I'm pretty sure Metametrix in Ga. has a very good vitamin K test. They have been working on this for a few years and have a great reputation for specialty testing.

Most people don't want to believe or listen to me when I talk about the negative effects of cell phone use and that's because the cell phone is such an integral part of our lives. If you can't see or feel the damage that is occurring to your brain than it must not be happening. I have had 3 patients die of Glioblastomas (brain tumors) and one patient had an Acoustic neuroma (Brain stem tumor). I'm a chiropractor not a medical doctor, so It should be extremely rare for me to ever have 1 patient with a Glioblastoma walk into my office. All of these patients lived on their cell phones. Studies have shown that in the last 10 years there has been an increase in brain tumors in adults and in children.

How about pushing exercise and food portion control.

From cnsfoundation.org:

Researchers at the University of Illinois report this week that a plant compound found in abundance in celery and green peppers can disrupt a key component of the inflammatory response in the brain. The findings have implications for research on aging and diseases such as Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis.

The study appears this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Inflammation can be a blessing or a blight. It is a critical part of the body’s immune response that in normal circumstances reduces injury and promotes healing. When it goes awry, however, the inflammatory response can lead to serious physical and mental problems.

Inflammation plays a key role in many neurodegenerative diseases and also is implicated in the cognitive and behavioral impairments seen in aging.

The new study looked at luteolin (LOO-tee-OH-lin), a plant flavonoid known to impede the inflammatory response in several types of cells outside the central nervous system. The purpose of the study was to determine if luteolin could also reduce inflammation the brain, said animal sciences professor and principal investigator Rodney Johnson.

“One of the questions we were interested in is whether something like luteolin, or other bioactive food components, can be used to mitigate age-associated inflammation and therefore improve cognitive function and avoid some of the cognitive deficits that occur in aging,” Johnson said.

The researchers first studied the effect of luteolin on microglia. These brain cells are a key component of the immune defense. When infection occurs anywhere in the body, microglia respond by producing inflammatory cytokines, chemical messengers that act in the brain to orchestrate a whole-body response that helps fight the invading microorganism.

This response is associated with many of the most obvious symptoms of illness: sleepiness, loss of appetite, fever and lethargy, and sometimes a temporary diminishment of learning and memory. Neuroinflammation can also lead some neurons to self-destruct, with potentially disastrous consequences if it goes too far.

Graduate research assistant Saebyeol Jang studied the inflammatory response in microglial cells. She spurred inflammation by exposing the cells to lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a component of the cell wall of many common bacteria.

Those cells that were also exposed to luteolin showed a significantly diminished inflammatory response. Jang showed that luteolin was shutting down production of a key cytokine in the inflammatory pathway, interleukin-6 (IL-6). The effects of luteolin exposure were dramatic, resulting in as much as a 90 percent drop in IL-6 production in the LPS-treated cells.

“This was just about as potent an inhibition as anything we had seen previously,” Johnson said.

But how was luteolin inhibiting production of IL-6″

Jang began by looking at a class of proteins involved in intracellular signaling, called transcription factors, which bind to specific “promoter” regions on DNA and increase their transcription into RNA and translation into proteins.

Using electromobility shift assays, which measure the binding of transcription factors to DNA promoters, Jang eventually determined that luteolin inhibited IL-6 production by preventing activator protein-1 (AP-1) from binding the IL-6 promoter.

AP-1 is in turn activated by JNK, an upstream protein kinase. Jang found that luteolin inhibited JNK phosphorylation in microglial cell culture. The failure of the JNK to activate the AP-1 transcription factor prevented it from binding to the promoter region on the IL-6 gene and transcription came to a halt.

To see if luteolin might have a similar effect in vivo, the researchers gave mice luteolin-laced drinking water for 21 days before injecting the mice with LPS.

Those mice that were fed luteolin had significantly lower levels of IL-6 in their blood plasma four hours after injection with the LPS. Luteolin also decreased LPS-induced transcription of IL-6 in the hippocampus, a brain region that is critical to spatial learning and memory.

The findings indicate a possible role for luteolin or other bioactive compounds in treating neuroinflammation, Johnson said.

