Eating Healthy? No, They’re Eating Biblically.

 

Kayla Bundy’s social pages focus on biblical eating, a diet that involves eating foods mentioned in the Bible. Credit...Kayla Bundy

Kayla Bundy likes to start her day with a cup of bone broth.

She buys her milk raw, snacks on sardines, eats authentic sourdough bread — no commercial yeasts here — and generally cooks with locally-sourced ingredients. On TikTok, where she has over 500,000 followers, she claims that her diet “fixed” her skin, her hair and her depression, and she sells coaching sessions to help others with their diets.

Bundy, a 27-year-old Christian content creator, might sound like your run-of-the-mill clean-eating type, but she believes her diet to be part of a higher calling. For eight years, she has been a biblical eater, someone who consumes mostly foods mentioned in the Bible. She is part of a niche but dedicated online community trying to tie religious values to dietary needs.

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Bacteriophages and their use in combating antimicrobial resistance

 

Key facts

• Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that selectively target and kill bacteria. They are the most abundant commonly occurring natural entities, playing crucial roles in regulating bacterial populations and influencing microbial ecosystems.
• Phages are useful as they can destroy bacteria resistant to drugs such as antibiotics. Phages infect their bacterial hosts with great specificity. They do not infect human cells.
• Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a serious global threat to our ability to treat bacterial infections. New antibiotics have often proved difficult and expensive to develop. This has led to an interest in an older approach to treating microbial infections by using phages. Phage therapy can be a promising tool for controlling AMR, which is one of the top global public health and development threats.
• In the WHO European Region, AMR is directly responsible for 133 000 deaths each year and indirectly linked to 541 000 deaths. Estimates show that AMR costs the European Union and European Economic Area about €11.7 billion each year due to health expenditure and workforce productivity losses.
• Addressing AMR requires a multifaceted approach that considers the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health – known as the One Health approach. Phages provide biologically innovative approaches to addressing the challenge of AMR across sectors, ranging from therapeutic use in humans and animals to potentially replacing antibiotic use in the agricultural sector.
• Currently, phages are primarily used on compassionate grounds, in life-threatening situations, when all other treatments have been exhausted.
• Further evidence from clinical studies is needed before phages can become widely available for human use. Phage application and therapy requires robust evidence to support its efficacy, safety, and feasibility across all One Health sectors.

How can phages be used to treat bacterial infections?

Phages that are used for therapy are lytic, which means that they infect and destroy bacterial cells, effectively preventing the onward spread of infection.

Phages are highly specific to their bacterial hosts, that is the bacteria they target. They do not infect human cells but can target and kill bacteria that could cause disease without disrupting the body’s normal microbiota or causing significant side-effects. Phage therapy can be tailored to individual bacterial infections, particularly those that are resistant to antibiotics. Phages can be combined to make mixtures that can target most common infections. Phages can also be used alongside antibiotics to enhance treatment efficacy, especially against infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In medicine, phages have been described as a “personalized medicine” – a group of treatments adapted to each patient individually. 

In some countries in the eastern part of the WHO European Region, phages are more broadly used as a treatment for bacterial infections, especially when antibiotics fail.

However, unlike antibiotics, phages are not approved medicines (biological medicinal products) in most countries. Therefore, they are primarily used on compassionate grounds, in life-threatening situations, when all other treatments have been exhausted. 

Further evidence from clinical studies is needed before phages can become available more widely for therapeutic use in humans. 

How can phages be useful in combating AMR?

Phage therapy can be useful in the treatment and prevention of infections in humans, animals and plants, and potentially in the environment.

In humans, phages can be used as therapy for bacterial infections that are resistant to antibiotics, which means those that no longer respond to antimicrobial medicines. Case studies have shown the successes of phage therapy in the treatment of infections caused by bacteria, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

In veterinary medicine, phages are used to treat infections in livestock and companion animals, reducing the reliance on antibiotics and thereby decreasing the overall consumption of antimicrobials, which is considered a key factor in the development and spread of AMR. In agriculture and food production processes, phages can be applied to control bacterial diseases. Phages are used to target harmful bacteria like salmonella and Escherichia coli in poultry and cattle, reducing infections without relying on antibiotics.

