I went to a very interesting lecture a few weeks ago about the decline of the Fraser River sockeye salmon stocks, presented by Dr. Glenn Crossin from the University of British Columbia. His studies of the Fraser River sockeye implicate climate change as one of the most important factors in their almost complete collapse this year. Ten million salmon that were expected to return to the Fraser River, simply did not show up at all. This disastrous collapse has caused the Canadian Government to launch a public inquiry in the hopes that we will not have a repeat of the cod fishery collapse of the early '90soff the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.

This question which first came up in France in the mid 1800s is still worth asking today, because one's view of how to obtain optimal health and wellbeing depends upon which side of this debate one agrees with. Germ Theory was put forward most famously by French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur, and states that certain sicknesses are caused by the invasion of micro-organisms that cannot be seen without a microscope. As such, treatment or prevention involves figuring out which microbe (bacteria, virus, fungus, parasite) has invaded the body and then killing it to prevent or stop the disease. This is the theory upon which western medicine is based. You get sick, you go to the doctor and get an antibiotic/antiviral/antifungal to get better. Much of our food, like milk, juices, canned food and even nuts like almonds are pasteurized in order to eliminate the bacteria to avoid sickness. Many people use anti-bacterial soaps and hand sanitizers in order to prevent the spread of infection. These actions are all about killing the germ, and are in support of Germ Theory.

I remember being a fly on a wall many years ago, listening in on a conversation between two exercise physiologists at the University of Toronto, arguing over which is more important for overall health, a weight training program or a cardiovascular training program. I think weight-training program wins the argument hands down, especially when one considers that if the exercise program is designed well, the participant will be getting a cardiovascular workout at the same time. So unless you are training for a particular athletic event such as a triathlon or 10km race, why bother spend all that extra time doing cardio? Most of us have better things to do with our time, and furthermore, aerobic training tends to break down muscle tissue which is counter-productive if you are trying to build strength or burn fat.

Insomnia, or regularly not being able to get to sleep or stay asleep, is a problem that affects roughly 1 in 7 people in North America and can have serious consequences for daytime alertness and functional ability. Most insomniacs get less than 5 hours of sleep a night, and struggle with extreme fatigue during the day. It's not any surprise that insomniacs are more accident prone due to daytime drowsiness. Although I seem to be doing much better than before, getting enough sleep is one of my own personal battles, and I feel like I have tried everything possible to improve my sleep, short of quitting my business and going on a vacation for an extended period of time. It feels like my body has forgotten how to fall asleep, which must seem absurd to those who have no trouble sleeping. I'm cozy in bed, feel dead tired, I feel like I'm dropping off and I think I'll be asleep in a few minutes, but I just don't seem to fall through the "sleep threshold", and instead hover in that la la land between sleep and wakefulness for most of the night, with my brain contemplating topics that would probably put most people to sleep, but I seem to find endlessly interesting, such as why trigger points in the platysma muscle would cause ringing in the ears. (Why is that?)

Let me say off the top that I don't have kids, so I can only imagine the struggles some parents go through trying to get their kids to eat vegetables, or in some cases, meat. I'll speak from a nutritional standpoint on what kids need and put out a few ideas, but feel free to post comments with ideas that have worked for you, so others can benefit too.

Retail stores reacted to customer concerns about BPA, and pulled the hard polycarbonate plastic bottles from their store shelves and replaced them with metal bottles, such as those made by the Swiss company, Sigg. This was completely a consumer-driven change. Nalgene, along with other plastic water bottle manufacturers that for years had declared that there were no health issues related to BPA, were forced to take the BPA out of their bottles due to consumer demand. It was not until October of 2008 that the Canadian government declared BPA a "hazardous substance", and it was placed on the toxic substance list. Then in March 2009, the US put through legislation that forbids the sale of "any bottle, cup, or other container that contains bisphenol A if the container is designed or intended to be filled with any liquid, food or beverage primarily for consumption from that container by children three years of age or younger.” According to the Canadian Gazette, "On March 16, 2009, in the United States, a bill to ban the use of bisphenol A in food containers, and for other purposes was introduced for the second time in the House of Representatives." BPA is particularly hazardous to infants, and many countries have now banned it from sippy cups, liners of infant formula containers, baby toys etc.

I am not American, and certainly how Americans decide to change or not change their health care system is not my business. But when the Canadian Health Care System is dragged into the current American debate, and denigrated and lied about in order to scare Americans, I feel a need to defend our system, and to get the facts out on how the Canadian system works. For example, Louie Gohmert, a Republican congressman from Texas said “I know enough about Canadian care, and I know this bureaucratic, socialized piece of crap they have up there. One in five have to die because they went to socialized medicine.” That is crazy nonsense! And Republican Paul Broun of Georgia said on July 10, “Life is precious. Some would say, ‘Well, she’s 85 years of age; we should just let her die.’ And that’s exactly what’s going on in Canada and Great Britain today. They don’t have the appreciation of life as we do in our society, evidently.” Does he really think we let people die?? That's offensive, not to mention untrue! And as for that TV commercial about the Canadian Shona Holmes who claims she had brain cancer - well it turns out she did not have brain cancer, but a benign cyst, and she chose to go to the States to get it removed immediately. I'm in no way suggesting that the Canadian system is perfect, but neither is the American one which leaves 50 million people with no insurance at all. Most Canadians would not trade our system for the American one, and poll after poll suggests we Canadians are happier with our system than Americans are with theirs.

I just got back from the farmer's market, one of my favourite weekend activities. I love the variety of produce that one simply can't find in the grocery store - last week after my farmer's market excursion, I made a "purple meal" with purple potatoes, purple beets, purple kale, purple cabbage and purple tomatoes along with some beef tenderloin. I didn't find the purple carrots or purple broccoli last week, but if I had found them, they would have been part of the meal too. What fun! And the food is so fresh and tasty compared to the grocery store produce which is picked weeks early for shipping and then frequently ripened with chemicals when the time is right.

Well today, my last purchase was two wild coho salmon fillets, caught in the deep ocean off the coast of the Queen Charlotte Islands in northern British Columbia. I haven't bought salmon in a while, because I find myself feeling guilty every time I think about it.

Well, with the heat wave we've been enjoying over the past week, I've found myself pondering how to stay comfortably cool, keep the apartment cool enough to be able to sleep, get my vitamin D dosage without burning to a crisp, and focusing on staying hydrated enough. Dehydration creates a number of problems in the body, including increasing blood pressure, accelerating osteoarthritis (the wearing down of joints), and increasing the risk of kidney stones.

When one considers that the water standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency for tap water are higher than the water standards set by the FDA for bottled water, and one realizes that it costs 10,000 times more to produce a bottle of water ($2.50 a liter or $10 a gallon - much more expensive than gasoline) than to simply turn on the tap, we must ask ourselves why we are wasting our resources and our money on bottled water.