor and the patient's husband. But during the course of his research for the book, Mason (to whom, I should say, I am not related) made a discovery. ''I was researching his back story,'' Mason told me, ''and I came across this moment in history where the Austro-Hungarian Army finds itself so ill-equipped for the war that they don't have enough doctors. So they invest in medical students with no clinical training and send them off to hospitals. I came across this at a time when I had just finished medical school, was deeply aware all of a sudden of this whole new range of human experience that I hadn't known existed before. Suffering mostly. Physical and metaphysical, but one is most impressed by physical suffering. Most medical students, up until that moment in their lives, haven't suffered an illness as severe as the illnesses they will encounter in their patients. And it sounds so unbelievably naïve, but I don't think I'm the only one whose world is shaken by the duration and the depth of suffering that people go through.''

Though it would take him a decade, Mason would jettison the part of the novel -- many hundreds of pages -- about the psychiatrist and instead explore his education: that of a medical student out of his depth who must try to help wounded men who are beyond helping.

That urge, that fear -- to help the afflicted; to avoid harming those who suffer -- is at the center of Mason's practice, both as a writer and as a doctor. That afternoon, Mason discussed, in broad strokes, the challenges of trying to help real people in crises. ''It's so bewitching to feel like you're curing somebody,'' Mason said. ''The first time I saw someone who had catatonia respond to treatment with Ativan, it was like, my God, I'm witnessing a miracle. The hard part is the next time around, when it doesn't work.

''It is very hard to learn to go home when a patient is not getting better,'' Mason continued, ''or to stop searching for an explanation.'' With all the unknowns involved in the treatment of mental illnesses, Mason said he takes comfort, as a clinician, in Freud's definition of the goal of treatment: ''Much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness.'' As a fiction writer, Mason's path to comfort -- comfort with the form; comfort with the sense that what he is producing is meaningful -- has had to come from practice, from a long process of figuring out what, for him, fiction can do: what it can reveal, and what it can offer, to a writer and his readers.

The information we reveal to others about ourselves isn't, of course, the exclusive province of psychiatrists; it's the regular texture of human interaction. How much or how little we let the door of the self open can be a matter of intractable temperament or malleable habit or, at certain moments, life and death. What I've found most remarkable about Mason's fiction is the quality of his revelations, his ability to unveil temperaments, habits, natures. His stories are mysteries, albeit not in the genre sense: When you come to the end of a Mason story, an explanation or solution to the puzzle of a person doesn't punctually arrive. The unknown remains unknown; the unexplainable remains unexplained. There is, instead, an intense quality of revelation -- a mystical intensity -- of the sort described by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'': ''There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.''

The first Mason fiction I read was ''Death of the Pugilist or, the Famous Battle of Jacob Burke & Blindman McGraw.'' It is, in thumbnail outline, spectacularly unpromising: a 7,000-word narrative of a boxing match. And not just a boxing match, but a fight between a scrappy young outsider and a seasoned champion. The form of the story seems no less enervating: like a long piece of reporting, with headlines, 17 of them -- ''Who was Burke? His Beginnings''; ''Who is Blindman?'' ''The day approaches''; ''The fight begins'' -- prefacing each section. As you read them, however, something funny happens. Mason turns the familiar theater of two men at brutal odds into a state of original fascination. Part of what makes the story so remarkable is Mason's sense of what language can do, his functional belief that words, as Guy Davenport wrote, ''are animals, alive and with a will of their own.'' Here, the challenger, Burke, watches the arrival of the champion, Blindman McGraw: ''Burke hears the murmurs thrumming through the crowds, then shouts going up, the hillside parting for a dark figure to come through. ... Six foot six at least, but the illusion of height is increased by the size of his chest and belly, which set his head back like some faraway peak.'' We have seen this scene before, the arrival of the gladiator, and yet we have not, not this way, not through this elemental seizing of time and space, of hillsides parting and peaks looming, far away. We are not in a boxing match; we are in nature, and the struggle will be for survival, hand to hand, word to word.

My favorite of Mason's stories to date, ''The Ecstasy of Alfred Russel Wallace,'' involves a more explicit investigation of our species. Wallace was a naturalist, explorer and biologist who, independently through his fieldwork, developed the theory of evolution through natural selection before Darwin published ''The Origin of Species.'' Mason situates us at Wallace's elbow and occasionally in his head as he gathers the specimens and accumulates the ideas that, he is coming to understand, will, for all time, change the way we see our world:

Wracked by malaria, thin, exhausted, he could barely remain upright for the entirety of his meals, and yet, in the field, he moved with the same alacrity as he had during his childhood days collecting in Wales: powered not by physical strength but by a momentum of mind, of wonder and joy, movement driven by movement itself, by the sun and heat and cold on his neck, the astonishment of the natural world unfolding. From life at sea, he had acquired the habit of rising early; from the rivers and countless portages, the conviction that one does not own what one cannot carry. In moments of reverie, he imagined his body light of all but the clothes on his back and the exquisite catalog of his mind. He was thirty-four. To his mother he wrote, I am running out of time.

Mason makes the urgency of a thought, and the energy of its pursuit, palpable, as Wallace, in total isolation, deep in the Malay Archipelago, in a state of total separation from the developed world, develops inside him an appreciation of the world new to human thinking. As the story builds to Wallace's expression of that understanding, Mason manages to capture a state I haven't felt so powerfully before in fiction: solitude, the space in which a thought can grow as organically as a cell, in which the real loneliness and boredom of intellectual work are eclipsed by the ecstasy such work can yield. Moreover, Mason shows how solitude is a kind of suffering that the human animal, if it is to achieve what only our species sometimes can, must -- and will -- endure.

During the long gestation and production of his new novel, Mason accumulated half a dozen short stories, among them ''Pugilist'' and ''Wallace,'' five appearing in Harper's and a sixth in Zoetrope. They vary in form -- one is a letter; one is written as if by Herodotus; another is in the first person; three in the third -- but they are united by their reliance on history for some spark, whether factual or textual. ''Pugilist,'' though its combatants are products of Mason's imagination, was in part inspired by Mason's reading of 19th-century magazine accounts of boxing matches, and ''Wallace'' by Mason's reading of Wallace's ''Malay Archipelago.'' In all of the stories, you can see Mason figuring out new strategies to get closer to the people he is writing about. Each is a portrait, each a deep dive into an individual's nature, each rooted in history.

I wondered why Mason's fiction insisted on, and drew from, historical subjects.

''I feel it's a better skeleton on which to hang other questions,'' Mason said. ''I feel astounded by the natural world. I could write an essay about how I'm astounded by the natural world. But there's a man who spent most of his life traveling alone, and with such astonishment for the natural world, that he's willing to endure everything so he can see one more plant and capture one more animal and sit cooked by fevers in the archipelago -- because he wants to see more.''

Mason himself traveled down the Amazon in 2004 after graduating from medical school. He says it remains one of the most extraordinary experiences of his life: ''There was something that happened to the perception of time during the long days traveling on the river, which gave me a sense of a fundamentally different way of experiencing the world.'' But though this journey inspired the Wallace story, it wasn't enough to be a story in itself. ''I would say my personal history is not particularly interesting,'' Mason said, with a small smile that predicted his questioner's disbelief. ''I do believe that. Now, the psychiatrist sitting with me would say: 'When you say that your personal history is not interesting, it means you probably think that your personal history is actually painful or difficult, and so this is a way of deflecting that.' I don't know if that's the case. I actually do think I grew up without the trials of most people.''

Mason recalls a childhood spent outdoors, in pre-dot-com Palo Alto. He and his younger sister grew up with a mother who taught art in an elementary school and a father who was a radiologist.

''It's one of the most technical professions in medicine,'' Mason said. ''But I think that the way I grew up around it, because of my father practicing it, radiology had a kind of mythical quality -- the idea that my father was somebody who could see inside other people was a mystical thing.''

Mason was an obsessive reader, a kid who took bikes apart and put bikes back together, who read magazines about bikes and how to take them apart and put them back together. There were baseball cards and stamps. There were math competitions. There was the seasonal youth-sports cycle -- soccer, baseball, basketball. There were posters on his wall: ''Whales of the World,'' a Lamborghini. He played clarinet because he had to. He excelled because he enjoyed school, and he went east to college at Harvard, because he sensed that there was something different about it from where he grew up.

When he arrived, he labored under a sense of insecurity. ''It wasn't an easy place. I felt very lost at the beginning. I felt that friends on the East Coast had access to an intellectual tradition and a historical tradition that engaged with a history that went even farther back into Europe, and I was some kind of rough.''

He was lonely there, homesick. Early in his junior year, he thought of transferring back to California to be closer to home. His adviser, perhaps sensing this lack of direction, introduced him to the young mathematician Ellis McKenzie, then a graduate student working on applying mathematical models to malaria infections. ''Not only was Ellis kind and generous with his time for a clueless undergraduate,'' Mason explained, ''but also there was something about him that was familiar. He had gone to college in Santa Cruz, spent a lot of time on the same beaches and redwoods, wore flip-flops in winter. He also introduced me to a way of thinking across disciplines, which I hadn't encountered in my classes. The project was to apply population models to the changing levels of malaria parasites in human blood, and Ellis introduced me to thinking of the body as a kind of ecosystem, rather than just a 'them' and 'us.' In this way, he anticipated the current interest in the microbiome. But even more than mixing disciplines like population biology and medicine, he had this respect for older literature and had discovered this remarkable old data set of blood-parasite levels from back in the early 1900s when people were infected with malaria to treat their neurosyphilis.'' (The high fever of malaria was thought to kill the organism that causes syphilis.) ''In some ways,'' Mason continued, ''my current interests in psychiatry come from this notion that he embodied, that biomedicine has enormous debts to other fields of biology, to the humanities.''

Mason graduated with a degree in biology in 1998, writing his thesis on the population dynamics of mixed-species malaria infections. Building on that work, he spent the following year in Thailand on a Luce Scholarship -- malaria research in Bangkok and at field sites on the southern Thai-Burmese border, preparation for what he supposed would be his specialization in medical school when he returned: infectious diseases.

Though Mason began medical school at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1999, he did not practice medicine until 2011. During his first year, gross anatomy underway and tissue samples in the microscopes, in a state he describes as complete disinhibition, Mason began writing a novel prompted by his time in Burma -- needed to, in fact. ''I returned home amazed by this new world. I felt like there was this huge part of me that was there, and I wanted to capture it, somehow. Preserve the experience. Otherwise it was going to be lost.''

''I didn't think about publishing it,'' Mason said. ''And then at a certain point I thought: If I'm going to share it with friends and family, could Kinko's do a nicer job of printing this than just binding it on one of those spiral things?'' Kinko's was spared the challenge: By the time he was beginning clinical rotations in 2001, Mason had managed to complete, and sell, a draft. Published in 2002, it was ''The Piano Tuner.''

By the time Mason graduated in 2004, after taking a year off to write and travel, especially in Brazil, he had begun conceiving two more novels -- the writing of one and the researching of another -- as well as the first of the suite of stories. Though he had intended to continue directly into his medical residency, the unexpected success of the first novel gave Mason time to try being a full-time fiction writer.

It didn't go well. The ease with which he wrote the first book -- the pure, unselfish freedom of writing only for himself, which Mason now calls ''a kind of lost youth'' -- was replaced by difficulty. ''If I characterize the trouble I hit with the second book, it felt very inhibited. I wondered, Why am I doing this? If you start asking that, you're in trouble.'' ''A Far Country'' took five years in all and was by design a very different book than its predecessor. ''I began to feel when I finished 'The Piano Tuner,' perhaps because of the attention, and a lot focused on the historical and musical apparatus in the book, I thought, Maybe I didn't capture anything, other than put into a nice fictional form some pretty cool stuff.''

Mainly, Mason sensed that he had failed to get close enough to his protagonist. So he sought a new direction. ''I had gone to Brazil to research this other story -- two convicts on a ship of Pedro Cabral's, mentioned in the record of his voyage as having been left on shore to learn the native language and weeping as the caravels sailed off. And I thought: Great premise, and so I went from town to town finding cool things, but I began to feel like: All I'm doing is taking this history and arranging it into a more palatable form.'' Wishing to avoid that pitfall, Mason abandoned the Cabral story and scrubbed ''A Far Country'' clean of history and place, writing it from the point of view of a 13-year-old girl from the most rural part of an unnamed ''far country.''

''Honestly, my intent was not to try to write about the experience of a 13-year-old girl. My intent was to write about somebody torn up from the roots they come from. I think I would have felt less restraint in retrospect and would have suffered less in writing the book had I picked a gold-rush migrant. Certainly, when I was writing it, that thought came across my mind: Do I have a right to be writing this person's story? And then there was this resistant thought that said, 'It's a work of fiction, and it's a work of the imagination, and I'm here.' ''

The novel received a more muted reception than his first, by which time Mason was also three years into a third novel that would become ''The Winter Soldier,'' and which, like the second, wasn't going as planned. It was vast, it was a story of the Great War, it was a novel of history that was also trying to be a novel of consciousness, it was about a psychiatrist, and it wasn't working. By 2010, ''it had become this huge appendage that I was constantly trying to beat into shape.'' Mason didn't know what to do about it and was dispirited.

''When I hadn't decided to go back to medicine, there was this existential pressure on the book to be worth existence. If this book is not expressing everything, what am I doing with my life? And if what I was attempting to do was trying to do something in the book to make life meaningful, it's a pretty tall order. And if I'm going to have to survive on this financially, it had to feel meaningful to me.''

Fate intervened. Mason, who had passed his first two medical board exams, would have to complete the third by 2011. ''Between 2004 and 2010, there were months I deeply wanted to return to medicine,'' Mason said, ''and months when I felt like I could keep writing forever. But I missed medicine more than I didn't.'' Mason decided at last to begin residency. And then, busier than ever, Mason returned to the stalled novel and, once he began practicing psychiatry, completed it, 14 years after he began.

It is not unusual to lead a divided professional life. Many doctors, say, split their work, as Mason himself does, between practicing medicine and teaching it, not to say pursuing research or public policy. Many doctors, too, have written fiction, quite a long and interesting list, among them Rabelais, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Céline and William Carlos Williams, all practicing physicians who were also writing. And many if not most writers have second jobs: Vladimir Nabokov worked as a lepidopterist and a college professor; Wallace Stevens as an insurance executive; Arundhati Roy as an activist who was trained as an architect. If this kind of bifurcation isn't uncommon, the psychiatrist who has written a novel is also not unheard-of. Peter D. Kramer, famous for ''Listening to Prozac,'' has written short stories and a novel, ''Spectacular Happiness,'' and the prolific Portuguese writer António Lobo Antunes, who long maintained a clinical practice, has been mentioned as a potential laureate for the Nobel Prize for Literature (should the Swedish Academy manage to give one again).