Phage treatments are currently applied to crops like tomatoes, peppers, and potatoes to control bacterial pathogens such as Xanthomonas and Erwinia that cause diseases like bacterial spot and soft rot. Likewise, phage sprays are used to manage a serious bacterial disease caused by Erwinia amylovora, which affects apple and pear orchards.

In aquaculture, phages can replace the use of antibiotics and chemicals that may contribute to the development of AMR.

Other potential environmental uses of phages include disinfecting hospital surfaces and wastewater treatment.

Environmental phages could play an important role in One Health responses to AMR by helping us to better understand, control and limit the global and local emergence, selection and transmission of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and their genes.  

The potential broader adoption of phage therapy requires further robust evidence to support its efficacy, safety, and feasibility across all One Health sectors. 

Are phages new?

Phages have long been used to control microbes in human, animal and environmental settings. Many countries in eastern Europe have used phage therapy for over 100 years. In western Europe, phages are primarily used on compassionate grounds, in life-threatening situations, when all other treatments have been exhausted.

However, more evidence is needed to support the wider routine use of phages in humans.

Are phages substitutes for antibiotics?

Phages could offer an alternative to traditional antibiotics or be used in combination with them to enhance treatment efficacy.

In the case of drug-resistant bacteria, phages provide a biologically innovative approach to treating infections that can no longer be treated with traditional antibiotics.

However, further evidence from clinical studies is needed before phages can become widely available for routine therapeutic use in humans.

Can phages be used against all bacterial infections?

No, phages cannot be used for the treatment of all bacterial infections as it might not be possible to identify corresponding phages and amplify them for all bacterial infections. Although phages may be found, they might not have the right properties needed to treat infection.

Bacteria can develop resistance to phages, and complex, mixed infections would need treatment with a combination of multiple phages. For specific bacterial infections, phage therapy holds promising potential, but it cannot be used universally against all infections. 

Can phages be dangerous to humans?

Phage therapy is generally considered safe for humans as phages do not target human cells. They do, however, interact with human cells that can take them up, which could be a useful way of targeting intracellular bacteria.

Nonetheless, there are some risks because, like antibiotics, phages can cause the release of endotoxins (toxic substances from bacterial cell walls), leading to inflammatory responses, especially in large-scale infections. 

Further evidence from clinical studies and monitoring are needed before phages can become widely available for therapeutic use in humans.

Will phage resistance develop like for antibiotics?

Bacteria can develop resistance to phages, just like they can develop resistance to antibiotics, but phage-resistant bacteria are often less harmful. In response, phages can evolve, which can increase their effectiveness again. More research is needed to better understand phage resistance.

What is the future of phages as human medicine?

Like many personalized medicines, phages currently struggle to meet regulations designed for conventional medicines produced to a single formulation.

Further evidence from clinical studies and monitoring are needed before phages can become widely available for therapeutic use in humans. The path to regulatory approval for phage therapy needs to be addressed due to their biological nature and the need for personalized therapy approaches. Regulators may consider setting clinical trial and manufacturing standards for phages that reflect their unique characteristics and specificity for each patient treated.

How does WHO/Europe advance the evidence base on phages?

The existing expertise on phage research and practical application in the WHO European Region provides an opportunity to contribute to innovation.

WHO/Europe is working in close collaboration with the Global Antimicrobial Resistance Research and Development Hub in Berlin to explore the potential of phages for addressing AMR. Further research is needed to understand the full potential and mechanisms of phages in treating infections with different antibiotic-resistant bacteria and other diseases, and to develop standardized phage therapy protocols.

WHO/Europe is contributing substantially to the global evidence base on phages from a One Health perspective by raising awareness, fostering dialogue, strengthening international networks, and supporting the development of evidence. 

