Find out how to get more vitamin D after the jump.

Feeling stressed? Moody? Depressed? While you may think it's your life that needs changing, your real problem might be what's missing from your diet: magnesium.

This under-appreciated and vastly under-consumed mineral is the hidden cause of many mood disorders, and boosting your magnesium levels could be the key to improving your emotional health.

Statistics show that we simply do not have enough magnesium in our diets. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) claims that 60 per cent of Americans aren't getting their daily magnesium requirements. And according to psychologist/MD/medical researcher Dr. Mark Sircus, who has written extensively on the topic, that number just scratches the surface of the problem -- "What they don't tell us is that this 60% is based on minimum daily estimates set by the Department of Agriculture [which] are set terribly low, so actually the number is much higher." A common culprit is processed foods, which are depleted of many essential minerals, including magnesium. On top of this, soil that has been depleted of minerals also lacks the all-important magnesium, so even our fresh produce tends to be lacking.


Find out how to get more magnesium after the jump.

There's nothing that makes new parents feel more frustrated and helpless than dealing with a colicky baby. Colic is defined as periods of intense and unexplained crying or fussing in a healthy baby, lasting more than 3 hours a day, more than 3 days a week for more than 3 weeks. The worst part is that nothing seems to soothe the infant. He or she will just keep crying, as if in pain from some unknown source. The babies can't communicate what's wrong, so they just cry.

Many theories about the source of colic have to do with food sensitivities and abnormal gut function. In one new study, published recently in the journal Pediatrics, researchers attempted to find out if supplementation with probiotic bacteria, the health-promoting bacteria which inhabit the human digestive tract and help with digestive function, would help ease infant colic.

The researchers took 50 exclusively breastfed infants who had been diagnosed with colic and assigned them randomly to either receive probiotic drops or a placebo for 21 days. The study was double-blind, which means neither the subjects nor the experimenters knew which children were getting the probiotic drops. Infants received five drops of probiotic liquid or placebo once per day, 30 minutes before feeding. The study relied on parental diaries for recording how much the babies cried during the trials. They also took stool samples to see if the probiotics had an altered effect on the gut flora.

While discussing bone health with a client last week, I mentioned the importance of vitamin K2. The client had never heard of this essential vitamin, which is not uncommon. Although vitamin K was discovered in 1929, it didn't receive a lot of publicity as it was then thought to be nothing more than a vitamin important for blood clotting.

More recent studies have begun to uncovered what K is responsible for in helping the functioning of our bodies. Dr. Mercola, nutrition expert and purveyor of the massive health site Mercola.com, calls it "the next vitamin D" as research keeps building, outlining vitamin K's important benefits for health. And, similar to vitamin D, almost everyone is deficient in vitamin K.

Mercola sites the research of Dr. Cees Vermeer who has found blood analysis of vitamin K levels are not accurate in determining whether a deficiency exists. Although most of us have enough for blood clotting, many lack enough vitamin K to prevent calcification of the arteries, osteoporosis, some forms of cancer and brain health problems like dementia.

A couple of months ago I wrote about cucumber water as being one of the most refreshing (and healthy ) summer beverages. Now that cooler weather has started to breeze our way (well, somewhat cooler. We've still got some summer left!) my mind has started to drift to another good use of the cucumber - pickles.

Fall is pickling season, which you might have noticed as many of the supermarkets are starting to display mason jars. You can do preserving all year long, mind you, but fall is the traditional season. Don't hate me because I'm talking about fall in August - you don't have to start your canning, jarring and pickling yet if you don't want to, but it's good to start thinking about this stuff now.

Last Monday, Statistics Canada released a report stating 91 percent of Canadians have bisphenol A (BPA) in their bodies, which shows just how prevalent the chemical is in our daily lives. This is the first time Statistics Canada has looked into the extent to which this industrial chemical is absorbed by Canadians exposed to it.

There's not much question about it - if you're exposed to it, you're absorbing it. BPA is almost inescapable in our modern world. The chemical is widely used in the manufacture of things such as hard, clear plastics, the resins used to line cans of food, beverages and infant formula and even as the coating on some cash register receipts. A Harvard University study in 2009 found that people drinking from BPA containing polycarbonate bottles for one week had a two-thirds increase of BPA in their urine. The study, published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, confirmed that BPA very easily leaches from containers into food and beverages contained.
So, there's not much question that you're exposed to it and Statscan has found those exposed to it absorb it. So what does it do?

Last week I checked out the Dufferin Grove Park farmers' market in downtown Toronto, which is awesome because it happens every Thursday in the park year-round. And it's an organic farmers' market, so I know everything I purchased there is top notch!