Even so, Mason's ''The Winter Soldier'' is a risky book, at least within contemporary letters. So much writing currently in critical favor -- that of Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Ben Lerner -- exploits the tension between the world on the page and the world that variously inspires those pages to reorient fiction on the author. Whereas Mason takes a resolutely old-fashioned approach by believing in historical fiction -- a genre which trusts that the world and history may be seized unselfconsciously, without the author's formal uneasiness elbowing in. ''The Winter Soldier'' is about the varieties of human suffering, which, you could say, is risky, because that's what the long literary tradition from Homer forward has always sought to illuminate: the ways in which we bring pain to others and to ourselves, even and especially as we try to show compassion. At the heart of Mason's attempt to add to that tradition is a young medical student named Lucius, son of a prominent Polish family. Mason gives us glimpses of the brutality involved in medical training and the brutality that needs to be noticed and then, by the student, negotiated:

Sometimes he was called forth as Praktikant. In Neurology, he stood next to the day's patient, a seventy-two-year-old locksmith from the Italian Tyrol, with such severe aphasia that he could only mutter ''Da.'' His daughter translated the doctor's questions into Italian. As the man tried to answer, his mouth opened and closed like a baby bird. ''Da. Da!'' he said, face red with frustration, as murmurs of fascination and approval filled the hall. Driven on by the lecturer's aggressive questioning, Lucius diagnosed a tumor of the temporal lobe, trying to keep his thoughts on the science and away from how miserable he was making the old man's daughter. She had begun to cry, and she kept reaching for her father's hand. ''You will stop that!'' his professor shouted at her, slapping her fingers. ''You will disturb the learning!'' Lucius's face was burning. He hated the doctor for asking such questions before the daughter, and he hated himself for answering. But he also did not like feeling that he was on the side of the patient, who was inarticulate and weak. So he answered forcefully, with no compassion. His diagnosis of early brainstem herniation and the relentless destruction of the breathing centers and death, was met by rising, even thunderous, applause.

Seeking experience, Lucius enlists when doctors are needed at the front, the pages devoted to his route there placing the reader deep into a very different world of expectations:

The forest thinned. They passed empty fields, now scarred by war. Bomb craters, abandoned bulwarks, trenches. From a tree, something was hanging: a body, now encased almost entirely in ice. At the far end of the field lay a dark pile of what seemed like boulders, but as he drew closer, Lucius saw that they were frozen horses. There were perhaps fifty, half-covered in snow. Garish, dark-red flowers bloomed from their heads. In the shadows of the forest, he thought he saw others.

What Lucius finds, once arrived at the deserted ''hospital'' in the Carpathians, that hospital a bombed-out church, is a whole new medical education at the hands of the one nurse in the doctorless outpost. Margarete, a young nun, has been treating the scores of grievously wounded, undertaking amputations and triage and palliative care on her own, and Lucius will learn, or not, what caring for people in pain entails. Margarete is the heart of the book, a gloriously real creation, a mystery that Lucius wants to know, solve, save. Failures accumulate as the war wears on. A patient is brought in, one who, amid all the varieties of suffering sprawled on the floor of the church, stands out: speechless, motionless, in some kind of shock. Lucius and Margarete will try, in their very different ways, to cure him. What unfolds is a kind of parable of what it means to sit with suffering, to charm it, to bear it, the novel performing the limits of a doctor's cure. It marks an evolution in Mason's idea of a novel. Gone is information for its own sake; gone is a pure investigation of a consciousness. Kept is Mason's committedness to history, in his way.

''I know the book will fit under the Library of Congress designation for 'historical fiction,' but if you want to learn about the First World War, I think there are many better things to read than my book. So the question is: What am I bringing to it?

''I couldn't write honestly about psychiatry because I would risk betraying confidences. What's interesting for a novel is all the complex feelings that a doctor has. The mistakes that he makes. The bad medicine that he practices. The guilt that he feels. And I felt an additional anxiety would flow back into my life, which is taking care of people who would then be reading this novel in which there's this protopsychiatrist who feels he's doing a bad job and who needs to make mistakes to move the book.''

We shouldn't mistake Mason's decision for an evasion so much as a decision about the kind of doctor he insists on trying to be and the kind of metaphysic he hopes his work will embody. Although ''The Winter Soldier'' contains some of the most brutal moments of suffering I've encountered in fiction, they're never there just to move the story along. They allow the reader to sit very close to someone in great pain and to listen to him. They feel entirely of a piece with the story Mason is telling, both about history and about one man's imagined personal history, a story that, for this imagined doctor, involves a great, signal failure.

''His failing is that he failed to protect someone from harm, violating his oath, which is both simple and so profound in all of its implications. This idea of doing no harm.''

What if, I wondered, there were an oath for novelists?

''It's hard for me to be cruel in writing,'' Mason said, with feeling. ''I know there is a horrible scene in this book. But it's redeemed. I don't think I could have written it if I weren't looking for moments of lightness. Maybe what I'm trying to do in the end is to create the possibility for kindness or,'' Mason said, after a pause, ''for relief.''

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.

Vinegar infused with fruit and herbs can add balance and sparkle to food, says Sue Quinn

SOUR NOTES

Pucker up, food lovers: we're rediscovering our taste for tart. Since fermented foods are now recognised as being not only delicious but also good for the gut, vinegar has enjoyed a resurgence, emerging more flavourful and versatile than ever.

Long relegated in Britain to being doused on fish and chips (dear old malt) or splashed in salad dressing (red or white wine, or balsamic), the condiment is now a feature ingredient in its own right. Chefs are making vinegars from scratch, infused with fruit, flowers and herbs, or, more bizarrely, wood ant and burnt toast.

And for home cooks, supermarkets and specialist food shops now stock vinegars made from vintage grapes or perfumed with petals, and craft versions matured in oak barrels. Online food retailer Sous Chef reports a 23 per cent increase in sales of speciality vinegars in the past year, with balsamic growing by a whopping 75 per cent. Waitrose stocks 38 different varieties of the sharp stuff.

The word "vinegar" comes from the Latin for "sour wine"; Roman legions valued its sharpness as a thirst quencher and drank it with water. Vinegar is sour because it is diluted acetic acid, created by the natural fermentation of wine or other forms of alcohol. This makes it a good preservative; the microorganisms that destroy food cannot survive in such an acidic environment. So, if you embalm ripe fruit, vegetables or herbs in vinegar, you freeze-frame the produce at its peak and imbue the vinegar with its flavour. Pasteurised or distilled vinegar has been heated to kill all the bacteria, but "live" varieties contain "the mother" - the cloud of live organisms that are good for gut health.

For centuries, British cooks made good use of vinegar (think mushroom ketchup and piccalilli), according to food historian Angela Clutton, author of the forthcoming book The Vinegar Cupboard (Absolute Press, Feb 2019). So why did it fall out of favour? "Because it wasn't very good," Clutton admits. "We lost our craftsmen vinegar producers. Machine-made took over for speed and cost, so most of what was available was just not that great."

In the basement kitchen of Scully restaurant in London, chef-proprietor Ramael Scully has buckets of vinegars burbling away. In the restaurant, gleaming jars fill the shelves, made with tayberries, kumquats, blackberry leaves, gooseberries and more. There's burnt toast vinegar on the go, made from charred sourdough and cider vinegar.

What will he use this for? "I've no idea! That's the exciting thing," he says. But it will eventually add sparkle to one of his dishes. "I believe anything rich needs a bit of acidity," Scully says. "Vinegar brings balance."

At Carters of Moseley in Birmingham, Brad Carter's cooking is firmly anchored in British-grown ingredients, so lemons are out and vinegar is vital to brighten and add flavour. He anoints fresh rhubarb with rhubarb vinegar, the sour notes teasing out hidden sweetness, and brushes roasted meat with a vinegar paste to snip through the richness. "Every dish should have an element of acidity - that's what elevates it," Carter says.

Vinegar features on the best drinks menus, too. Kate Hawkings, author of Aperitif (Quadrille, £16.99), says shrubs are the perfect antidote to sweet cocktails. "The sourness makes them more appetising, more grown up," she says. Hawkings runs Bellita bar and restaurant in Bristol, where she serves shrubs - strawberry and black pepper, say, or pineapple and kaffir lime leaf - with a splash of soda, or spirits. "They cut the alcohol nicely," she says.

Thom Eagle, head chef and fermenter at The Picklery in east London, thinks the popularity of vinegar is a sign that British palates are finally learning to appreciate a sour element in food. "Mediterranean chefs add a squeeze of fresh lemon, and in far-eastern cooking there's a tradition of balancing sweet and sour," he says.

"Here, people are only just realising that adding a dash of vinegar at the end of cooking is a way to round out the seasoning." He suggests adding a splash of good vinegar at the start of cooking and finishing with a dash of a more complex vinegar, such as a sherry or red wine version. "It allows different aspects of the flavour to come through," Eagle says. So next time your dinner tastes like it's missing something, reach for the vinegar, not the salt: a dash of sour might be just what it needs.

?Mix together the yogurt, olive oil, lime zest and juice, cardamom and some salt and pepper to create a thick paste. Leave paste in the fridge until needed.

To make the batter, mix together the masa harina, cornflour and a teaspoon of salt. Make a well in the middle and add the soda water and tablespoon of vinegar. Mix to a very thick batter. Place in the fridge.

Drain the potatoes gently and spread on a baking tray lined with a dry J-cloth.

Preheat the vegetable oil to 180C in a large saucepan or frying pan. Cook the potatoes in batches, coating them first in a layer of masa harina, then dip into the batter, then submerge in the oil. Fry to golden brown (any longer and the batter will turn bitter). ?Remove with a slotted spoon, dry on kitchen paper and serve sprinkled with salt and lime zest, to dip in the yogurt.

Ramael Scully's crispy salt and vinegar potatoes with lime and cardamom yogurt SERVES four

INGREDIENTS

500g Maris Pipers, lightly scrubbed with skin left on 100ml white wine vinegar, plus 1 tbsp 200g Greek yogurt 1 tbsp olive oil Zest of 1 lime and juice of ½ 2 tsp ground cardamom 300g masa harina, plus a little extra for dusting 100g cornflour 700-800ml soda water 1 litre vegetable oil, for frying Grated lime zest, to serve Method ?Slice the potatoes into 1cm-thick medallions. Add to a medium-sized saucepan and cover with water. Add 100ml vinegar and a teaspoon of salt. Bring to boil, turn heat down and simmer for 10-25 minutes, until al dente.

Some 850,000 people in the UK currently have the degenerative brain disease which destroys many elderly lives, according to the Alzheimer’s Society

A growing number of young people are falling prey to dementia.

Some 850,000 people in the UK currently have the degenerative brain disease which destroys many elderly lives, according to the Alzheimer’s Society.

Every three minutes another person will be diagnosed with the condition that causes memory loss, confusion and speech problems.

Equally alarming is that an increasing number of younger people are succumbing to the disease, with over 40,000 UK sufferers who are under 65.

In 2016 it became the leading cause of death in the UK, overtaking heart disease, said nutritional therapist Clare Daley, 53.

Mum-to-be who died in sleep will be laid to rest in prom dress as heartbroken family wait for answers[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mystery-over-shock-death-pregnant-13242067]

She said: “But it’s happening in younger and younger people, with studies in Mexico finding changes in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s in their teens.”

She warned stress, lack of exercise and diet can all affect your brain health. She believes we should try to prevent cognitive decline from our teenage years.

Clare said: “The sooner people start looking after their brain health the better. It’s never too late to make changes.”

Daughter horrified after CCTV caught "cruel" carer subjecting her mother to vile abuse in her own home[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/daughter-horrified-after-cctv-caught-13239184]

Here are her top tips.

The World Health Organisation said more than a third of UK adults fail to get enough exercise, increasing the risk of dementia.

But instead of going for a run, Clare recommends taking up a sport that helps you exercise your body and brain.

She said: “More complicated exercise is the best, like table tennis or ­dancing.”

Breakfast is said to be the most important meal of the day, so pack it full of foods and nutrients that can help keep the brain healthy.

Blueberries have lots of antioxidants and can be sprinkled on top of porridge, while walnuts are also high in healthy fats. Dark chocolate with more than 70 per cent cocoa content is also good for the brain.

Clare said: “A bowl of blueberries at breakfast helps improve concentration and memory up to five hours later, and research shows kids who eat them at breakfast have a short term boost in brain function during the day.”

Getting enough shut eye is a crucial to maintaining a healthy brain, as this is the time the brain resets and recovers. Stress has a negative affect on our brain. A key hormone released when you’re stressed, cortisol, has been linked to problems with memory. Stress also affects the immune system, which is known to play an important role in the development of dementia.

Clare suggests watching fewer high-action dramas which can wind you up before bed and try nature shows, such as David Attenborough’s, to cut stress.

Even focusing on the positives of the day by writing a happiness or gratitude journal can reduce stress. Clare said: “Keep a notebook by your bed and at the end of the day write down three good things that happened.

“Even if you’ve had a rubbish day you have to find three good things. It puts your brain in a positive frame before sleep.”

It will lift for your mood and stimulate a nerve connecting your brain to your gut.

A healthy gut is key in the ­battle against dementia because Harvard researchers discovered gut bacteria can cause the brain inflammation behind dementia.

Clare said: “Gargling and singing loudly stimulates the Vagas nerve, and doing exercises can support both of your brain and your gut. Singing loudly also releases endorphins and other happy chemicals in the brain.”

■Clare works for Cytoplan supplements which has launched The Brain Health Programme to improve people’s cognitive function, memory and mood. See thebrainhealthprogramme.co.uk.

There's a scene in Netflix's popular teen romantic comedy "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" in which Peter Kavinsky, the jock with a heart, is giving Lara Jean — his fake girlfriend — and her little sister, Kitty, a ride to school. He takes a sip of something Kitty calls a Korean yogurt smoothie and says, "Wow, this is really good." While the majority of the audience might not have recognized the red top of the bottle, I knew exactly what it was. "Duh, Peter!" I yelled at the screen. "Of course it tastes good!"

And while the scene lasts less than a minute, the inclusion of yakult, a popular probiotic milk drink, and other Korean food items in "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" made me realize how much I compartmentalize my love for Asian snack foods and more hearty and traditional Korean food. Sure, I like American potato chips, and I dabble in pretzels, but give me saewoo-kkang, ojing-eochib and yakult any day.

My first memories of a Korean grocery store are from growing up in Northern Virginia in the 1990s and drinking the Lotte brand yakult. After perusing the snack aisle and unsuccessfully trying to persuade my mom to buy me one more box of Pepero (Korea's answer to Japan's Pocky), I knew that at the very least she would always buy me yakult, which I nicknamed "yoggi" based on the Korean pronunciation "yoguruttu."  My older sister would happily carry our go-to drinks into the kitchen, where we would poke holes in the lids with chopsticks. I would drink one in the car on the way to kindergarten and another right when I came home from school. At the height of my yakult craze, my sister and I had a timed race to see who could drink 10 the fastest. The only rule: You had to use the chopstick method instead of taking off the red foil. Even though I lost in the end — if you ask me, my sister cheated by poking bigger holes with her finger and, no, I'm not bitter about it — I remember being on the verge of a stomach ache, but happy I could trick my parents into letting me drink more than two yakults at a time.