“It might be possible to use flavonoids to inhibit JNK and mitigate inflammatory reactions in the brain,” he said. “Inflammatory cytokines such as interleukin-6 are very well known to inhibit certain types of learning and memory that are under the control of the hippocampus, and the hippocampus is also very vulnerable to the insults of aging,” he said. “If you had the potential to decrease the production of inflammatory cytokines in the brain you could potentially limit the cognitive deficits that result.”

Most Americans are walking around in a pro-inflammatory state. Inflammation is being linked to almost every health problem out there from Heart disease, to Alzheimers. The Normal American diet is extremely high in Omega 6 and Omega 9 fatty acids which are pro-inflammatory to our bodies. We need these fats but they must be in the proper ratio with Omega 3 fatty acids. That's why it's extremely important to take Omega 3 fatty acids.

From TheAutismNews.com:

The parts of the human brain that grow the most during infancy and childhood are nearly identical to the brain regions that have changed the most when humans are compared to primates, a recent study has shown.

Researchers made the discovery as they conducted a study to try to better understand abnormal brain development in premature babies and assess the long-term effects of premature birth on brain development.

The number of babies born before term in the United States has risen steadily to reach 12% of all births, said Terrie Inder from Washington University in St Louis and lead author of the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Disorders due to brain structure

Babies born prematurely face a greater risk of having learning disabilities, attention deficits, behavioral problems and cognitive impairments, according to the researchers.

“This study and the data that we’re gathering now could provide us with very powerful tools for understanding what goes wrong structurally in a wide range of childhood disorders,” Inder said.

The researchers hope to gain insight into the after-effects of premature birth and even conditions such as autism, attention-deficit disorder or reading disabilities, they said.

Uneven growth points to evolution

The researchers used a technique called surface reconstruction to compare regions and structures in different brains.

In analysing the brain scans of 12 full-term babies and comparing them to the scans of 12 healthy young adults, the researchers found that the cerebral cortex – the wrinkled area on the surface of the brain responsible for higher mental functions – grew unevenly.

A quarter to a third of the cortex expanded around twice as much as other cortical areas during normal development.

The findings reveal “evolution’s imprint on the human brain” because the rapidly developing parts of the brain are also those that differ most when the human brain is compared to primates’.

Gaining the upper hand

High-growth regions have been linked to advanced mental functions such as language and reasoning and traits that make humans uniquely human.

Previous studies have shown that many of the brain’s high-growth regions “are expanded in humans as a result of recent evolutionary changes that made the human brain much larger than that of any other primate,” said David Van Essen, one of the study’s authors.

Brain growth dictated by early needs

Van Essen, who developed the surface reconstruction technique used to scan the brain regions, speculated that the full physical growth of the rapid-growth regions may be delayed somewhat to allow them to be shaped by early life experiences.

Inder hypothesised that certain regions of the brain might develop more quickly in young infants for evolutionary reasons.

For instance, the part of the brain responsible for vision, which is necessary to allow a baby to bond with his mother during nursing, develops early, while brain functions less important early in life come later.

Source: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/3562/evolution-determines-infant-brain-growth

Other studies have shown that motor movement of the limbs helps with the development of the ipsilateral cerebellum and contralateral frontal cortex. That's is also why you will see motor and muscle imbalances in children with Autism and learning disabilities.

It remains unclear what impact chemical dispersants will have on sea life–and only the massive, uncontrolled experiment being run in the Gulf of Mexico will tell

From ScientificAmerican.com:

Roughly five million liters of dispersants have now been used to break up the oil spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, making this the largest use of such chemicals in U.S. history. If it continues for 10 months, as long as Mexico’s Ixtoc 1 blowout in 1979 in the same region, the Macondo well disaster has a good chance of achieving the largest global use of these chemicals, surpassing 10 million liters.

And there is no doubt that dispersants are toxic: Both types of the dispersal compound COREXIT used in the Gulf so far are capable of killing or depressing the growth of a wide range of aquatic species, ranging from phytoplankton to fish. “It’s a trade-off decision to lessen the overall environmental impact,” explained marine biologist Jane Lubchenco, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), at a press conference on May 12. “When an oil spill occurs, there are no good outcomes.”

The trade-off in this case is the addition of toxic chemicals in a bid to protect the marshes of Louisiana and the beaches of Florida. But the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), for one, has become concerned about the toxicity of the most-used dispersant at the Gulf of Mexico spill—COREXIT 9500—and ordered BP to look at alternatives. (COREXIT 9527 was used earlier during the spill, but it was discontinued because it was considered too toxic.)