UC San Diego Researchers Expand Virus-Based Treatment Options for Antibiotic-Resistant Infections

 

Antibiotic resistance is one of the most pressing challenges to global public health as harmful microbes evolve to evade these medications. Now, researchers at University of California San Diego and their colleagues have developed a new method to combat antibiotic-resistant bacteria using bacteriophages, or phages, for short — viruses that infect and kill bacteria — as an alternative to traditional antibiotics.

The researchers targeted Klebsiella pneumoniae, a species of bacteria notorious for its ability to resist multiple antibiotics. The dangerous pathogen can cause severe infections in hospital settings, including pneumonia and sepsis. While phages have been used as a treatment for bacterial infections for over a century, they are extremely specific about which strains of a bacterial species they will attack. This has limited their effectiveness against the most antibiotic-resistant strains.

To overcome this problem, the research team "trained" the phages by allowing them to evolve together with the bacteria in a controlled laboratory setting for 30 days.

This technique, called “experimental evolution”, permitted the phages to adapt to bacterial defenses. This resulted in significant improvements to their ability to kill a wide variety of bacterial strains, including multidrug-resistant and extensively drug-resistant K. pneumoniae — strains that pose a significant challenge to modern medicine.

What’s more, the evolved phages also demonstrated an enhanced ability to suppress bacterial growth over extended periods of time.

Genetic analysis revealed that the evolved phages acquired mutations to specific genes responsible for recognizing and binding to bacterial cells to initiate the infection process. These changes likely contributed to their improved effectiveness.

The research, led by senior author David T. Pride, M.D., Ph.D., professor of pathology at UC San Diego School of Medicine, highlights the potential of phage therapy as a powerful tool to address the global antibiotic resistance crisis. The team believes their method could be adapted to target other resistant pathogens, offering an avenue for developing treatments against a wide range of life-threatening infections.

The study was published in Nature Communications on November 19, 2025.

Eating from the Bible : Jordan Rubin says a diet based on the Bible and eating the way God intended saved him from an incurable illness

 

Jordan S. Rubin is a nutritionist and a naturopath, but his "Maker's Diet," based on the health precepts Jordan found in the Bible, is not a product of his advanced degrees, but his own illness and his particular brand of Christianity. His regimen, which precludes pork or shellfish, is the latest to update the ancient Jewish kosher laws, outlined in the Old Testament, for Christians--not as a matter of devotion but of diet. We talked to him recently about how his plan incorporates (and goes beyond) kosher eating, about his own health, and his faith.

At his sickest, Rubin weighed just 114 lbs.

The story of your recovery is very compelling. Could you re-cap it?
Ten years ago, at age 19, I was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease. In addition, I had everything from arthritis to diabetes to chronic fatigue to hair loss, anemia. I was a complete mess. In one seven-week period, I lost 20 pounds. This was after being a completely healthy 185-pound, college athlete on academic scholarship. I traveled the world trying every treatment you could think of, conventional medicine, alternative medicine. It all failed. I was in a wheelchair and was facing a very risky and life altering surgery.

How did you get back to health? MORE>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The next pandemic is already here: Antimicrobial resistance is upending a century of achievements in global health

 Almost a century ago, the discovery of antimicrobials changed the course of modern medicine. We saw previously fatal infections—pneumonia, sepsis, tuberculosis—become treatable, and surgeries become safer. Millions upon millions of lives have been saved since then.    

But that is changing. Today, due to misuse and overuse of these medicines, medical advances long taken for granted are at risk of being erased. Bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites are quickly changing and becoming resistant to antimicrobials. Globally, one in six bacterial infections now resists standard antibiotics amid rising rates of resistance. The result: common infections are becoming harder to treat — increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness and death. 

As a doctor and surgeon in Tonga, I visited provincial hospitals and saw patients battling infections that no longer responded to the medicines we relied on. I remember a young child brought in with sepsis. We tried every antibiotic available, but nothing worked. Unfortunately, the child did not survive. That moment has stayed with me as a constant reminder that antimicrobials are precious, fragile tools in a physician’s arsenal - tools we are in danger of losing. 