Over the years I slowly stopped drinking yakult, and my lunches included less Korean food (with my favorite side dishes, such as myulchi bokkeum and jangjorim) and became the standard ham-and-cheese sandwiches. While I never endured the type of bullying over bringing traditional dishes depicted in "Fresh Off the Boat" and discussed in David Chang's podcast, a part of me was convinced that Korean food wasn't appropriate or cool enough to have a place at the cafeteria table. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was denying my inherent Koreanness.

It wasn't until I was stripped of my Korean food source in college that I realized how ingrained the cuisine is in my identity and happiness. Gone were the days when my mom would have soondubu jiggae, buchujeon and godeungeo gui ready when I came home after school. Instead, while I searched for Korean food in Williamsburg, Va., I tried to pacify my desire for steaming hot soups that warmed me to the bones by buying watery chicken-and-rice soup at the school cafeteria. While I was attempting to learn how to properly salt my food as a new college graduate, I sensed a growing presence of Korean food: fast-casual bibimbap eateries in malls, Korean food trucks that would dole out bulgogi with rice, and gochujang appearing as a glaze for veggies and meat in restaurants. Starting in middle school, when people learned that I was a Korean American, they would say, "Oh, wow, your English is so good" or "Are you from North or South Korea?," but after 2014,  the reaction shifted to "I love kimchi and Korean barbecue."

You would think I'd be glad that more people seem to know about Korean culture via food. The problem is, it still feels like such a narrow scope. Korean food isn't a trend; it's a complex cuisine with a full history, regional differences — and even interpretations of other nations' foods, as in Korean Chinese and Korean Japanese. Yet Korean food becomes part of the conversation only when it mirrors American food trends or makes an appearance in pop culture. And it's misunderstood.

Take bibimbap, the topped-rice dish my mom would feed me anytime she wanted me to eat my vegetables. I didn't start seeing fusion styles of it pop up left and right until after Gwyneth Paltrow filmed an irksome, disrespectful video with chef Lee Gross on how to make it in 2010. Bibimbap has an established history, but Paltrow doesn't even try to pronounce the word properly. She calls it "a Korean rice dish, essentially" when it is exactly a Korean dish. The bibimbap recipe on Paltrow's Goop site fails to mention its Korean roots, and includes in the mix broccolini, which would be fine if she at least acknowledged that it's not a traditional bibimbap. Such videos treat Korean food as a spectacle, not a rich cuisine deserving respect.

Fusion can be just fine when done by chefs and writers who attempt to understand and pay tribute to traditions and culture, not when they just think it's "cool" to marry two types of food. All global cuisines have layered histories, so it's not fair to the food, culture or the people to glorify certain aspects of a country's food history while casting off others — and understanding none of it.

That's why I found the yakult scene, however short, in "To All the Boys I've Loved Before" not just relatable, but almost invigorating. The movie, along with "Fresh Off the Boat" and  "Crazy Rich Asians," depicts Asian food without over-explaining or exoticizing it, and seeing them has helped me realize that my Korean and American identities can and should coexist. One culture is not more correct than the other.

Yakult crept back into my life before "To All the Boys I Loved Before," but I would be lying if I said my renewed interest in Korean food isn't tied to the small burst of Asian and Asian American representation in the media. I'm rediscovering strong Korean flavors such as ssamjang with a greater appreciation. After some trial and error, I've learned how to make simple versions of Korean food, including dakbokkeumtang. Maybe one day I'll graduate to making my favorite jjigaes without relying on measurements but purely using my taste buds — just like my maternal grandma. Until then, the next time you see me, I might be munching on veggies dipped in ssamjang, followed by a nice refreshing yakult.

More from Voraciously:

Poke's popularity surges even as arguments about authenticity heat up

World to Gordon Ramsay: You are no Anthony Bourdain

How Corelle plates came to fill immigrants' kitchen cabinets

Sharks are not known for their taste for greenery. But at least one species of shark enjoys a salad of sea grass as well as the prey it hunts.

The bonnethead shark, a diminutive species that reaches up to 3 feet in length, lives in the shallow sea grass meadows off both coasts of the Americas. It eats small squid and crustaceans ferreted from the swaying underwater fronds. But, researchers who have carefully monitored everything going in and out of captive bonnetheads say in a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B[http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/285/1886/20181583] that they also eat large quantities of seagrass. The grass isn’t just passing inertly through the sharks’ guts. They extract nutrition from it just as they do from the meaty portion of their diet. These sharks must, therefore, be reclassified as omnivores — the first omnivorous sharks known to science.

[ Like the Science Times page on Facebook. [http://on.fb.me/1paTQ1h] | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter. [http://nyti.ms/1MbHaRU] ]

In 2007, researchers first reported that the digestive tracts of bonnethead sharks caught in the Gulf of Mexico were full of sea grass, up to 62 percent of the contents by weight.

At the time, some reasoned that the grass might have been ingested incidentally, as the sharks dove for scurrying prey in the meadows. But Samantha Leigh, a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, and lead author of the paper, and her colleagues wondered whether there was more to it.

They caught bonnethead sharks just off the Florida Keys and transported them to an outdoor lab facility. There, the sharks lived in a large tank and received a meal every day consisting of a wad of seagrass wrapped in a piece of squid, resembling a large inside-out sushi roll. The sea grass, which made up 90 percent of the roll, had been loaded with a tracker isotope that could be detected later in their blood if the grass was truly being digested, not just passing through. The researchers also filtered the sharks’ feces from the water using a fine mesh, allowing them to test how much of what went in came out.

The sharks thrived on this diet, all of them gaining weight during the experiment. When the researchers checked their blood, they found very high levels of the tracker, indicating the grass was being digested and used for nutrients. Checking enzymes in their guts revealed that the sharks do possess enzymes needed for breaking down the carbohydrates in plants, much like other omnivores; carnivores, on the other hand, have primarily enzymes for dealing with proteins. The researchers calculated that the sharks were digesting the grass with about 50 percent efficiency, much greater than carnivorous lizards, for instance, whose efficiency at digesting plant matter is about 30 percent.

In fact, the sharks had roughly the same digestive efficiency as juvenile sea-grass-eating sea turtles, which start out as omnivores and become more like herbivores as they mature.

“They are at least as good as those guys. That was pretty surprising to see,” said Ms. Leigh. How do humans compare? “We’re actually in the same realm as the bonnethead shark,” she said, good omnivores that we are.

Going forward, the researchers hope to understand why the shark has this ability. Humans get our plant-digesting enzymes from our gut microbiome, and it seems likely the sharks do as well, though that has yet to be confirmed. Understanding that the bonnethead eats plants also changes its status in ecological models of the seagrass meadow ecosystem, an important tool for conservation[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/science/seagrass-coral-reefs-pathogens-global-warming.html].

Could it be that other sharks have been grazing on grass all this time?

“This is the first one that we know for sure is, but it definitely makes me at least want to take a closer look at some other coastal shark species,” said Ms. Leigh, citing their small sizes and tendency to feed on smaller creatures, as the bonnethead does. “It’s definitely possible that there are others that could be doing something similar.”

PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH BY GETTY IMAGES)

* Fossils on an Australian Beach Reveal a Shark-Eat-Shark World[https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/science/sharks-fossils-australia.html]

* Tracking the Elusive Whale Shark[https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/science/whale-sharks.html]

* Meet the Greenland Shark. It Could Be the Longest-Living Vertebrate.[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/12/science/greenland-shark-longest-living.html]

* Studying Sharks’ Social Lives to Expose Their Friendly Side[https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/12/science/studying-sharks-social-lives-to-expose-their-friendly-side.html]

It's cold and flu season, which means day-care facilities and classrooms will soon be filled with sick children performing the latest version of that annual hit, cough cough, sneeze sneeze, achoo. So how do you keep your children safe from the common cold and flu this winter?

For the common cold, there is no magic pill. The best prevention is simple: frequent hand washing, cleaning and disinfecting commonly touched surfaces, and getting plenty of sleep, exercise and a healthy diet full of good nutrition and vitamins (including probiotics and vitamin D).

To avoid the flu, though, there's a very effective method: the flu vaccine, in the form of a shot or the needle-free FluMist. Getting a flu vaccine of any type is better than not getting one. Flu vaccines are recommended for everyone 6 months and older. To help protect newborns who are too young to get their own vaccines, make sure everyone else at home or anyone who cares for them is vaccinated.

Other than a sore arm, side effects from the flu shot are rare. And contrary to popular belief, you can't catch the flu from the flu shot. If you're wary of needles or looking for an alternative to the traditional flu shot, the nasal spray version is approved for healthy children 2 years and older. Although the American Academy of Pediatrics still recommends the flu shot as the best defense, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is not voicing a preference this year and many experts think the FluMist looks promising for protecting kids against the flu. The main difference, other than how the vaccine is given, is how it is made. The nasal spray contains a live, inactive virus and the shot is made with either a killed or manufactured form of the virus. A few flu seasons ago, the nasal spray was determined to be not as effective, and then it was taken off the market for two years. Now it's back, and only time will tell which vaccine performs better this flu season, so whichever you choose (or your doctor recommends), just get one.

If this is their first year receiving the flu vaccine, and your child is younger than 9, they will need two doses administered one month apart. One bit of good news: The flu vaccine can be given at the same time as other childhood immunizations, so it won't put your little one behind schedule.

Although the vaccine is updated each year — to combat an influenza virus that changes frequently — it is not a cure-all. Some people who get the flu vaccine will still catch the flu, but usually they have a milder case and are less likely to develop serious complications, such as pneumonia or death. It's also important to remember that the flu vaccine protects against influenza (a respiratory infection), not other viral causes of coughs and colds. It also doesn't protect against stomach viruses, often called the "stomach flu," which aren't actually a flu at all but a different virus that causes vomiting and diarrhea.

In past years there had been concern about giving the flu shot and nasal FluMist to children who are allergic to eggs, because the flu shot contains a very tiny amount of egg protein. This is no longer the case, as the amount of egg protein in the vaccines has decreased significantly over the years. No serious reactions have been reported after administration of egg-based flu shots and nasal spray vaccines in individuals with egg allergy. It is now recommended that all patients 6 months and older with egg allergy (including those with a history of an anaphylactic reaction to eggs) can receive any flu vaccine.

If you bypass the vaccine, for one reason or another, be prepared for possible trouble. If you are otherwise healthy, the flu is probably the worst you will ever feel, with fever, cough, sore throat, headache, chills and muscle aches. Most people are sick for a few days to a week, but some get much sicker and may need to be hospitalized. The flu still causes thousands of deaths each year, and last year 178 children died of the flu in the United States (nearly 80 percent of those did not receive the flu vaccine).

Tanya Altmann is a practicing pediatrician who founded Calabasas Pediatrics and a mom of three. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics and the author of several books, including "Baby and Toddler Basics: Expert Answers to Parents' Top 150 Questions." Candace Katz is a board-certified allergist and immunologist at Kaiser Permanente in Pleasanton, Calif., and a mom of two.

Follow On Parenting on Facebook for more essays, news and updates, and join our discussion group here to talk about parenting and work. You can sign up here for our weekly newsletter.

More reading:

What parents should know about fevers, according to a pediatrician

You can now use a 529 to pay for K-12 education — so should you?

What to know (and what to avoid) when transitioning babies to solid foods

BACTERIA are known to play a crucial role in the human gut, but scientists have discovered they hold a shocking secret - they produce electricity.

US researchers have found that hundreds of types of bugs produce electrical charges that can make us fall ill.

Previously bacteria that produce electricity have been found in extreme environments, deep within mines or at the bottom of lakes, where they use the ability to take in nutrients.

But scientists have noticed a similar process occurs in the gut.

Some electro-bacteria are known to be responsible for human illnesses, such as gangrene and listeria and those that cause hospital-acquired infections and food-related sicknesses.

"The fact that so many bugs that interact with humans - as pathogens or in probiotics, or in our microbiota or involved in fermentation of human products - are electrogenic, had been missed before," said Dan Portnoy, professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

"It could tell us a lot about how these bacteria infect us or help us have a healthy gut."

While animals and plants use oxygen to create the chemical reactions needed to fuel their cells, bacteria in airless environments must find an alternative.

Underground, that can often be minerals like iron or manganese, which must "breathe" to survive. To grab those substances, bacteria make tiny electrical currents that allow electrons to be swapped with the minerals.

The same electrical chain reaction has been found in the human gut, also an oxygen-free environment.

"We think that the conventionally studied mineral-respiring bacteria are using extracellular electron transfer because it is crucial for survival, whereas these newly-identified bacteria are using it because it is 'easy,'" said Sam Light, a postdoctoral fellow at the university and first author of the study.

Scientists think the discovery will be useful to researchers who are trying to create "living batteries" from microbes. If harnessed, it could allow green energy to be created from bacteria in waste treatment plants.

Caroline Ajo-Franklin, a scientist from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, measured the current from streams of gut bacteria and found they produced up to 500 microamps, enough to run a tiny motor.

Mr Light also found that lactobacilli, bacteria crucial to the production of cheese, yogurt and sauerkraut, also produce electricity and has theorised that they may play a role in producing the taste of cheese and sauerkraut.

"This is a whole big part of the physiology of bacteria that people didn't realise existed, and that could be potentially manipulated," he said.

The research was published in the journal Nature.

These days you can make milk from anything, it seems — cashews, hemp, oats — and foodies will lap it up. Anything but actual cow's milk, that is, which has been shunned by fad dieters in recent years.

Gwyneth Paltrow recommends giving up dairy to 'detox' your system, Victoria Beckham's dermatologist suggests cutting it out to improve your complexion and U.S. actress Megan Fox has said a diet free of cow's milk keeps her slim.

But this week, scientists said people who eat three portions of full-fat dairy a day have a lower risk of early death, serious heart disease and stroke.

And the dairy industry is hitting back with a host of surprising new ways to enhance cow's milk...

SOOTHING SLEEP AID

Sleep Well milk drink is a blend of full-fat Jersey milk, honey, vanilla and valerian root designed to help you nod off.

Valerian root has been used as a herbal sleep aid for millennia and is thought to work by gently increasing your brain's levels of a natural substance called gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA), which soothes anxiety (£6.95 for three 200ml cartons, sleepwellmilk.com).

Or there's Lullaby Milk, which has nothing added to it but comes from cows milked just before dawn, when they produce milk with higher levels of tryptophan and melatonin, two hormones that encourage good sleep.

It is available in Ireland, with plans to launch in the UK soon (£1.79 a litre, lullabymilk.com), but sleep experts say more research is needed to prove its  benefits.

ALLERGY-FREE

sensitivity to dairy products — which can trigger bloating and stomach cramps — used to mean cow's milk was off the menu for about 10 per cent of the UK population. But not now.

'If you have a problem digesting dairy, try some of these cleverly adapted milk products,' says Sophie Medlin, a dietitian and lecturer in nutrition and dietetics at King's College London.

Arla's Lactofree range of 'dairy drinks' are essentially normal milk with added lactase enzymes. These are the chemicals that help our bodies to break down and digest dairy products — but some people produce too little of them, so these dairy drinks may help (£1.40 per litre from most major supermarkets).