My goal was to make a meal with as much local food as I possibly could. I managed pretty well, too, except for things like olive oil and unrefined sea salt. And my inspiration, in addition to keeping my hard-earned cash in the local economy, was to get the freshest produce possible.

As the locavore movement gains momentum, you've probably heard murmurings about the less that ideal facts behind grocery produce. Most of it is picked any where from four to seven days prior to arriving in the supermarket and is transported an average of 2500 kilometers before hitting the shelves. And this is from within Canada! Increase those distances considerably when you're talking strawberries imported from California, mangoes from Mexico, rice from Asia or any number of other imports. It's nice to eat food you know was picked within the last day and travelled less than 100 kilometers, generally, to arrive at your table.

My shopping list and dinner recipe after the jump

Organic labelling is generally considered a good thing. As customers, we need to know to what standard the food we eat has been held to. If we want to avoid pesticide exposure, antibiotics in our animals products or genetically modified foods, we know that choosing products labeled as organic addresses these concerns. This is why when last year Canada-wide government regulated organics standards came into effect, most considered it a good thing. No longer was it up to us to check the standards of the individual certification bodies, organic standards are now federally regulated and standard.

Similarly, when it was announced that organic standards for aquaculture, fish and seafood, were being worked on, it seemed like a good thing. But apparently the crafty bureaucrats from Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), who have been tasked with coming up with organic standards for aquaculture for Canada-wide regulation, have been working behind closed doors with members of the salmon farming industry to try to sneak in some truly deplorable regulations to be labelled as "organic" net pen salmon farms.

The only things an industrial salmon farm would have to do to qualify as organic, according to these regulations, would be to make minimal changes to the feed - replace poultry byproducts with wild fish and use organic grains. Everything else is considered above board including antibiotics, biocides, sea lice, disease, uncontrolled waste, and escapes. Not exactly the organic standards that we're used to. As a comparison, organic meat products must be completely antibiotic-free, be free of disease and have a minimum indoor and outdoor space requirement. Can net pen salmon be considered to have outdoor space? Wouldn't it be the equivalent of battery cages for chickens, something prohibited under current organic standards?

Could we be witnessing the final nail in the coffin for high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS)? Despite the Corn Refiners Association's continued assurances that HFCS is perfectly safe, a new study out of the University of California in Los Angeles, published in the journal Cancer Research, has found that fructose triggers pancreatic cancer cells to proliferate and grow more quickly. Certainly, resulting headlines like "Cancer cells slurp up fructose" aren't helping the sugar's image.

This study just adds to the charges against fructose: obesity, diabetes, increased triglycerides in the blood, metabolic syndrome, fatty liver to name a few. But the most important finding of the study is that fructose is used differently by the cancer cells than sucrose.

It was previously believed, and asserted repeatedly by the HFCS industry, that sugar is sugar is sugar, meaning all sugars are treated the same way in the body. Not so. Pancreatic tumour cells fed both glucose and fructose in this study were found to use the two sugars differently. The researchers said this study may help to explain other studies that have linked fructose intake with pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest types of cancer.

The researchers found that fructose, compared to glucose, activated a key cellular pathway that causes cancer cells to divide and multiply. In other words, while the tumor cells thrive on glucose, they readily use the fructose to proliferate. And not only did cancer cells prefer it, fructose also triggered cellular processes that enabled tumor cells to more rapidly use both glucose and fructose.

Starch seems to be getting a lot of flack as of late. With the popularity of the glycemic index and glycemic load, people generally consider starchy foods to be little better than sugar. The glycemic index (GI) is a measure of how much blood sugar and insulin rises as a result of eating a particular food. Because insulin reacts to carbohydrates, starch has a strong tendency to make blood sugar rise.

The low-carb people, including the increasingly popular Paleo-dieters may knock starches for this very reason, but importance placed on the GI of foods may be overblown. There's a lot more to a food's healthful qualities than how much it affects your blood sugar. High starch foods actually have less of an impact on disease than many low-GI foods like high-fructose corn syrup or agave for instance. Plus, traditional cultures that ate high-starch diets at the turn of the century (before the scourge of the western diet had reached them) were observed to be in perfect health without any incidence of diabetes or blood sugar issues.

One major reason that starchy foods like potatoes, sweet potatoes, legumes or rice should still be high on your list of good foods is the fibre they contain. Oh, fibre. This again. You're going to make me have to suppress my gag reflex while you tell me the importance of adding bulk to my stool, aren't you Doug. Well, yes, there's that. But fibre is important for reasons other than just providing, ahem, bulk to the stool and adding to the feeling of fullness so that you don't overeat.