The pandemic of antimicrobial resistance – or AMR - isn’t a science-fiction scenario. In many ways, it’s already here.

Countering the threat of antimicrobial resistance.  More>>>>>>>>>>>

Staggering amount of sugar and calories in Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts drinks revealed

 

'For perspective, the recommendation on added sugar consumption is between 25-36 grams per day depending on age, activity level, etc.,' Lisa Moskovitz, RD, founder of The NY Nutrition Group, told the Daily Mail.

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Two thirds of British teens set to have mental health problems by 2030, warns new report

 Almost two-thirds of British teenagers could be diagnosed with a mental health condition by 2030, a new report has warned.

Analysis by Zurich Insurance found that 51 per cent of 15 to 19-year-olds in the UK currently have a mental or behavioural condition such as depression, ADHD and anxiety. 

Almost two-thirds of British teenagers could be diagnosed with a mental health condition by 2030, a report has predicted

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Young cancer timebomb: Major study blames takeaway chemicals, school uniforms and frying pans for surge in under-50s diagnoses

 Artificial ingredients in takeaway meals and 'forever chemicals' found in school uniforms and frying pans may be helping drive a surge in deadly cancers among young people, a major new report warns.

British scientists also believe antibiotics could be part of the mystery behind a rise in 11 cancers among adults aged 20 to 49.

It adds to a growing global picture. In the US, early-onset cancer cases rose by almost 15 per cent between 2010 and 2019, with younger adults increasingly being diagnosed with diseases once seen mainly in older age.

'Whilst BMI [weight] remains our best clue as to why cancer is on the rise in this age group, much of the increase still remains unexplained,' said Professor Montserrat García-Closas, of The Institute of Cancer Research in London.

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Cucumbers, the juicy truth: How the water-packed vegetable can improve your skin and digestion

 Cucumbers are a staggering 95 per cent water, making them one of the most hydrating foods we can eat.

The Queen liked her cucumber sandwiches with a smear of yogurt and sprigs of fresh mintR

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Can Food Actually Be Medicine? These Doctors Say Yes

 Lauren Estess, a third-year student at Tufts University School of Medicine, believes knowing how to make chickpea stew will make her a better doctor.

She and 14 other students spent a recent evening making dinner as part of a two-month culinary medicine class to train doctors, dentists and dietitians that the university began offering last spring. Using case studies and cooking, the course aims to convince future medical professionals that good, affordable food targeting specific diseases can be as important as medication.

“It’s unfortunately a big misconception that medicine doesn’t have anything to do with food,” she said, chopping dill with hands she hopes will one day be delivering babies.

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Health News Today | Fatty Liver On The Rise? Experts Decode Risks, Gut Issues & Prevention

 

WHAT DID JESUS REALLY EAT? Israel with Aline

 

New study suggests link between melatonin use and heart disease

 

KIDNEY STONES on the RISE

 

February 12, 2016

By Robert H. Shmerling, MD, Senior Faculty Editor, Harvard Health Publishing; Editorial Advisory Board Member, Harvard Health Publishing

In the past, medical textbooks described the typical person unlucky enough to develop a kidney stone as a white, middle-aged, obese man who eats an unhealthy diet and doesn’t drink enough fluids. Those books may need an update.  A new study has found not only that the incidence of kidney stones is going up, but that they are also developing in people not considered high-risk in the past, including children, women, and African Americans.

Why stones?

Kidney stones develop when certain chemicals in the urine, such as calcium or uric acid, form crystals. Risk factors for stone formation include

• diet, including high intake of animal protein, sodium, and sugar, as well as low intake of fluids
• certain conditions, such as gout, diabetes, and obesity
• some medications, including calcium supplements
• family history and genetics — kidney stones can run in families, although the specific contributions of shared genes versus shared environments and diets are uncertain.

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TYPE 1f Diabetes patients are CURED of disease with groundbreaking new treatment, study shows

 A team at the University of Chicago Medicine Transplant Institute has updated the results of the ongoing clinical trial of patients with type 1 diabetes. 