If you're not lactase-deficient but still find cow's milk upsets your digestion, try A2 milk — £1.39 per litre from large supermarkets. Most cows produce milk that contains A1 protein, which some people struggle to digest. This milk is from cows that produce only the more easily digestible A2 protein.

FULLER FOR LONGER

SALES of protein-laced foods, supplements and drinks have soared by 500 per cent in the past five years.

Designed to keep us 'fuller for longer' and to help build muscle, products such as Arla's Raspberry and Strawberry Protein Milkshake (£1 for 225ml) and the For Goodness Shakes range (£1.35 for 315ml) have at least 20g protein per bottle: twice as much as milk.

Spanish research has shown that people who eat large amounts of protein are 90 per cent more likely to gain substantial weight, though.

'Most people who eat a balanced diet meet their daily protein requirements easily,' says Sophie Medlin.

Heart-friendly

If you're conscious of your heart health, organic milk — sales of which have risen by 15 per cent in the past year — is a good choice. Research has shown that it can contain up to 50 per cent more polyphenols (heart-healthy fats).

You could also try Flora ProActiv Skimmed Milk Drink, £1.40 per litre, which contains added plant sterols that have been shown to reduce cholesterol by between 7 and 10 per cent in two to three weeks, if you drink three 250ml servings a day.

Too good to be true? Sophie Medlin says: 'These products can be useful for lowering cholesterol but the most important thing by far is staying a healthy weight with a well-balanced diet.'

Raw Milk

FANS say unpasteurised milk tastes richer and creamier and is better for you because it contains beneficial bacteria and enzymes that can help to fight allergies, eczema and asthma.

Some also claim that because it hasn't been homogenised (pushed through fine jets so the cream globules stay evenly distributed), it is easier to  digest.

But the jury is still out on whether raw milk is safe. Pasteurisation kills any potentially dangerous bacteria such as  E. coli, so unpasteurised milk  is not recommended for the very young, the elderly or pregnant women.

It is not allowed to be sold in shops but raw milk, butter and even cheeses can be bought directly and online from well-monitored, approved farmers. Raw milk must be kept refrigerated. It freezes and defrosts well.

TRENDY KEFIR

Said to promote healthy digestion, boost immunity and aid weight loss, probiotic kefir is the dairy drink du jour.

It is made by fermenting whole milk with bacteria and yeast cultures to create a tangy, probiotic drink.

Bio-tiful Kefir (£1.75 for 200ml from major supermarkets) is a range of kefir smoothies. You can also buy kefir by mail order from livekefircompany.co.uk, which charges £9.60 for an eight-day supply.

Boozy Milk

Finally, Black Cow Pure Milk Vodka (£26 for 50cl from Marks & Spencer, blackcow.co.uk) looks like normal vodka but is  made from fermented milk whey, which gives it a smooth, creamy taste.

© Daily Mail

On the surface, the Boston Fermentation Festival, which just celebrated six years in existence, is as quirky as you'd expect.

At the booth of Micro Mama's from Weare, N.H., you can taste a wonderful spiced sauerkraut called Mexi Mama, which is like the Central America street food staple curtido, and then learn about New England's horseradish industrial complex from owner Stephanie Zydenbos-Heino.

Enter the outpost of Go-En, from Whitefield, Maine, and an impossibly rich and complex bite of tahini miso begins to make sense after a rundown on koji, the mystical fungus at the heart of Japanese cuisine, from co-owner Nicholas Repenning.

The cycle continues, threatening to blur the bigger picture now illuminated by the festival: Fermentation isn't just a quaint little movement of hippies and homesteaders anymore. It's a revolution with transformative potential in gastronomy, agriculture, health, and other sectors.

Greater Boston is playing its familiar role as a hub of global progress.

Frontier days (of five years ago)

Jeremy Ogusky, owner of Ogusky Ceramics, a Jamaica Plain company that provides pottery and plateware to some of the Boston area's best restaurants, cofounded the festival in 2013 with humble hopes.

“We just wanted to spread the word about fermentation and bring people together," he said. “I don't really think we really saw it as part of some kind of global uprising."

Regardless, the scrappy gathering launched just as a confluence of factors collided to push forward the fermentation wave.

By 2014, the 21st-century generation of superstar chefs, led by Rene Redzepi of Copenhagen's Noma, had taken molecular gastronomy in a new direction, turning focus from tech-driven theatrics toward tech-enabled experimentation with powerful and ancient natural forces, particularly fermentation. Redzepi opened his groundbreaking fermentation lab at Noma that year, and using social media and events as platforms, he and his team and a small global network of explorers, including key players from Boston, revved up one of the most exciting innovation movements in the food world.

“I remember seeing the guys from Noma coat a beef rib with clarified butter and peaso (miso made from peas) to age it, and it blew me up," said Jeremy Kean, co-owner of Jamaica Plain's Brassica Kitchen & Café, perhaps Boston's most fermentation-forward restaurant. “When you get these things right, you're always kind of asking yourself: Why the [expletive] is that so good?"

Kean was part of a network of local early adopters like Ogusky; the late Geoff Lukas of Sofra Bakery & Café; Nicco Muratore of Commonwealth; Tim Maslow, Brandon Baltzley, and Laura Higgins-Baltzley of the now shuttered Ribelle; private chef Mike Betts; microbiologist Bryan Greenhagen, who founded Mystic Brewery; Jitti Chaithiraphant of Heritage Food Project; and blogger-explorer Rich Shih of OurCookQuest.

“We started engaging with chefs and other really creative people from all over the world in this open source way," said Shih. “It has been mind-blowing seeing what people share and how we all build on each other's work."

Bubbling up

Shih's characterization brings to mind the innovation language of tech and biotech, and five years ago in Boston, those sectors were where other huge leaps were being made in understanding the microbiome, the mashup of microorganisms surrounding us and inside us, and related metabolic processes like fermentation.

In 2014, Ginkgo Bioworks, a Seaport-based firm that engineers custom microbes for use across a range of industries, became the first biotech company accepted into the legendary Y Combinator accelerator program (of Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit fame). Nearby, the Charlestown-based firm Symbiota (now Indigo Ag) was founded to apply microbial technology to seeds to help farmers and their crops weather drought and other scourges. Cambridge-based Evelo Biosciences was also launched to develop new treatments that work with immune cells in the gut to address broader conditions in the body.

Academic research initiatives on fermentation were also gathering steam across Greater Boston at the time. Most notably, the groundbreaking Science and Cooking curriculum at Harvard's Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which was becoming an important global meeting place for dialogue among scientists and culinary leaders, added a course called “Flavor Molecules of Food Fermentation: Exploration and Inquiry" in 2015.

“Food is such a powerful vehicle to help people understand and explore science," says Pia Sorensen, a chemical engineer and lecturer who leads the course. “And fermentation is this wild and unpredictable process that forces you to think differently about . . . food and flavor and the world around us, which opens up huge possibilities."

Developing layers

Less than five years later, the microbiome mob in Boston is growing and bringing those possibilities more into focus.

Both Ginkgo Bioworks and Indigo Ag have achieved rare status as unicorns, or privately held companies valued at over $1 billion. Last week, Synlogic, another pioneering microbiome company in Cambridge, announced positive results from a clinical trial of a microbial treatment for a rare disease called phenylketonuria, which makes it hard for carriers to digest and break down protein in meat and cheese. According to news reports, the treatment has potential to become the “first synthetic biology-based medical treatment to gain approval by the Food and Drug Administration." Dozens of other promising microbiome companies have more recently been launched to do everything from mapping the gut biome to treating a range of other ailments.

“We've commercialized microbiome-coated seeds and seen more than 10 percent yield increases across hundreds of thousands of acres [where our products are used], and we're just scratching the surface of what the microbiome can do." said Geoffrey von Maltzahn, PhD, cofounder and chief innovation officer at Indigo Ag, and a Partner at Flagship Pioneering, a major investor in microbiome companies.

Academic research initiatives on the health benefits of fermentation have also leapt forward. Pia Sorensen's fermentation course at Harvard has become one of the program's most popular classes, and nearly every other university and research institution in the area now hosts a microbiome program that touches on food.

“We have hundreds of studies showing associations between probiotics and positive health outcomes, and a few clinical trials that conclusively demonstrate those beneficial effects," said Dr. David Ludwig, a professor of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, whose cookbook, “Always Delicious," features information and recipes on fermented foods. “Overall, the evidence suggest that regular consumption of fermented foods is a tasty way to improve long-term health."

Microbiome to table

The Boston area's dining scene is a good place to test this premise, if you can summon the exploratory spirit that drives all of Boston's microbiome innovators. A few restaurants are making fermentation part of the backbone of their approach, including Brassica Kitchen & Café, Bondir, Commonwealth, Tasting Counter, Alden & Harlow, Waypoint, Cape Cod's the Buffalo Jump, and Worcester's Deadhorse Hill. Ethnic restaurants, like Allston's great Korean establishments, are also putting global fermentation culture within reach, as are grocery and specialty food stores, where stocks of fermented products have skyrocketed in recent years. Lest it be forgotten, New England's thriving brewing and distilling scene is playing a huge role in introducing the public to the wonders of fermentation.

At a recent, sold-out fermentation workshop and dinner at Brassica, one of a semi-regular series, Ogusky facilitated a sauerkraut making session, while Kean and chef Sarah Trainer served a beautifully simple, impressively deep meal of galette of fermented cauliflower, fermented chickpea panisse, and a green salad with fermented carrots. Kean guesses that he and his team have dozens of fermentation experiments going on at any given time, calling them “totally necessary for us to be successful."

Across town at Commonwealth, a similar recent series event, facilitated by Muratore and Shih, featured a full spread tasting of their collaborative projects, including misos, pepper pastes, and a knockout version of New Orleans' legendary muffaletta sandwich with koji-cured tasso and fermented vegetable giardiniera. The duo, along with Betts and others from the group of Boston's early fermentation adopters, will be taking their show to a new level this Saturday, Sept. 15, when they present “Quest for Koji," one of the first fermentation-themed dinners at the prestigious James Beard House in New York City.

Chefs at the fermentation-driven restaurants are using the approach and products as more than embellishment, but rather as a power tool for boosting flavors, being more seasonal and local, leaving less waste, and creating a more unique experience overall for diners. Not to mention, it's easy to sense in conversation how the approach instills a spirit of endless innovation in their kitchens that benefits everyone inside and out. The trend is likely to spread and accelerate here and across the global dining landscape when Redzepi and his compatriots at Noma release their “Noma Guide to Fermentation" next month.

Back at the Boston Fermentation Festival, all the paths converge. The Boston Public Market estimates the festival drew more than 14,000 people in 2017, making it one of the largest free fermentation festivals in the country. Indigo Ag and Ginkgo Bioworks, the microbiome pioneers, are primary sponsors, and researchers, chefs, and artisans are all featured on the festival floor and in the program.

“It amazes me that things have come this far," said Ogusky. “And I have to laugh, because a lot of our longtime vendors and partners say they miss the days when we were doing the festival in a tiny Egleston Square parking lot and no one knew about it."

Luckily, things bubbled up and over.

Sam Hiersteiner can be reached at samhiersteiner@gmail.com.

Credit: By Sam Hiersteiner Globe correspondent

Hospital superbugs to probiotic lactobacillicapable of 'electrogenesis' when deprived of oxygen in the gut

Microbes in your stomach may have a shocking secret as scientists have found many species of bacteria are able to produce electricity.

Scientists from University of California, Berkeley,have discovered that listeria bacteria, which contaminate food and causelisteriosis, start producing power under certain environmental conditions – such as alack of oxygen.

If grown in a flask with electrodes inserted these species produce a measurable current and scientists are looking at ways this could be refined andexploited to generate electricityat waste treatment plants or powersmall electronics.

Previously the only“electrogenic” bacteria species were thought to live in harsh,mineral-rich environments like acidic mines and lake beds.

Read more

The secret to why you’re not losing weight

For better gut bacteria, eat more oily fish

Gut bacteria plays a role in long-term weight gain

The Berkeley team found abundantexamples ofgangrene-causing clostridiumbacteriaandhospital-acquired infectious strains capable of makingsparks fly.

They also found these properties in species of beneficial bacteria, like the lactobacilli which are contained in probiotic drinks for the health promoting effectsand are used in yoghurt and cheese production.

“The fact that so many bugs that interact with humans, either as [disease causing] pathogens or in probiotics or in our microbiota or involved in fermentation of human products, are electrogenic – that had been missed before,” said Professor Dan Portnoy, a microbial biology expert who is one of the authors of the study published in

Nature

on Wednesday.

“It could tell us a lot about how these bacteria infect us or help us have a healthy gut.”

Bacteria produce electricity as part of their metabolism. In humans our cells use the oxygen we breathe to drive the transfer of energy-carrying electrons locked up as sugars and other molecules in our food, fuelling every cell.

But single-celled bacteria living in low oxygen environments don’t have that option.

They have to use different chemical elements to promote this flow of electrons.In the case of electrogenic bacteria found in acid lakes or mines they are effectively breathing minerals like iron or manganese, as humans use oxygen.

As these minerals are outside the cell, the electrons have to flow throw several steps to reach them – effectively an internal current conducting electrons as they would along a copper wire.

Read more

Now that we know probiotics are useless, stop hoarding supplements

In gut bacteria, when they’re deprived of oxygen they usually have access to an abundance of one very effective electron acceptor called flavin. This molecule is made up of vitamin B12 which is essential to the action of all of our cells and so is usually abundant in the body.

The researchers found that gut bacteria produce just as much electricity, around 500 microamps, as those using mineral exchange despite a simplified method.

“It seems that the cell structure of these bacteria and the vitamin-rich ecological niche that they occupy makes it significantly easier and more cost effective to transfer electrons out of the cell,” said Dr Sam Light, who is first author of the study.

“We think that the conventionally studied mineral-respiring bacteria are using extracellular electron transfer because it is crucial for survival, whereas these newly identified bacteria are using it because it is ‘easy’.”

A few portions of milk a day may keep the doctor away, researchers suggest

Many people believe that consuming milk[https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Milk] that’s low-fat or dairy-free is better for your health than opting for whole-fat varieties.

However, a major study has concluded that including full-fat dairy[https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/dairy] in your diet can actually be extremely beneficial for the wellbeing of your heart[https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/heart].

Researchers from McMaster University in Canada carried out a study of 136,384 people aged between 35 to 70 years old from 21 countries, that was published in

The Lancet

journal.

Read more

Belief that milk makes cold mucus and phlegm worse 'is medieval myth'

The participants were assessed over the course of nine years, during which their daily dairy intake and overall health were recorded.

They were split into four separate categories: those who ate no dairy at all, those who had less than one serving a day, those who had one or two servings a day and those who ate more than two servings a day.

Furthermore, the type of milk that they consumed, whether they had whole-fat or low-fat dairy, was also taken into account.

Those who had around three portions of dairy a day had lower rates of mortality and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease or stroke than those who had no dairy at all.

On top of that, the people who consumed three servings of whole-fat dairy a day were reported as being less likely to experience heart disease than those who only had half a serving of whole-fat dairy a day.

Lead author of the study Dr Mahshid Dehghan explains why past advice given about the benefits of solely eating low-fat dairy foods may have been misguided.

