(NaturalNews) As NaturalNews reported previously, Canadian scientists have found that consuming chocolate regularly significantly reduces the odds of having a stroke (http://www.naturalnews.com/028278_c…). Now other researchers have just published a study in the European Heart Journal providing even more evidence that chocolate — especially the dark variety — benefits the cardiovascular system. In fact, eating just one small square of chocolate a day can lower your blood pressure and reduce your risk of heart disease.

Researchers at the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Nuthetal, Germany, reached this conclusion after following 19,357 people between the ages of 35 and 65 for at least ten years and studying the research participants’ chocolate consumption. The results? Research subjects who ate the most chocolate (on average, about 7.5 grams a day) had lower blood pressure. What’s more, the risk of chocolate lovers having a heart attack or stroke was dramatically lowered, too.

“People who ate the most amount of chocolate were at a 39% lower risk than those with the lowest chocolate intakes,” Dr Brian Buijsse, the nutritional epidemiologist who led the research, said in a press statement. “To put it in terms of absolute risk, if people in the group eating the least amount of chocolate (of whom 219 per 10,000 had a heart attack or stroke) increased their chocolate intake by six grams a day, 85 fewer heart attacks and strokes per 10,000 people could be expected to occur over a period of about ten years.”

Read More: http://www.naturalnews.com/028521_chocolate_blood_pressure.html

A 2005 study concluded that a push in Denmark to screen large numbers of women for breast cancer with mammography had reduced breast cancer deaths in Copenhagen by a whopping 25 percent. Sounds like proof that regular mammograms are truly life-savers, right? Wrong. Scientists from the Nordic Cochrane Center in Copenhagen and the Folkehelseinstituttet in Oslo have re-examined this pro-mammogram study along with additional data and come up with an entirely different conclusion.

First, they found that the scientific validity of the 2005 study doesn’t hold up because the research was deeply flawed. Even more important: the new report shows there’s no evidence mammography itself was the reason behind any reduction in breast cancer deaths. In fact, deaths from breast cancer were lower in areas where women didn’t undergo those screening tests.

More Info: http://www.naturalnews.com/028530_brst_cancer_mammograms.html

Scientists at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom have discovered a substance that reduces fat uptake in the body by more than 75 percent. This potential obesity fighter isn’t a drug but a natural substance found in seaweed.

The research team, headed by Dr. Iain Brownlee and Professor Jeff Pearson, tested more than 60 different fibers in the laboratory to see how effective they were in absorbing fat. The results? The scientists found that alginate, a natural fiber in sea kelp, blocks the body from absorbing fat far more effectively than anti-obesity treatments currently sold over the counter.

More Info: http://www.naturalnews.com/028525_seaweed_weight_loss.html

Many scientific “breakthroughs” widely reported in the popular press are actually false, warn researchers Marcus Munafo of the University of Bristol and Jonathan Flint of Oxford University, writing in The Guardian.

“The social environment in which research occurs places scientists under pressure to perform, measured by the amount and quality of publications, and success in attracting research funding from government and charitable agencies,” the scientists write.

This pressure encourages researchers to find some exciting conclusion to report, the authors write, even if that conclusion is probably false.

All scientific studies — such as those claiming to find a “gene for” depression, schizophrenia, obesity, or any other condition — contain a probability that their findings occurred simply by chance. Normally, this probability is less than 5 percent — making the findings “statistically significant.” Munafo and Flint note, however, that it is actually fairly easy to produce statistical significance.

“With enough data, and by running enough statistical tests, it is easy enough to find a significant effect,” they write. “And with enough people trying, this effect might even be found more than once, giving the appearance of replication. The problem is that the results almost certainly won’t be true.”

This is why further studies, particularly meta-analyses combining the results of multiple studies, consistently disprove many headline-topping “breakthroughs.” Yet these later studies rarely receive the same degree of media coverage as the originals. The authors note that although they conducted a meta-analysis finding no evidence for a connection between a certain gene variant and depression, screening for this “depression gene” is still available via the Internet.

More research being done does not necessarily mean more reliable findings, either.

“The greater the financial and other interests and prejudices in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true,” said genetic epidemiologist, John Ioannidis. “The hotter a scientific field (with more scientific teams involved), the less likely the research findings are to be true.”

Source:  Natural News

How Mercury Causes Brain Neuron Degeneration University of Calgary Faculty of Medicine Dept. of Physiology and Biophysics This short presentation available on the University website clearly shows how mercury in fillings can destroy brain neurons as seen with people who have Alzheimer’s Disease.