The problem? The EPA’s industry-generated data is unclear as to the relative toxicity of various dispersants. “If you think the data on COREXIT is bad, try to find any decent toxicology data on the alternatives,” says toxicologist Carys Mitchelmore of the University of Maryland’s Chesapeake Biological Laboratory, who helped write a 2005 National Research Council (NRC) report on dispersants. “I couldn’t compare and contrast which one was more toxic than the other based on that.”

Dispersed oil
Both COREXIT 9500 and 9527 are produced by Naperville, Ill.–based Nalco, a company better known for its water purification work with the oil industry. “For every barrel of oil produced, 3.5 barrels of water are produced,” explains chemist Mani Ramesh, chief technology officer for Nalco. “That needs to be treated before it can be released. That water treatment has been a core area for us.”

But at the same time Nalco keeps busy cleaning the oil industry’s water, it also provides COREXIT, a product to minimize the impact of any oil that spills into the water. Developed in a joint venture with ExxonMobil, the compound is largely made at facilities in Sugarland, Tex., and Garyville, La. The company expects to sell some $40-million worth of COREXIT as a result of the latest spill. “What the dispersant process enables is to prevent the oil from reaching the shore and converts that oil to easy food for naturally occurring microbes,” Ramesh says. “If the oil reaches the shore the decomposition rate of oil is so low it would remain on the shore for probably 100 years.”

By last week, the EPA and Nalco had both released the ingredient list for COREXIT 9500 in response to widespread public concern. Its constituents include butanedioic acid (a wetting agent in cosmetics), sorbitan (found in everything from baby bath to food), and petroleum distillates in varying proportions—and it decomposes almost entirely in 28 days. “All six [ingredients] are used in day-to-day life—in mouthwash, toothpaste, ice cream, pickles,” Ramesh argues. “We believe COREXIT 9500 is very safe.”

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention agrees, noting in a document for health professionals that “the dispersants contain proven, biodegradable and low-toxicity surfactants,” which are “detergentlike” and “in low toxicity solvents.”

However, those solvents—petroleum distillates—are also known animal carcinogens, according to toxicology data, and make up 10 to 30 percent of a given volume of COREXIT. And those same everyday products can be deadly to wildlife. “It’s the same products in Dawn dishwasher soap,” Mitchelmore notes, which is being used widely to clean up oiled birds and other animals. “I wouldn’t want to put a fish in Dawn dishwashing soap either. That would kill it.”

As a result, the EPA ordered BP to stop spraying dispersants on the oil slick on May 26. The EPA also ordered BP to look for less toxic alternatives on May 20, and the company responded in a letter dated that same day that “BP continues to believe that COREXIT EC9500A is the best alternative.” The dispersant continues to be sprayed onto the ongoing oil spill.

No alternative
One reason BP can make such claims is due to a lack of clear data on any of the alternative dispersants. As part of the National Contingency Plan required for offshore drilling, one of 18 EPA-approved dispersants must be on hand to handle spilled oil. Each of those dispersants has been preapproved for use, and each of those dispersants has been tested—by the companies that make them—for toxicity using representative species of estuarine shrimp (Mysidopsis bahia) and fish (Menidia beryllina). Specifically, these animals are exposed to a mix of one liter of dispersant for every 10 liters of heavy fuel oil in water.

Yet, the results of those tests vary wildly, from toxic impacts occurring at levels of just 2.6 parts per million for COREXIT to 100 ppm for another dispersant, NOKOMIS 3-F4. That suggests to experts that the tests which showed lower toxicity may have employed heavy fuel oil that had lost its potency. After all, volatile organic compounds in oil evaporate quickly when exposed to air and can even wash off in water. “These are order of magnitude differences,” Mitchelmore notes. “A lot of that can relate to how those tests were set up.”

Adds Nalco toxicologist Sergio Alex Villalobos, “If the oil is aged, then the oil loses its toxicity. Using an oil that is not very toxic, if you disperse that oil you are going to get very favorable numbers. Do those numbers really exist?”