"Focusing on low-fat is predominantly based on the assumption that saturated fat increases LDL cholesterol," she says, according to

TIME

.

"But dairy contains many other components [which may be healthy] - amino acids, vitamin K, calcium, magnesium. They can be fermented and have probiotics. We should not focus on a single nutrient."

DrDehghan, a senior research associate in the Department of Medicine at McMaster University, believes thatthe research team’s extensive study indicates the need for regular dairy consumption to be encouraged.

“Our findings support that consumption of dairy products might be beneficial for mortality and cardiovascular disease, especially in low-income and middle-income countries where dairy consumption is much lower than in North America or Europe,” she says.

Read more

Butter and cheese 'could become occasional luxuries’ after Brexit'

The data regarding the participants was accumulated by the Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiological (PURE) study.

According to the researchers, regular consumption of milk and yogurt had a greater impact on mortality and overall wellbeing than butter and cheese.

In the past, health professionals have suggested avoiding whole-fat dairy due to the apparent detrimental effect of eating too many saturated fats[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/saturated-fats-in-meat-and-dairy-produce-not-as-bad-for-health-as-previously-thought-study-finds-10450663.html].

In the opinion of Anna Rangan, associate professor of the School of Life and Environmental Sciences at Sydney University in Australia, people should take these particular findings with a pinch of salt.

Meat and dairy companies to surpass oil industry as world’s biggest polluters, report finds

“The results from the PURE study seem to suggest that dairy intake, especially whole-fat dairy, might be beneficial for preventing deaths and major cardiovascular diseases,” she says.

“However, as the authors themselves concluded, the results only suggest the ‘consumption of dairy products should not be discouraged and perhaps even encouraged in low-income and middle income countries.’

“Readers should be cautious, and treat this study only as yet another piece of the evidence - albeit a large one - in the literature."

On the surface, the Boston Fermentation Festival, which just celebrated six years in existence, is as quirky as you'd expect.

At the booth of Micro Mama's from Weare, N.H., you can taste a wonderful spiced sauerkraut called Mexi Mama, which is like the Central America street food staple curtido, and then learn about New England's horseradish industrial complex from owner Stephanie Zydenbos-Heino.

Enter the outpost of Go-En, from Whitefield, Maine, and an impossibly rich and complex bite of tahini miso begins to make sense after a rundown on koji, the mystical fungus at the heart of Japanese cuisine, from co-owner Nicholas Repenning.

The cycle continues, threatening to blur the bigger picture now illuminated by the festival: Fermentation isn't just a quaint little movement of hippies and homesteaders anymore. It's a revolution with transformative potential in gastronomy, agriculture, health, and other sectors.

Greater Boston is playing its familiar role as a hub of global progress.

Frontier days (of five years ago)

Jeremy Ogusky, owner of Ogusky Ceramics, a Jamaica Plain company that provides pottery and plateware to some of the Boston area's best restaurants, cofounded the festival in 2013 with humble hopes.

“We just wanted to spread the word about fermentation and bring people together," he said. “I don't really think we really saw it as part of some kind of global uprising."

Regardless, the scrappy gathering launched just as a confluence of factors collided to push forward the fermentation wave.

By 2014, the 21st-century generation of superstar chefs, led by Rene Redzepi of Copenhagen's Noma, had taken molecular gastronomy in a new direction, turning focus from tech-driven theatrics toward tech-enabled experimentation with powerful and ancient natural forces, particularly fermentation. Redzepi opened his groundbreaking fermentation lab at Noma that year, and using social media and events as platforms, he and his team and a small global network of explorers, including key players from Boston, revved up one of the most exciting innovation movements in the food world.

“I remember seeing the guys from Noma coat a beef rib with clarified butter and peaso (miso made from peas) to age it, and it blew me up," said Jeremy Kean, co-owner of Jamaica Plain's Brassica Kitchen & Café, perhaps Boston's most fermentation-forward restaurant. “When you get these things right, you're always kind of asking yourself: Why the [expletive] is that so good?"

Kean was part of a network of local early adopters like Ogusky; the late Geoff Lukas of Sofra Bakery & Café; Nicco Muratore of Commonwealth; Tim Maslow, Brandon Baltzley, and Laura Higgins-Baltzley of the now shuttered Ribelle; private chef Mike Betts; microbiologist Bryan Greenhagen, who founded Mystic Brewery; Jitti Chaithiraphant of Heritage Food Project; and blogger-explorer Rich Shih of OurCookQuest.

“We started engaging with chefs and other really creative people from all over the world in this open source way," said Shih. “It has been mind-blowing seeing what people share and how we all build on each other's work."

Bubbling up

Shih's characterization brings to mind the innovation language of tech and biotech, and five years ago in Boston, those sectors were where other huge leaps were being made in understanding the microbiome, the mashup of microorganisms surrounding us and inside us, and related metabolic processes like fermentation.

In 2014, Ginkgo Bioworks, a Seaport-based firm that engineers custom microbes for use across a range of industries, became the first biotech company accepted into the legendary Y Combinator accelerator program (of Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit fame). Nearby, the Charlestown-based firm Symbiota (now Indigo Ag) was founded to apply microbial technology to seeds to help farmers and their crops weather drought and other scourges. Cambridge-based Evelo Biosciences was also launched to develop new treatments that work with immune cells in the gut to address broader conditions in the body.

Academic research initiatives on fermentation were also gathering steam across Greater Boston at the time. Most notably, the groundbreaking Science and Cooking curriculum at Harvard's Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which was becoming an important global meeting place for dialogue among scientists and culinary leaders, added a course called “Flavor Molecules of Food Fermentation: Exploration and Inquiry" in 2015.

“Food is such a powerful vehicle to help people understand and explore science," says Pia Sorensen, a chemical engineer and lecturer who leads the course. “And fermentation is this wild and unpredictable process that forces you to think differently about . . . food and flavor and the world around us, which opens up huge possibilities."

Developing layers

Less than five years later, the microbiome mob in Boston is growing and bringing those possibilities more into focus.

Both Ginkgo Bioworks and Indigo Ag have achieved rare status as unicorns, or privately held companies valued at over $1 billion. Last week, Synlogic, another pioneering microbiome company in Cambridge, announced positive results from a clinical trial of a microbial treatment for a rare disease called phenylketonuria, which makes it hard for carriers to digest and break down protein in meat and cheese. According to news reports, the treatment has potential to become the “first synthetic biology-based medical treatment to gain approval by the Food and Drug Administration." Dozens of other promising microbiome companies have more recently been launched to do everything from mapping the gut biome to treating a range of other ailments.

“We've commercialized microbiome-coated seeds and seen more than 10 percent yield increases across hundreds of thousands of acres [where our products are used], and we're just scratching the surface of what the microbiome can do." said Geoffrey von Maltzahn, PhD, cofounder and chief innovation officer at Indigo Ag, and a Partner at Flagship Pioneering, a major investor in microbiome companies.

Academic research initiatives on the health benefits of fermentation have also leapt forward. Pia Sorensen's fermentation course at Harvard has become one of the program's most popular classes, and nearly every other university and research institution in the area now hosts a microbiome program that touches on food.

“We have hundreds of studies showing associations between probiotics and positive health outcomes, and a few clinical trials that conclusively demonstrate those beneficial effects," said Dr. David Ludwig, a professor of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, whose cookbook, “Always Delicious," features information and recipes on fermented foods. “Overall, the evidence suggest that regular consumption of fermented foods is a tasty way to improve long-term health."

Microbiome to table

The Boston area's dining scene is a good place to test this premise, if you can summon the exploratory spirit that drives all of Boston's microbiome innovators. A few restaurants are making fermentation part of the backbone of their approach, including Brassica Kitchen & Café, Bondir, Commonwealth, Tasting Counter, Alden & Harlow, Waypoint, Cape Cod's the Buffalo Jump, and Worcester's Deadhorse Hill. Ethnic restaurants, like Allston's great Korean establishments, are also putting global fermentation culture within reach, as are grocery and specialty food stores, where stocks of fermented products have skyrocketed in recent years. Lest it be forgotten, New England's thriving brewing and distilling scene is playing a huge role in introducing the public to the wonders of fermentation.

At a recent, sold-out fermentation workshop and dinner at Brassica, one of a semi-regular series, Ogusky facilitated a sauerkraut making session, while Kean and chef Sarah Trainer served a beautifully simple, impressively deep meal of galette of fermented cauliflower, fermented chickpea panisse, and a green salad with fermented carrots. Kean guesses that he and his team have dozens of fermentation experiments going on at any given time, calling them “totally necessary for us to be successful."

Across town at Commonwealth, a similar recent series event, facilitated by Muratore and Shih, featured a full spread tasting of their collaborative projects, including misos, pepper pastes, and a knockout version of New Orleans' legendary muffaletta sandwich with koji-cured tasso and fermented vegetable giardiniera. The duo, along with Betts and others from the group of Boston's early fermentation adopters, will be taking their show to a new level this Saturday, Sept. 15, when they present “Quest for Koji," one of the first fermentation-themed dinners at the prestigious James Beard House in New York City.

Chefs at the fermentation-driven restaurants are using the approach and products as more than embellishment, but rather as a power tool for boosting flavors, being more seasonal and local, leaving less waste, and creating a more unique experience overall for diners. Not to mention, it's easy to sense in conversation how the approach instills a spirit of endless innovation in their kitchens that benefits everyone inside and out. The trend is likely to spread and accelerate here and across the global dining landscape when Redzepi and his compatriots at Noma release their “Noma Guide to Fermentation" next month.

Back at the Boston Fermentation Festival, all the paths converge. The Boston Public Market estimates the festival drew more than 14,000 people in 2017, making it one of the largest free fermentation festivals in the country. Indigo Ag and Ginkgo Bioworks, the microbiome pioneers, are primary sponsors, and researchers, chefs, and artisans are all featured on the festival floor and in the program.

“It amazes me that things have come this far," said Ogusky. “And I have to laugh, because a lot of our longtime vendors and partners say they miss the days when we were doing the festival in a tiny Egleston Square parking lot and no one knew about it."

Luckily, things bubbled up and over.

Sam Hiersteiner can be reached at samhiersteiner@gmail.com.

Credit: By Sam Hiersteiner Globe correspondent

More than 4,000 people died during country's last major outbreak in 2008

Zimbabwe[https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Zimbabwe]has declared a cholera[https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/cholera] outbreak in the country’s capitalafter 20 diedfrom the disease.

More than 2,000 people have also been infected in Harare[http://www.independent.co.uk/topic/Harare] by drinking contaminated water, the country’s new health minister, Obadiah Moyo, said on Tuesday.

The deaths have raised fears of a repeat of the 2008 cholera outbreak which killed more than 4,000 people, according to government figures.

Read more

Cholera vaccine probiotic drink could tackle deadly epidemics

The current outbreak is believed to be caused by poorly-maintained water and sanitation infrastructure.

After touring a hospital where patients were being treated, Mr Moyo warned reporters that the outbreak could spreadto other parts of the country.

“The numbers are growing by the day and to date there are about over 2,000 cases, that isquite a big number,” the minister said.

“This whole problem has arisen as a result of blocked sewers. The other problem is that garbage has not been collected on a regular basis. There is water problems, no water availability.”

Mr Moyo said the selling of meat and fish in the affected suburbs has been banned and the government has suspended classes at some schools in at-risk areas.

Zimbabwe’s government has asked United Nations[https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/UnitedNations] agencies and private companies to supply portable water and assist with treating the growing number of patients.

Read more

Zimbabwe’s presidential inauguration delayed after court challenge

Who is Nelson Chamisa? The man who is disputing the Zimbabwe elections

Yemen hit by new cholera outbreak warning

Cholera is a bacterial disease which is spread by ingesting contaminated food or water and can spread easily in areas with inadequate sewer systems.

Mr Moyo was recently appointed to the position of health minister by Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa[https://www.independent.co.uk/topic/emmerson-mnangagwa],and was sworn into the country’s cabinet on Monday.

Since his appointment was announced last week, Mr Mayo has faced accusations he hadfalsified his medical qualifications, with local papers questioning why his qualifications do not appear to be officially registered with Zimbabwe’s medical council.

Additional reporting by agencies

Twenty years ago, few people in Britain had heard of probiotics. Known as “good bacteria”, they are said to restore the bacterial balance in your gut to healthy levels, and have exploded in popularity in the last two decades. Their rise is fuelled by shiny, commercial brands like Yakult, which claims to pack 6.5 billion “good” bacteria into a simple, pocket-sized drink.

As with most fashionable health trends, however, scientists are sceptical. Last week, researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science became the latest to question the benefits of probiotics, labelling them “quite useless” after testing a home-made probiotic cocktail on 25 healthy volunteers.

In one of the most detailed studies of probiotics to date, the volunteers were asked to take a special cocktail of 11 common strains of good bacteria. After examining stomach samples from each volunteer, the Israeli researchers found that, in half of the cases, the good bacteria had simply passed in one end and out of the other. In the other half, the bacteria lingered briefly before being crowded by out by existing microbes.

The study will delight the sceptics who have spent years arguing that probiotics are nothing more than a fad. But Professor Tim Spector, who researches Genetic Epidemiology at King’s College, London, is more cautious, and thinks we shouldn’t chuck away our probiotic supplements just yet.

Unlike much of the rest of Europe, he says, medics in Britain have always given short shrift to the importance of good bacteria. Whereas a doctor in France will quickly prescribe probiotics to a patient who complains of a cold, most British doctors will hold back.

25 tips on how to take care of your digestive system[https://cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk/622abd7d-702e-4512-965e-422cd962884b.html] “It's routine practice in France for anyone on an antibiotic to be given probiotics,” he says. “It's routine practice in Poland for anyone on antibiotics to be given kefir [a cultured, fermented milk drink]. Our doctors would laugh if you said you were going to do that. The UK particularly has no culture of fermented foods. Nobody really understands it, and they’re not trained in it.”

In this instance, Prof Spector thinks our scepticism could be misplaced. All the Israeli research does is suggest that our traditional way of thinking about probiotics is flawed, he says. We used to imagine that probiotics “took over” the existing microbes in our gut, allowing the effects to last for much longer than the food is in our system for. Now that theory is totally dead, he says. We now know that you must carry on taking the probiotics if you want to keep the bacteria in your system.

But as long as you keep taking them, he argues, probiotics can work wonders.

“There is plenty of evidence to say that if you're ill, if you have a minor illness [and you take probiotics] you will improve. These include travellers' diarrhea and irritable bowel syndrome, and there's evidence for depression. There's evidence for all kinds of childhood problems, and some food allergies.”

He says studies have pointed to as many as 18 medical conditions that probiotics can alleviate.

He recommends taking “real foods” with natural bacteria, rather than artificial supplements, because they contain a much larger range of bacteria. They include non-frozen cheeses (particularly raw-milk cheeses), natural yoghurts, and kefir.

How to keep your gut happy[https://cf-particle-html.eip.telegraph.co.uk/830cced9-42e5-4d36-85dc-a0328abceaf1.html] Jeannette Hyde, a nutritional therapist and author, also believes that natural fermented foods are much better than artificial probiotic supplements.