Unlike type 2 diabetes, which typically comes on later in life and is caused by lifestyle factors such as obesity, type 1 diabetes, which affects as many as 4 million Americans, is an unpreventable autoimmune disorder in which the immune system destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. 

Without insulin, type 1 diabetics' bodies have no way to regulate blood sugar, which can build up in the bloodstream and skyrocket. Instead, their bodies break down fat for fuel, creating acidic byproducts called ketones and eventually cause diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), leading to brain swelling, kidney failure, cardiac arrest and potential death. 

In the trial, 10 type 1 diabetics underwent transplantation of islet cells, tiny clusters of specialized cells scattered throughout the pancreas that produce hormones to regulate blood sugar.

After just four weeks, all 10 achieved insulin independence, meaning their bodies were able to produce insulin on their own without costly supplemental injections. 

Their A1C, which measures the amount of glucose in the blood, also fell from eight percent on average, which indicates diabetes, to 5.3 percent, which is considered non-diabetic. 

The new results, unveiled earlier this month, are updated from initial findings published last year, which showed an initial favorable response and gradually decreasing A1C levels. 

In a new trial, 10 patients have effectively been cured of their type 1 diabetes after having islet cell transplants (stock image)

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More people hospitalized with life-threatening condition after eating contaminated cheese

Editor's note:  This probably is not a fair report, as news and cdc is against raw milk, but time will tell and we bring you the news as reported here

Two more people have been sickened in an outbreak linked to raw milk and cheese sold by RAW FARM (stock image)

 More people have been sickened and hospitalized with E.coli in an outbreak linked to eating cheese made with raw milk.

The CDC revealed the new illnesses Thursday, bringing the total to nine, including three who have been hospitalized, and one who has developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, a serious condition that can cause kidney failure.

Of the seven patients interviewed, all said they had consumed RAW FARM-branded products. Five reported consuming raw cheddar cheese, sold either in a block or shredded, and two reported consuming raw milk.

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Probiotics could help in fight against intimate bacterial infection that hits more than three million women every year

 Researchers have found a potential breakthrough in preventing bacterial vaginosis, a condition affecting around one in three women at some point in their lives.

The infection – also known as BV – is caused by an imbalance in the bacteria that normally live in the vagina, often triggered by sex.

While it usually causes mild symptoms such as unusual discharge, BV can have serious consequences, including an increased risk of infertility, contracting sexually transmitted infections, premature birth and even newborn death.

It is routinely treated with antibiotics but can be notoriously difficult to eliminate. Around half of women see the condition return within a few months of treatment.

Now, a new clinical trial has shown that restoring protective 'good' bacteria in the vagina can significantly reduce the risk of the condition coming back.

The study was carried out by researchers from Mass General Brigham, the Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa and the Vaginal Microbiome Research Consortium.

Participants were recruited from the US and South Africa. All 90 women in the trial had BV and were first treated with standard antibiotics. 

After completing antibiotics, participants were randomly assigned to take either a placebo or a once-daily oral probiotic tablet containing several strains of beneficial bacteria normally found in a healthy vagina. 

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The New Year - 1st Day of Spring Let there be light!

Daffodils in an English garden … nature is a well-established mood-enhancer. Photograph: Rosemary Calvert/Getty Images 

Like prisoners waiting to be released from winter, we on these small islands in the northern hemisphere have been willing spring on for weeks now, watching for signs. The hours of light are growing apace, as the shadows shrink. Chilly daffodils nod at us from municipal flower beds. Are the skies even getting bluer? Our senses are alert in ways we don’t fully understand, like a pleasing, hazy inheritance from the wild creatures we once were.

Spring has two official start dates, depending on your priorities. For meteorologists, spring already sprung on 1 March, according to their neat, evenly spaced seasons, formalised in the 1900s. But if you plot the seasons in line with our planetary activity, as humans have done for thousands of years, the “astronomical” seasons show spring starting at the vernal equinox, which this year falls this year on 20 March. Just a few days to go …