EPA, for its part, did not show the best understanding of toxicological data in making its recommendations, urging BP to use dispersants with less than a certain cutoff of toxicity (pdf). Of course, in toxicology the lower the concentration the more toxic a given substance is. “They completely got that wrong,” Mitchelmore says. EPA is now undertaking its own toxicology testing of COREXIT and Louisiana crude oil, but results are pending.

Nevertheless, just 20 ppm of COREXIT 9500—or one drop in 2.5 liters of water—inhibits growth of Skeletonema costatum, a Gulf of Mexico diatom, according to toxicology test data presented in the 2005 NRC report. It appears to inhibit the phytoplankton’s ability to perform photosynthesis, specifically blocking part of the biochemistry that enables the photosystem II complex, Villalobos says. “Skeletonema seems to fall among the most sensitive ones,” he says. “Like many aquatic plants, these are organisms that are resilient, that tend to come back even though you wipe them out in some cases chemically.”

COREXIT is also not approved for use in U.K. waters because it fails the so-called “limpet test”. That test involves spraying the dispersant and oil on rocks and seeing if limpets (a type of small mollusk) can still cling to them, a test which COREXIT and many other dispersants with slippery surfactants fail. “This is not a product for rocky shores,” Villalobos says. “These are only for open sea waters.”

Novel use
Of course, in the case of the oil spewing from BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico, COREXIT is being used in another unapproved way. A wand from one of the remote-operated robots has sprayed more than 1.5 million liters of dispersants directly onto the escaping oil and natural gas roughly 1,500 meters beneath the ocean’s surface. “I don’t think anybody knows what would happen by applying the dispersants at depth,” Ramesh says. “We do not have any knowledge that would allow us to predict what would happen.”

In addition to creating subsurface plumes (and providing a rich feast for oil-eating microbes), it remains unclear what kind of dosage of dispersed oil sea life throughout the water column is facing. NOAA measurements show that levels reach 100 ppm of dispersed oil in the first half-meter of water, dropping to 12.5 ppm at 10 meters and unknown levels even deeper. “There isn’t any information on what is the environmentally relevant level of dispersant,” Mitchelmore notes. “Dispersed oils are going to be toxic, particularly in the top 10 meters that contains all the sensitive life stages. Anything that has sensitive membranes can be affected by dispersants and dispersed oil.”

Sunlight falling on the dispersed oil may make the problem worse through a phenomenon known as phototoxicity. Compounds in the oil act as a catalyst to transfer some of the sun’s energy into oxygen, converting the latter to a more reactive state that can literally burn up cells. And as fish and other sea life ingest the dispersed oil, it can be broken down into more toxic by-products. “What do these things break down into?” Mitchelmore says. “In toxicology it’s quite often not the original compound that’s the toxic entity.”

Ultimately, the problem is that too little is known about the dispersants and the dispersed oil. “Given that this is a billion-dollar industry, why were those data gaps not filled?” Mitchelmore asks. “The whole issue regarding limited toxicity data—that’s not just common to dispersants, that’s common to tens of thousands of chemicals we’re putting out into the environment daily.”

After all, it was only after decades of using bisphenol A, polybrominated flame retardants and other chemicals that significant concerns began to manifest. In effect, usage replaced safety testing—and that’s exactly what is happening with dispersants and the massive spill in the Gulf. Different regulation of chemicals and the chemical industry might forestall toxicological mysteries like those surrounding dispersants—and their thousands of chemical cousins—in the future.

“We’re using an awful lot of dispersants,” said EPA administrator Lisa Jackson during the same May 12 press briefing on the chemical’s use at which NOAA’s Lubchenco spoke. “This is going on longer than one might have known on day three or four. We’re still dealing with a constant release of fresh oil and we need to continue to disperse.”

I have a friend who is a chemical engineer who works for a large well known chemical company that makes and sells these chemical dispersants. He said his company refused to sell their dispersants to BP for fear of the after effects to the environment. Yet, their competition is selling BP thousands of gallons of the dispersants.

Chiropractic Neurologist have know this for over 20 years. Movement stimulates the brain especially the Frontal Cortex, which has been shown to be the problem in most cases of depression. This is why the chiropractic adjustment is so affective in helping patients with health problems. The joint mechanoreceptors and muscle spindles of the spine are the most stimulatory to the brain when fired. When the joints and muscles of the spine are not firing properly you can have a decline in brain out put causing many different health problems. This is also why exercise has such an affect on the brain.