She says she recently saw one client who had been taking a “very expensive” probiotic pill for nearly three years. When she examined her client’s stool sample, however, she found almost no trace of the good bacteria promised on the label.

But she says it would be wrong to abandon our quest for good bacteria just because a few supplements have been shown not to work. When consumed through real foods, natural bacteria can help, she says, and the results of this week's Israeli study do not change that.

“Just because a special cocktail [scientists] made didn't work, it doesn’t mean that if you've had some really smelly cheese that's been fermented for two years, and the French have been eating for centuries, that it doesn't work. [The study] was so completely abstract from the real world.”

She recommends a varied diet that is high in fibre for those concerned with keeping a healthy gut.

Whatever the research shows, it seems likely that probiotics will only grow in popularity in the coming years. Prof Spector believes British doctors will soon “catch up” with their continental counterparts, and begin to recommend probiotics after a course of antibiotics.

“At the moment, it's still not considered particularly mainstream, despite the evidence,” he says. “But it will happen, and I think it will be driven by the public.”

A few species of microbe play a crucial role in maintaining the microbiome. From eating wholegrains to breastfeeding, there are many ways to keep them happy

Eat more prebiotics

Scientists have identified a few species among the many trillions of microbes that live in your intestines that play a crucial role in gut health and maintaining a balanced immune system. Your dietary intake is vital to allowing these species to flourish and to preventing imbalances that can lead to disease. Prebiotics provide a good food source for certain populations of healthy gut bacteria, such as bifidobacteria, which, in turn, prevent intestinal inflammation. Studies have shown that prebiotics can be particularly beneficial for obese people, as they reduce insulin and cholesterol levels, while lowering the risk of heart disease and diabetes. Prebiotics can be bought as supplements, but they are also contained within foods including asparagus, leeks, bananas, garlic and jerusalem artichoke[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/31/nigel-slater-jerusalem-artichoke-recipes].

Focus on fibre and wholegrains

Western diets tend to be rich in fat and sugar, with most of our food coming from only 12 plant and five animal species[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27110483]. However, following a diet rich in high-fibre foods such as apples, artichokes, blueberries, chickpeas, lentils, pease and beans can limit the growth of harmful bacteria[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26757793] and stimulate [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17761020] bifidobacteria[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17761020], lactobacilli and another healthy species called Bacteroidetes.

Up your intake of fermented products

Fermented foods such as kimchi[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/12/kimchi-jeon-vegan-korean-pancakes-recipe-meera-sodha], kefir[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/jan/29/magical-microbes-how-to-feed-your-gut], kombucha[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/mar/07/pickle-ferment-recipes-six-of-the-best], natural yoghurts and fermented soya bean milk[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22040525] have been shown to promote the abundance of healthy gut bacteria and reduce the levels of enterobacteriaceae, a family of bacteria linked to a number of chronic diseases[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17217568]. Natural yoghurt enriched with bifidobacteria has also been found to [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17927751] alleviate lactose intolerance[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17927751] in children and adults, while yoghurts enhanced with lactobacilli have had some beneficial results[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2219330/] in patients with inflammatory bowel disease. Avoid flavoured yoghurts, which tend to contain high levels of sugar.

Prioritise polyphenols

Polyphenols are plant compounds that are mainly digested by gut bacteria and are associated with a variety of benefits including reducing blood pressure, cholesterol and oxidative stress. They are found in foods including almonds, blueberries and broccoli as well as in green tea, cocoa and red wine. The types of polyphenols found in cocoa are linked to changes in the microbiome [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21068351] that reduce inflammation and triglyceride levels[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21068351].

Avoid artificial sweeteners

Artificial sweeteners such as aspartame are commonly found in food as replacements for sugar. However, aspartame has been found to alter gut bacteria[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25231862] in human and animal studies[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25313461]. These changes appear to result in elevated blood sugar levels and increased susceptibility to metabolic disease.

Breastfeed

Our microbiome is continually developing during our first two years of life. A number of studies[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25974306] have shown that babies who are breastfed for six months develop a much healthier gut compared with those who are fed with formula. Children who have been breastfed are also less prone to allergies, obesity, leukemia and diabetes; this is thought to be linked to the microbiome[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20111658].

Go vegetarian

Several studies have suggested that vegetarian diets may be good for the microbiome[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21811294], with findings indicating that a largely plant-based diet decreases the levels of disease-causing bacteria such as E coli and Enterobacteriaceae. This may be particularly beneficial for obese people with type 2 diabetes or hypertension. One small study[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24115628] found that obese people who switched to a vegetarian diet had reduced levels of potentially harmful bacteria as well as lower levels of cholesterol and inflammation after one month.

How does Mehmet Oz, M.D., the star of The Dr. Oz Show—beginning its 10th season Sept. 17—keep healthy, upbeat and way trimmer than the average 58-year-old grandpa? He’ll tell you it’s all a matter of time.

Exciting new discoveries about the timers within our cells—trillions of them, priming our bodies to work efficiently—are transforming health care, Oz says. “Science has always been focused on the what: what drugs we give to treat disease, what we eat to lose weight,” he says. “Up until now, we haven’t just underestimated time, we’ve completely ignored its role. We’re now starting to see that the when can be just as important.”

In fact, using the power of time—to prevent disease and treat it—is among the biggest medical breakthroughs Oz has seen since launching his show. And that’s saying something, considering he’s taped 1,575 episodes about health, healing and the far frontiers of medicine. Here’s how time can help us live better.

When You Eat “New studies suggest that when you eat matters for your health, longevity and even weight loss ” Oz .

The average American eats pretty much all day long, throughout the 17 hours that most of us are awake. “Our intestines aren’t supposed to work 17 hours a day,” he says.

Before drive-thrus, microwaves and refrigerators, the human body evolved to go for long stretches without food. During these breaks, vital things happen. Insulin levels drop, which makes stored body fat more accessible for use. Human growth hormone goes up, to help burn fat and build muscle. Damaged cell material is shed faster (called autophagy). Even the way genes are expressed changes.

All this may help us to:

Lose weight (or stick to a healthy weight).

Studies show that people who fast—basically not eating for a set period, usually at least 12 hours—tend to consume fewer calories overall and lose more belly fat. A large 2017 study of Seventh-day Adventists found that those with the lowest body-mass index (BMI) had a long overnight fast (of 18 or more hours) and ate their largest meal at breakfast.

Slow Alzheimer’s.

In animal studies, fasting appears to halt cognitive decline to the point where older subjects perform as well as younger ones. Fasting triggers a “switching over” from using glucose as fuel to fatty acids (a state known as mild ketosis). One theory is that this metabolic switching may aid the brain, Oz says. Also, the release of chemicals that cause inflammation is a side effect of digestion. Too much brain inflammation is one factor thought to fuel Alzheimer’s.

Grow a healthier gut.

Other animal studies suggest that feeding/ fasting rhythms can contribute to the diversity of microorganisms in the gut. There’s huge interest in gut health’s role in metabolic diseases like diabetes, insulin resistance and obesity, as well as autoimmune disorders.

Prevent other diseases—and maybe even slow aging.

Fasting can reduce inflammation in people with asthma and rheumatoid arthritis. By also reducing blood pressure and increasing insulin sensitivity, it adds protection against cancer, diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

When You Don’t Eat Fasting in a consistent pattern—intermittent fasting (IF)—seems key. This “time-restricted feeding,” confining all eating to a certain window of time, works for Oz. He’s in his second year of eating all his meals and snacks in a 12-hour period, usually between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. He then fasts for the next 12 hours.

He says 12:12 intermittent fasting prevents hunger better than dieting and tends to be more sustainable as a lifestyle because it’s not so isolating. You’re not nursing a juice cleanse while your friends down tacos.

“All you have to do is sleep eight hours, which helps with just about every chronic health problem anyway, and then you have four hours left [of not eating],” Oz explains. Stop eating at least two hours before bed. In the morning, instead of automatically grabbing breakfast, have a cup of black coffee, tea or water. Most people aren’t truly hungry when they wake up, he adds.

“I like it because it’s easy to do and I feel sharper,” Oz says. “I’m hacking my system to be able to function at a higher level.”

Mice fed on a 12:12 cycle lose weight even though they eat the same number of calories as mice who eat all day, studies show, and they’re healthier.

Plus, in 12:12 fasting you can pick the 12 “off ” hours that work best for you. Late party? Hold off eating ’til noon the next day. Breakfast meeting you can’t miss? Stop eating earlier the evening before.

When You Get Medicine Another way time influences health: chronotherapy, which considers natural rhythms when treating diseases. This can have powerful effects, especially on how medications work:

Better flu shots.

Get yours in the morning, suggests Oz. A large clinical trial found more protective antibodies were created then, versus late afternoon.

Stronger chemo, fewer side effects.

Just like any other cell, cancer cells grow and rest on a circadian cycle. “Cancer chemotherapy works by attacking rapidly growing cells,” Oz explains. “By figuring out a cancer’s rhythm, we may be able to administer drugs at the time when the cancer is most vulnerable to the effects.” Lung cancer patients given the drug cisplatin, for example, had fewer side effects when it was timed to work with the kidneys’ circadian rhythm.

More effective blood-pressure medications.

For studies of drugs to lower hypertension, research suggests that using a full 24 hours of blood pressure data to inform a medication schedule can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke, Oz says.

Similar research is underway in every corner of medicine. Have past drugs failed because of timing errors? Are some ailments caused by “broken” body clocks that can be fixed? Last fall’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to three scientists who proved how circadian rhythms work right down on the molecular level.

“Have you ever realized you’ve been completely unaware of something you should be thinking about?” Oz says. “Time is one of those fundamental assumptions of life that you have to get your arms around. When you do, you begin to realize that it affects you in so many ways.” More Medical Breakthroughs Dr. Oz identifies these other big ideas that are quickly transforming health care.

Virtual reality. Special computer programs, headsets, gloves and other equipment let people experience what doesn’t exist. Used to train surgeons and pilots, it’s now a tool to help stroke or brain injury patients in rehab gain mobility and balance and allow legally blind people with macular degeneration to see.

A health coach in your phone. Imagine your phone picking up insights about your mood and health based on your voice, your social media usage and other factors—then offering you an immediate way to respond and improve.

“Drug” therapy. Though Oz says he has never smoked a joint, he’s all for the therapeutic potential of substances once ignored on moral grounds. LSD and psilocybin (a compound produced in “magic mushrooms”) are gaining credibility as treatments for anxiety, depression and addiction because they silence the default pathway in the brain that causes rumination.

The ability to live well with cancer. Thanks to rapid advances in immunotherapy, stem-cell treatments, genetic testing and more, cancer is increasingly becoming a manageable chronic disease, rather than something you have or don’t have.

Scientists also say the saliva of Siberian brown bears is has a lot in common with human poo

A chemical in bear[https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/bears]spit kills the lethal hospital superbug[https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/superbugs]MRSA, research shows.

Scientists captured a group of Siberian brown bears in remote forests in Russia and immediately took saliva samples as part of a ground-breaking study.

They found the saliva contains the antibiotic Ami (amicoumacin A), which they say can destroy deadly Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)[https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/mrsa].

It means scientists can now develop better medications to treat MRSA as the study uncovered the mechanism by which the chemical combats the MRSA molecule.

The droplets of spit were scanned in Moscow during the study, frozen with liquid nitrogen and analysed in labs.

Brown bear shot dead as it HIBERNATES in den by Russian governor celebrating birthday with new gun[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/brown-bear-shot-dead-hibernates-13194775]

"Our technique enabled an efficient and straightforward single-step isolation of bacteria displaying the desirable anti-S. aureus activity from an exotic microbiota source," said Professor Alexander Gabibov, of the Russian Academy of Sciences[https://www.mirror.co.uk/all-about/russian-academy-of-sciences], in the city.

He added: "The ability of wild animals to thrive while surrounded by aggressive microorganisms may be partially mediated by their microbiota.

"Here we present the analyses of the microbiome collected from East Siberian brown bear (Ursus arctos collaris) obtained immediately after capture in the taiga."

The experts say bear spit is unlike human's saliva, and "has much more in common with our faecal matter".

Top Stories from Mirror Online

"Exploration of uncommon microbiota sources appears to be a promising approach to search for and select both antibiotics and probiotics from wild nature," added Prof Gabibov.

Brown bears, which are one of the largest carnivores on Earth, are found across Northern America and parts of Europe and Asia.

Some strains of MRSA, known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, have developed resistance to commonly used antibiotics in the last decade.

It means it can be challenging to treat and, ultimately, lethal[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/superbugs-could-kill-millions-unless-5539350].

MRSA is most commonly associated with hospitals[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/hospitals-failing-mrsa---superbug-3248951].

GRAPHICS: SEPT 8TH

GRAPHICS: GOOD MORNING AMERICA

TROPICAL STORM FLORENCE

TRUMP, OBAMA, "THE NEW YORK TIMES"

PAPADOPOULOS, TRUMP

TRUMP, OBAMA, "THE NEW YORK TIMES," PAPADOPOULOS

JEAN, HALL, SHOOTING, BRADFUTE

DELTA FIRE, ELLIS

POWER OUTAGE, SMITH, MILLER, OWENS

GRAPHICS: RIGHT NOW

PEREZ, SHOOTING

RODDICK, US OPEN, OSAKA, WILLIAMS

PROBIOTICS

GRAPHICS: WEEKEND DOWNLOAD

CARDI B., MINAJ, MCCARTNEY, HAWN, CHER

GRAPHICS: POP NEWS

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) A.B., Adrienne Bankert, showcasing her range this morning.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Right.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Does the news, she does "Pop News."

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) She does the "Pop."

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Let's do it all.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Let's do it all.

GRAPHICS: OMG!

GRAPHICS: NICKI VS CARDI B.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) We started the show, so this is a very full circle moment, with this rivalry between Nicki Minaj and Cardi B.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yeah.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(VO) Okay. So, they were involved in a little bit of a tussle at a New York Fashion Week party, decked out in designer gowns. Very ladylike. The AP reports that a witness says Cardi B., in the red Dolce & Gabbana, tried to attack Minaj. Minaj's security guards intervened. In an Instagram post, Cardi B. seemed to indicate that she was angry about comments made about her parenting skills and newborn daughter. Cardi B. was seen leaving the party with what appear to be a huge goose egg on her forehead.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(VO) It was a knot.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) And, again, you know, we don't know who threw the first punch. We don't know who talked the most dirt first. We don't know any of those details, but it was people at this Fashion Week event were in shock.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Setting a good example for the children.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) I mean, you know, yes, yes, absolutely.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yes.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Well, moving on, some lucky commuters had anything but a hard day's night heading home yesterday.

GRAPHICS: SAY WHAT!

GRAPHICS: PAUL MCCARTNEY'S SURPRISE PERFORMANCE

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(VO) I just, what a sing-a-long. They were treated to the sounds of Paul McCartney. Only invited guests like Meryl Streep, Jon Bon Jovi and Amy Schumer were allowed to watch the concert at New York's Grand Central Terminal, but commuters could hear the music. The former Beatle promoting his new album called "Egypt Station." So, very VIP but, you know...

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(VO) Wait, you had to be Meryl Streep in order to see it?

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(VO) Only those, only three of them and they all were duplicated in that audience.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Everybody else could listen through the vents.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) It was like, it was like a VIP concert.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yeah.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yeah.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) But then, you know, the sound wafted through.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) And it was the worst kept secret, by the way. Everybody knew it was happening and where it was going to be.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) I have a feeling there's gonna be more of these pop-up concerts.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Okay.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) It won't be maybe so VIP. We'll see. We'll see what Paul does. Actress Goldie Hawn keeping her fans guessing this morning or at least showing us that maybe she doesn't use social media all the time.

GRAPHICS: BUZZY!

GRAPHICS: GOLDIE HAWN'S BIRTHDAY MESSAGE

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(VO) She posted this Instagram pic with a sweet birthday message for her son. People are wondering why she chopped off the head of her son. Was this a mom fail or is she just tired? Technical difficulties? Or was it an inside joke?

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(VO) You know, maybe she's saying I like my other children better.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) No, no. I really think it was more like let me post this quickly like, oh, like I'm tired.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yeah, I think you're giving her too much credit.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yeah.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) I'm gonna do that. All right, Cher, let's talk about another hot momma.

GRAPHICS: ALL THE BUZZ!

GRAPHICS: CHER'S NEW TOUR

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Cher giving fans what they want, her first North American tour in five years.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(VO) Fresh off her role in "Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again," comes her "Here We Go Again" tour. The announcement comes just ahead of her upcoming ABBA tribute album "Dancing Queen" due at the end of the month. Tickets go on sale September 14th. And her first date will be January 17th in Fort Myers, Florida.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

I'm gonna get along all this information, but just know, we're gonna (inaudible).

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) I worked at a Cher concert.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) You?

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) I worked there.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) This is another Whit story.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) By the way…

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) When I was a teenager.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Thank you for watching ABC News. The countdown is on. "GMA Day" starting on Monday.

FOR INFORMATION ON ORDERING A VIDEO OR TRANSCRIPT COPY OF ABC NEWS OR ABC NEWS NOW PROGRAMMING, PLEASE VISIT THE SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT WWW.TRANSCRIPTS.TV

GRAPHICS: SEPT 8TH

GRAPHICS: GOOD MORNING AMERICA

TROPICAL STORM FLORENCE

TRUMP, OBAMA, "THE NEW YORK TIMES"

PAPADOPOULOS, TRUMP

TRUMP, OBAMA, "THE NEW YORK TIMES," PAPADOPOULOS

JEAN, HALL, SHOOTING, BRADFUTE

DELTA FIRE, ELLIS

POWER OUTAGE, SMITH, MILLER, OWENS

GRAPHICS: RIGHT NOW

PEREZ, SHOOTING

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Time now to the weather. We wanna get back to Rob Marciano at the US Open in Flushing Meadows. Rob, a busy day for you. You got weather and you've also got fun guest speaking with.

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(OC) You better believe it. And it's raining now here on court 4.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) And it's raining.

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(OC) But you've got a roof on the main stadium that they shouldn't have a problem later on today. We might have some problems come next week. We are dealing with Florence, which the forecast is looking rather ominous. The weakening stage pretty much is over. We expect it to get over warmer water, lighter shear and stronger environment.

GRAPHICS: FLORENCE

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(VO) So, the forecast tack has not change much. If anything, it shifted a little further south, which means the trajectory is such that, by next Thursday, Friday, it's gonna be right at the doorstep potentially of the East Coast. So, we are concern about that as a category 4.

GRAPHICS: HELENE

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(VO) Also, Tropical Storm Helene, this one right off the coast of Africa. We've got tropical storm warnings up for the Cape Verde Islands. Can you believe that? This one will be traversing across the Atlantic, likely to peel off as opposed to what Florence is gonna do.

GRAPHICS: OLIVIA

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(VO) All the while, Olivia in the Pacific, this one's gonna make a run in Hawaii. This after Lane came through about a week and a half ago, but weakening as it does. So, nonetheless, this one is gonna bring some heavy rains to a very soggy Hawaiian islands.

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(OC) That's a check on what's happening nationally weatherwise. Time now for a look at your local forecast.

GRAPHICS: NATIONAL MAP

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(OC) This weather report is sponsored by... Coming up on "GMA," the one and only Andy Roddick right here.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yes.

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(OC) We'll talk US Open and we might hit a few rounds. But you know what, the rain is coming now. We may have to call off the playing the tennis.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) No.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Excuses already.

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Game-time decision.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) I think it's gonna all work out.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Rob is gonna claim he pulled a hammy.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Rob and Roddick.

DAN HARRIS (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yes.

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Exactly.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) I'm telling you, this is great TV. Thank you, Rob.

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(OC) If you say so. See you, guys.

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(OC) He's so humble.

GRAPHICS: COMING UP

GRAPHICS: PROBIOTICS STUDY

ADRIENNE BANKERT (ABC NEWS)

(VO) Coming up on "Good Morning America," what you need to know about probiotics. Dr. Jen Ashton takes a look at the results of a new study.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

GRAPHICS: SEPT 8TH

GRAPHICS: GOOD MORNING AMERICA

TROPICAL STORM FLORENCE

TRUMP, OBAMA, "THE NEW YORK TIMES"

PAPADOPOULOS, TRUMP

TRUMP, OBAMA, "THE NEW YORK TIMES," PAPADOPOULOS

JEAN, HALL, SHOOTING, BRADFUTE

DELTA FIRE, ELLIS

POWER OUTAGE, SMITH, MILLER, OWENS

GRAPHICS: RIGHT NOW

PEREZ, SHOOTING

RODDICK, US OPEN, OSAKA, WILLIAMS

PROBIOTICS

GRAPHICS: WEEKEND DOWNLOAD

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) In today's "Weekend Download," we are discussing probiotics.

GRAPHICS: DO PROBIOTICS WORK?

GRAPHICS: STUDY SHOWS BENEFITS DIFFER AMONG INDIVIDUALS

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) We eat them in yogurt, smoothies and other foods and take them as supplements. But do they make a difference in keeping our guts healthy? Joining us is chief medical correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton with the results of a new study. Great to see you as always.

DR. JENNIFER ASHTON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Thank you, Whit. That's really the question because this is really like the vitamin D of 10 years ago.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yes.

DR. JENNIFER ASHTON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) So many Americans spending a lot of money on probiotics. We really don't know yet, can we connect the dots on the research and say they do this in the gut. They do this in everyone and, therefore, everyone should take them. So, this was a small but interesting study done in Israel published in a journal "Cell," two studies actually, and really were some of the first to show this is not one size fits all. Different people respond differently to probiotics and there may actually be some harm. So, in medicine, when we find a good therapeutic result, we always have to ask what are the clinical risks because it's never all one way or all another way. And that's really what this is bringing into the forefront.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) And this has been such a trend. I mean, eat more probiotics.

DR. JENNIFER ASHTON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yeah.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) So, explain once again what probiotics actually are.

DR. JENNIFER ASHTON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Right, because so many people hear the word and we've been hearing it for so long we take it for granted that a lot of people don't even know what they are. But this is really the good bacteria and yeast that live in our GI tract. They live in our gut. 98% of the DNA on us, Whit, is not our DNA, it actually belongs to the bacteria that are in and around us. And that's really what the probiotics are for. They establish this gut microbiome. And studies and research have shown they are important for a good immune system, good GI function. There have been links and associations, not yet cause and effect, with everything else including mood. But this is not ready for prime time yet. We don't know what strains are important. We don't know how much. We don't know if when we take it in supplementary form if our acid in our stomach just digests and kills it. So, it's not there yet. And people are spending a lot of money and there may be actual downsides.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Quickly, what do we eat?

DR. JENNIFER ASHTON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yes.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) What do we do with this report?

DR. JENNIFER ASHTON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Well, listen, always get it from the food sources, yogurt, kefir, pickles. I'm not a pickle fan. But fermented foods like sauerkraut, miso and tempeh, they're all good sources of probiotics.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Got it.

DR. JENNIFER ASHTON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) If a health care professional tells you to take them, discuss that first before you go spend money.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Right. Maybe don't eat them all at the same time.

DR. JENNIFER ASHTON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) Yeah, a good idea.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) All right, Dr. Ashton, always a pleasure. Thanks so much.

DR. JENNIFER ASHTON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) You bet.

WHIT JOHNSON (ABC NEWS)

(OC) "Pop News" when we come right back.

COMMERCIAL BREAK

ROB MARCIANO (ABC NEWS)

(VO) "Good Morning America" is sponsored by…

Some farts smell so bad they can clear a room of people. Here's a few reasons why and how to stop it.

We've all heard that Brussels sprouts and baked beans make you pass wind.

But aside from the playground rhymes about 'tooting', nobody ever talks about other bad gas habits.

If you silently pass wind and think you've got away with it - only to be greeted by a foul stench - you might wonder where you're going wrong.

Apparently healthier eating will actually lead to more gas, so it's not good news if you're on a diet.

Dr Myron Brand, a gastroenterologist, spoke to Thrillist[https://www.thrillist.com/health/nation/why-do-my-farts-smell-so-bad]about what makes our gas smell - and how you can stop the whiff.

Five reasons why you might be farting so much - and what makes them so smelly

He said: "Smelly odour is not bad, it's just a function of what you're eating and what your bacteria is doing inside your gastrointestinal tract. Everyone is different."

smell cover nose gif

The average healthy person farts 10-20 times a day, so it's totally normal.

Wind is produced when food (mainly carbohydrates) isn't properly absorbed into your intestines and is left to ferment in gut bacteria.

As Dr Brand explains: "Foul smell just means the carbohydrates you consume are being malabsorbed - it's fermented."

Have your say in the comments below

Dr Brand recommends opting for a high-protein diet if you want to pass less wind.

Some people follow a low-FODMAP carbohydrate diet (FODMAP stands for Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides And Polyols - types of carbs which aren't completely absorbed and start to ferment, causing gas).

Fitness and nutrition scientist Cassandra Forsythe has compiled a list of high-FODMAP[http://www.cassandraforsythe.com/blog/complete+fodmap+list+for+a+happy+gut]foods to avoid if you want to produce less gas.

These include apple, pear, watermelon, cabbage, asparagus, leeks, onions, garlic, avocado, mushrooms and cauliflower.

Top Stories from Mirror Online

People are sharing their worst wedding horror stories - and they get pretty shocking[https://www.mirror.co.uk/interactives/people-sharing-worst-wedding-horror-13152955]

Surprisingly, broccoli is listed as a 'suitable' vegetable - although she does say it's not suitable for everyone.

She also notes that bread, pasta, noodles, breakfast cereals, cakes, biscuit and pastry are "problem" wheat and rye products, recommending rice, corn, potato and quinoa instead.

It's also best to limit your alcohol intake and drink more water.

Weatherman appears to try and disguise fart during live broadcast

Hospital security guard who filmed his farts at work for six months is sacked[https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/hospital-security-guard-who-filmed-13129090]

If you have excessive amounts of wind and foul-smelling gas, it might be best consult a professional as this is a sign you're not digesting carbohydrates and have malabsorption.

So if you want to pass wind less, eat fewer carb-heavy foods and increase your protein intake.

But rest assured that it's a totally natural thing and we should stop being embarrassed by it.

Meet nosulus rift: This wearable tech will let you smell fart in new 'South Park' game

How to boost your health

The temperature has dropped and the nights are getting longer. But with the right attitude, the shift to autumn can be just as rewarding, enjoyable and transformational as the more hyped summer months.

“It’s important to be attuned to the changing temperatures and the new feel of the outside world, not only by choosing different clothes, but also by starting to eat more warming, nourishing foods and possibly by changing our exercise ­programme and our skincare regime,” says Anna Hunt ­( annahunt.com[http://annahunt.com/] ), an author and healer.

“A priority for me is to spend time in nature by going for walks in forests to look at the wonderful colours of the turning leaves – this enables me to decompress in a way unique to this special time of year.”

Read on for our fail-safe guide to embracing the shift in seasons, and ensuring you’re buoyed up for autumn…

Rethinking your wellbeing

Switch up your exercise regime

During a heatwave summer, the thought of going for a run or entering a sweatbox of a gym can be daunting. Most athletes long for autumn, when the cooler temperatures make exercise much more enticing. And you can now cycle or walk to work without arriving dripping in sweat. Now is the time to rethink your exercise regime.

“Exercise is such a key part of building our own strong foundations, especially in such sedentary times,” says Lancaster. “Many of us spend hours in front of screens with sitting described as ‘the new smoking’ by the World Health Organization. So get up, get active, get moving. Even if you simply put on some music and shake your tush for five minutes, you will feel the difference in your energy levels. Find what works for you and commit to it.”

Don’t give up on the outdoors

Sunshine’s benefits don’t end with vitamin D. Exposure to the sun’s rays also boosts levels of serotonin, the body’s natural feel-good hormone. Higher levels of serotonin in the body can stave off moderate depression, and it also suppresses the appetite, so we make healthier food choices.

Sun exposure also regulates our melatonin levels, affecting our sleeping rhythms, which is why it’s easier to jump out of bed on a sunny morning than a gloomy one. Make sure you’re still getting a fix of sunlight and fresh air, even as the nights grow longer and the temperatures drop.

Focus on your 
sleep

During the summer months, it’s easier to rely on sunshine and serotonin to get you through the day with fewer hours of sleep. This changes when our alarm clock goes off and it’s still dark in the morning. “In autumn it becomes paramount to make sure you are getting enough rest. It sounds simple, and yet this is so important to support our physical, emotional and mental health,” says Lancaster. “I suggest switching off gadgets such as phones and iPads well before bedtime and keeping them out of the bedroom. Magnesium is also a great supplement to help you sleep.”

Learn some restraint

The summer can be a period of excess, whether it’s beers in the sunshine, overeating at barbecues or allowing children unfettered access to screens. It’s no coincidence that movements such as Stoptober, Dryathlon and Scroll-Free September take place in the autumn. Whatever it is that you’ve been overdoing in the sunshine, view this season as a time to regroup, reconsider and revise your less-than-healthy habits – after all, you’ve got the debauchery of the Christmas period up ahead.

The nesting instinct

Load up your box set library

Your sofa has missed you during the summer, and the feeling is mutual. Now is the time to plan your autumnal viewing. Suddenly in the mood for a moody crime drama? Try NowTV’s Sharp Objects, an eight-part Gillian Flynn (author of Gone Girl) adaptation starring Amy Adams as a troubled reporter returning to her hometown to investigate the murder of two schoolgirls.

If you’re pining after The Handmaid’s Tale, Netflix has another Margaret Atwood adaptation, Alias Grace, telling the story of an Irish servant in Canada accused of the 1843 murder of her employer.

Fans of the supernatural should try A Discovery of Witches on Sky One, about a witch’s relationship with a charismatic vampire.

Last up, Killing Eve, starring the wonderful Sandra Oh, is a slick thriller adapted by British writer Phoebe Waller-Bridge, airing on BBC iPlayer in October.

Make tea-making a ritual

Even the smallest tweaks to our morning routines can save us stress and time, and are therefore worth making. “For example, making sure your kettle, tea and coffee and mugs are all together and neatly organised can make the tea-making ritual a pleasure rather than a hassle,” says Silverthorn.

While you’re at it, rethink those cool-weather habits – like your hot drink consumption – because now’s the time to make changes. “If coffee makes you jittery, for example, I would recommend removing it from your diet,” says Ali. “If you feel you desperately need it, try to stick to one cup a day and be sure to have food first – and try to drink your coffee by midday. Herbal teas, on the other hand, are rich in polyphenols that your gut bacteria love. Green tea, especially matcha, is a great source of the amino acid L-Theanine. This has been shown to help moderate stress and anxiety symptoms.”

Get serious about bath time

Baths really come into their own during autumn; showers suddenly feel spartan rather than refreshing. And this might be the season to make a major upgrade to your bath time experience by fitting a water softener, making the water in your home closer to the natural spa water you had on holiday.

Hard water in your home can result in a massive 150lb build-up of limescale in your water system, and there is a growing awareness of the impact of hard, untreated water on everything from our appliances to the taste of our tea to skin problems like eczema.

Installing a Kinetico ( kinetico.co.uk[https://www.kinetico.co.uk/?SID=d20fbht6rrl4sqmbbmff7vvum5] ) water-softening system can have a major impact on skin complaints and flat hair, while minimising limescale means household appliances last longer.

Colour yourself comfortable

For many of us, the colder months can mean feeling tired despite a full night’s sleep, craving sweets and carbohydrates or getting moody over things that typically don’t bother us.

Colour therapy can help, and it can be as simple as buying warm-hued rugs, cosy throws and glowing lamps and making your living room feel more like a nest. The Philips Hue LivingColors mood lamp ( £69.99; johnlewis.com[https://www.johnlewis.com/philips-hue-livingcolors-bloom-colour-changing-led-mood-light-white/p1301061] ) allows you to set the lamp to countless colour variations that suit you, allowing you to change the atmosphere in the room.

Eating the season

Revive the 
roast

“It’s always important to listen to your body, no matter the season: ultimately it knows best what it needs,” says Mercedes Ngoh Sieff, founder of healthy eating collective Yeotown Kitchen ( yeotownkitchen.com[http://www.yeotownkitchen.com/main-page/] ).

“That said, there is something about the change in the weather that makes it a prime time to shift the way we eat as we start to crave foods with more calories, proteins and fats than during the warmer, sunnier months.”

Now is the perfect time to mix things up and create vibrant, veg-heavy roasts and hotpots. Seek out grounding root vegetables, and turn up the umami. “Coconut kale with curried sweet potatoes, ginger and turmeric, butternut squash and miso, mineral-rich seaweeds and warming spices are on the menu now at Yeotown Kitchen,” says Ngoh Sieff. “Slower-cooked foods like a hotpot are very nourishing, great for the gut and super satisfying.” Think of autumnal eating as the best of both worlds – summer and winter – on a plate.

Expand your recipe repertoire

As we start to spend more time indoors during the evening, and it gets dark earlier, we’re better positioned to get into a healthy eating regime and rediscover the joys of home cooking. It’s no accident that most new recipe books land in September and October.

Yotam Ottolenghi’s Simple (Ebury, £16.99) is set to be the hit recipe book of the season, and Jamie Oliver’s Jamie Cooks Italy (Michael Joseph, £26) will help you maintain that Mediterranean vibe throughout the autumn. Gizzi Erskine’s Slow: Food Worth Taking Time Over (HQ, £25) is a sumptuous volume of recipes that urges you to linger in the kitchen.

If following recipes from books and grocery shopping seems too much like hard work, consider a food subscription service like Mindful Chef ( mindfulchef.com[https://www.mindfulchef.com/] ), which provides recipe cards and all the ingredients you need, and can minimise food waste, save you time and work out as affordable as £4 a meal.

Embrace autumn picnics

Yes, autumn is a time for enjoying the delights of the indoors, but don’t give up on al fresco dining just yet. “The reason people feel more carefree in summer is because we naturally spend more time outside in the sunshine, whereas in autumn, we tend to be indoors more,” says Hunt. “Break this cycle by making time to connect with nature even in the colder months.”

Wrap up, pack some warmer dishes in a hamper and take an autumn picnic to your local park. Or at the very least, take 10 minutes every lunch break to eat your sandwich outside.

Supplement your vitamin D

Unless you spend a huge amount of time outdoors, it’s very hard to get adequate amounts of vitamin D in the UK during the cooler months. In 2010 a landmark BMJ study into vitamin D deficiency in adults and children confirmed what many doctors and paediatricians had long suspected: “Vitamin D deficiency is flourishing”.

The study revealed that 46.6 per cent of white British adults were found to have vitamin D insufficiency, with 15.5 per cent having severe deficiency during winter or spring. Think about taking a supplement now, because the body can’t store vitamin D.

Dressing for autumn

Work on your wardrobe...

Now is the time to stash “holiday” dresses and other items that only get worn when you’re away or during heatwave-grade weekends in Britain.

The change in seasons is the perfect time to make a fresh start with your wardrobe“The change in seasons is the perfect time to make a fresh start with your wardrobe,” says Vicky Silverthorn, decluttering expert and author of Start With Your Sock Drawer. As a mild autumn is forecast and a last-minute holiday might materialise, it’s wise to keep a capsule collection in your wardrobe for now, but the bulk of your summer wear can be stored. And this isn’t purely a practical move.

“Mindfulness is all about living in the present moment, not hanging on to the past, and not living for what might happen in the future,” adds Silverthorn. “So mentally and physically, this is about clearing for the life you’re living right now.”

... and invest in long-lasting 
pieces

One of the joys of autumn is the excuse to shop for a couple of new additions to your wardrobe. Perhaps it’s a new Hades ( hades-shop.co.uk[https://hades-shop.co.uk/] ) cashmere or Markus Lupfer merino jumper ( £285; markuslupfer.com[https://www.markuslupfer.com/women/shop/knitwear?p=2] ), or a Stutterheim raincoat ( £149; stutterheim.com[https://stutterheim.com/eu/] ), or a pair of Ops & Ops ankle boots ( opsandops.com[https://opsandops.com/] ).

Autumn naturally forces us to think about quality over quantity; now is the time to invest in items like leather footwear and woollen coats that we’ll be wearing for several winters to come, rather than taking summer’s more fast-fashion approach of snapping up one-season-only holiday items.

Slip into something comfortable

Autumn is also the time to slip into something cosier, which can be a treat after a heatwave-heavy summer where we’ve been forced into flimsy flip-flops and lightweight cotton. And the good news is that slippers are having a serious fashion moment.

Ugg’s sheepskin slippers (from £80; ugg.com[https://www.ugg.com/] ) are long-standing favourites, but for something more glamorous, check out Penelope Chilvers’ suede dandy palm tree slippers (£259; penelopechilvers.com[https://www.penelopechilvers.com/] ) or Derek Rose Morgan’s mule slippers (£140; derek-rose.com[https://www.derek-rose.com/] ) in calfskin leather.

Get back to bases

Good quality underwear and base layers can make the difference between you enjoying that blustery walk on the beach and cutting it short, and getting more time outdoors is something worth investing in.

British surf brand Finisterre ( finisterre.com[https://finisterre.com/] ) produce good quality, ethically manufactured merino wool base layers; its £50 Pali leggings are a particularly smart buy, and will keep you taking your lunch and a book to the park for a few precious extra weeks this autumn.

New season, new social life

Fill up your calendar

In summer we might feel a bit more sociable, but the truth is that friends and family are often away, so it’s not necessarily the easiest time for our personal relationships.

Autumn is the real season of connection, plus it’s also a time to focus on more intimate gatherings and one-on-one dates with close friends, rather than crowded barbecues. “There is an old saying that ‘we become the five people we spend the most time with’ and I believe there is something in that,” says Donna Lancaster, relationship and life coach ( thebridgeretreat.com[http://thebridgeretreat.com/] ). “I believe it’s important to ensure those that we surround ourselves with bring us nourishment and joy as well as challenge.”

Pick five friends or family members you want to prioritise, and contact them this week to make plans for the month ahead.

Cram in some culture

Summertime is dominated by big cultural set pieces – the Proms, blockbuster exhibitions, the Edinburgh Festival – but in autumn new plays open at local theatres and new concert seasons begin in earnest. Even if it’s as simple as live-streaming a London Symphony Orchestra ( lso.co.uk[https://lso.co.uk/] ) performance from your sofa, now is the time to start filling your diary with cultural treats to look forward to.

Rediscover the great indoors

Yes, the season of barbecues and beer gardens might be drawing to a close, but by now most of us are secretly looking forward to a glass of red wine next to a log fire, or a lengthy pub lunch after a country walk. Relish the season ahead and make plans that feel like an autumnal treat. Invite friends and family over for their first roast dinner of the autumn, go blackberry picking, or book a late-summer weekend away at a country house now that the busy school holidays season is over.

Learn something new

Blame it on years of Woolworths “Back To School” window displays if you like, but even as an adult, autumn feels like the right time to take a language class or cookery course, or sign up for pottery or singing lessons.

We no longer worry about missing a sunny evening in the garden, plus having a project during the transitional season helps to set us up for the gloomy winter months, a time it can be tempting to mentally fast-forward through. Find that sense of purpose now, and the momentum will continue right through to February.

(8:30 AM, EDT)

JOHN DICKERSON: Welcome back to CBS THIS MORNING.

Right now it`s time to show you some of this morning`s headlines from around the globe. The Philadelphia Inquirer says GoFundMe plans to fully reimburse a homeless man who claims a couple withheld hundreds of thousands of dollars from him. Police raided the home of Kate McClure and Mark D`Amico yesterday. Johnny Bobbitt is suing the New Jersey couple who raised four hundred thousand dollars in a highly publicized campaign on his behalf. The trio met last year after Bobbitt spent his last twenty dollar bill to fill McClure`s tank when she ran out of gas. The couple had no comment.

GAYLE KING: In that video we just saw, John, they were taking away the couple`s brand new BMW that they said that they didn`t use any of the GoFundMe money for. But it`s just-- this story has taken such a turn.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: It`s a sad turn, right?

GAYLE KING: Yeah.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Such an uplifting story the first time we heard it.

JOHN DICKERSON: It was-- the difference between the uplifting feeling you had at the beginning--

GAYLE KING: Yes.

JOHN DICKERSON: --and where we are now is quite bad.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: (INDISTINCT) stayed up here.

JOHN DICKERSON: Yeah.

GAYLE KING: Me too.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, Britain`s Guardian says a British astrophysicist passed over for a Nobel Prize just won a three million dollar award for discovering cosmic pulsars half a century ago. Her male supervisor shared the Nobel in 1974 for that discovery. A leading panel of scientists awarded Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell a breakthrough prize in Fundamental Physics. She says she`ll donate the money to help students who are underrepresented in physics. Good for her.

GAYLE KING: And-- very good for her. And she`s there with the queen.

And The Wall Street Journal says Generation Z is coming to your office. Get ready to adapt. About seventeen million people born in 1997 and later are starting to enter the workforce. They`re in demand as businesses face a worker shortage. Companies are easing hiring requirements and holding raffles at campus recruiting events to attack the talent. Some employers are reworking training to replicate YouTube-style videos that appeal to those Gen Z workers brought up on their smartphones.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: OMG.

GAYLE KING: Yeah.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, popular probiotics may not be as helpful as you think, and may even be harmful. That`s according to two new studies in the journal Cell. Nearly four million Americans take probiotics, which are live bacteria and hopes of boosting their digestive health. They can be taken as a supplement or in foods like yogurt, sauerkraut, and pickles. Researchers studying the human digestive tract found probiotics have questionable benefits and may interfere with the body`s own natural ability to maintain gut health. Our Doctor David Agus is with us. And Doctor Agus, I drink a probiotic, a Russian kefir, every single morning thinking that I`m not only continuing the Russian heritage but also taking care of my body. Is that not healthy?

DR. DAVID AGUS (CBS News Medical Contributor): I don`t want to attack your cultural beliefs.

GAYLE KING: Yes. Yes.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: I said that for mom and dad.

DR. DAVID AGUS: I feel horrible in that regard. But, you know, you have thirty feet of GI tract, Bianna, and there are thousands of different bacteria in them. So taking a couple of bacteria in that kefir is probably altering that landscape, that rainforest of thousands of bacteria. So this was an amazing study because they did endoscopy and colonoscopy and they took bacteria throughout the entire thirty feet, the first down if you will, you know, ten yards of the GI tract and they looked at this bacteria. And when you took just probiotics, most of the time they just went through you. Sometimes they stayed. But a couple of bacteria would dominate. Then they did the amazing studies. They gave antibiotics and then the probiotics. What happened is, is that these couple of bacteria in the kefir or the pill they took actually started to dominate the GI tract and it delayed the normal bacteria from coming back. So it`s not just it does no harm. It could actually delay recovery from antibiotics which wipe out all bacteria.

JOHN DICKERSON: So is that to say that the harm is related to if you`re taking at the same time as when you`re taking an antibiotic which some people have been told to do.

DR. DAVID AGUS: Yeah. I mean, that`s what we think, is that, you know, antibiotics wipe out bacteria and the idea, very simply, was probiotics are pills of live bacteria that can put, what we called, "beneficial bacteria in." but there are a few of the thousands of species in that same study-- and I know this is tough to do on morning television, but I`m going to do it, is they took the normal bacteria out of individual and made a pill of their own bacteria and they gave them to those people and those people recovered in days versus up to six months when they took the probiotics. So we`re going to have personalized pills of bacteria going forward and that`s what`s going to be exciting.

JOHN DICKERSON: What is-- what does the study say if anything about people who take it when they`re not taking antibiotics? Because gut health has been, you know, everywhere and-- and this has been talked about a lot. What does this study about that?

DR. DAVID AGUS: So what it says is gut health is tremendously important. The data are right. It controls your brain, it controls your immune system, what you absorb from food, diabetes, all of those. But a simple pill isn`t a quick fix to gut health. And so we all want that quick thing. Let me get better quickly.

GAYLE KING: Yeah.

DR. DAVID AGUS: And the problem is, is there`s complexity here.

JOHN DICKERSON: Yeah.

DR. DAVID AGUS: And we`re just starting to learn it. Obama-- President Obama announced the Human Microbiome Project to look at these bacteria in 2016. And so what we learning is ten-fold more bacteria in you, John, than human cells. And so there`s complexity there. And so it`s going to take a little while but gut health is going to be a way we prevent disease and treat disease in the future. But the simple (INDISTINCT) probiotics now is at the window.

JOHN DICKERSON: No simple fixes, darn it. You`re a-- you`re a killjoy.

DR. DAVID AGUS: Listen--

JOHN DICKERSON: But that`s all the time-- now I have to be the killjoy. That`s all the time we have. Thank you, doctor.

DR. DAVID AGUS: Got it.

GAYLE KING: Yeah.

END