Mind & body, in brief

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which decides what may go into food and medicine, has proposed letting some chemicals into food with no safety review. [1]

Today an exemption called the threshold of regulation covers only chemicals in packaging and machinery that touch food. [1] To qualify, a chemical must not cause cancer and must stay under 0.5 parts per billion. [1]

The draft would stretch that exemption to chemicals added straight into food: flavourings, preservatives, emulsifiers, binders and other ingredients. [1]

The change sits inside the FDA's draft rule on GRAS, short for generally recognized as safe. [1] Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US health secretary, presented that rule in August as closing a loophole. [1]

Under GRAS, a company's own scientists can declare a new ingredient safe and then simply tell the FDA, or not tell it at all. [2] NPR reported that 99% of chemicals in US food came in this way, not through a full review. [2]

Campaigners say some chemicals that do not cause cancer still harm the body below 0.5 parts per billion. [1] They name perchlorate, some phthalates, some bisphenols and some PFAS, the 'forever chemicals'. [1]

Bisphenols and phthalates can latch onto the body's hormone receptors, the switches that hormones normally turn on. [5]

Perchlorate shows what can happen. In 2005 the chemical company BASF used the exemption for big grain sacks, and FDA tests later found more perchlorate in children's cereal. [1]

Perchlorate stops the thyroid, a gland in the neck, from taking in iodine. [1] The thyroid needs iodine to make T4, a hormone the growing brain depends on. [1]

A review of food-safety science says some chemicals act at very low doses. [4] That challenges the usual idea that less of a chemical always means less harm. [4]

The draft also takes no account of several small doses adding up, campaigners say, and shoppers would have no way to know a product holds an exempted chemical. [1]

The FDA did not answer The Guardian's questions. [1] It is not known who added the exemption to the rule. [1]

Why it matters. The next test is the final GRAS rule: whether the wider exemption stays in it, and whether the FDA says who added it. [1]

NPR, the US public radio network, counted more than 1,000 reports of optic nerve damage linked to GLP-1 drugs in the FDA's side-effect database since 2024. [6] That is out of nearly 190,000 reports about the drugs, mostly stomach upsets or dosing mistakes. [6] More than one American in ten takes a GLP-1 drug, such as Ozempic, to lose weight. [6] Doctors, patients and drug companies send reports by choice, and the FDA does not check them. [6] The FDA says it has started its own study of the eye risk. [6]

Why it matters. Two large US lawsuits now include 247 people with this eye damage and more than 4,000 with pancreatitis or gallstones. [6] Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, says such harms are very rare in its trials and the cases have no merit. [6]

The Wellcome Global Monitor surveyed more than 140,000 adults in about 140 countries, with the polling company Gallup. [7] Wellcome is a British charity that pays for research. [7] It found 52% of Americans trust science 'a lot', against 26% across the world. [7] Worldwide, the share who say science helps most people in their country fell from 42% in 2018 to 37% in 2025. [7] In the US it rose from 48% to 57%. [7]

Why it matters. STAT, a US health news site, found the US far more divided than other rich countries: a 24-point gap between religious and non-religious people, against 5 points elsewhere. [7] Only 40% of Americans said they have a lot of confidence in their hospitals and clinics. [7]

England has three high-security hospitals for people with severe mental illness who are a grave danger to themselves or others: Rampton, Ashworth and Broadmoor. [8] The Guardian spoke to Jan Neate, whose son Jake has been held at Rampton for eight years. [8] In 2017, during psychosis, he killed his partner, Suzanne Brown. [8] His psychosis returned after clozapine, a schizophrenia drug that had kept him stable for ten years, was stopped suddenly. [8] A later report found no new risk check was done. [8]

Why it matters. Neate says she is told almost nothing during his spells of seclusion, when he is kept alone in a room. [8] England's health watchdog raised Rampton from 'inadequate' to 'requires improvement' in May 2025, but said staff shortages remained. [8]

Researchers at the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China used brain scans, genes and lifestyle data from 46,843 people in UK Biobank, a large British health study. [9] They built a model that guesses a person's age from their brain scan. [9] Higher genetic risk and an unhealthy lifestyle both went with brains that looked older than their owners. [9] The team found 19 places in the DNA linked to how fast the brain ages. [9]

Why it matters. At one of those places, people with the risky version aged faster on a poor lifestyle and slower on a healthy one. [9] The finding comes from watching people, not from a trial that changed their habits. [9]

Scientists in Ghana tried two new quick tests for onchocerciasis, or river blindness, a disease caused by a parasitic worm. [10] They tested 1,700 people aged five and over in seven communities. [10] Some had been given mass medicine against the worm for years, and some were thought free of it. [10] A lab test on skin samples found the worm in only 26 people. [10] The new tests caught about seven cases in ten, and wrongly flagged about three in ten people without it. [10]

Why it matters. The tests were good enough to map where the disease is, by World Health Organization standards, but not to decide when mass treatment can stop. [10] With so few real cases, the authors say it is hard to judge any new test. [10]

Doctors at Fiocruz, Brazil's public health institute, offered 409 young gay, bisexual and non-binary people aged 18 to 24 a clinic service built for them, plus weekly text messages. [11] All 409 accepted, and 83% were still in the study after 48 weeks. [11] During the messages, more took HIV medicine and PrEP, pills that prevent infection, and binge drinking and depression scores fell slightly. [11] 99% said they would recommend the messages. [11]

Why it matters. There was no comparison group, so the study cannot show the messages caused the changes. [11] Young men who have sex with men carry a large share of HIV in Latin America, and services built for them are scarce. [11]

Scientists at the University of Brescia in Italy exposed zebrafish embryos to dolutegravir, a drug that treats HIV. [12] Earlier work linked the drug to problems in unborn babies, especially of the spine and brain. [12] At one dose, the fish embryos had weaker heartbeats, less blood flow and shrunken heart chambers. [12] The drug also changed genes that build the heart and blood vessels. [12]

Why it matters. The authors call the work exploratory, and fish embryos are not human babies. [12] Drugs of this kind have greatly cut deaths from HIV, so their effects on unborn babies are studied closely, as here. [12]

Researchers at Pomeranian Medical University in Poland studied 325 men aged 18 to 30. [13] About 18% had a high or very high level of problem internet use. [13] One in three led an unhealthy lifestyle. [13] Heavier problem use went with worse health habits, including eating, and weakly with lower serotonin, a brain and gut chemical, in the blood. [13]

Why it matters. The links were small, and the study measured everyone once, so it cannot say which came first. [13] The authors want help for young men to cover both screen use and daily habits. [13]

Researchers scanned the brains of 29 adults while they judged the average size of groups of objects on a screen. [14] A nearby group of large shapes made the target group look smaller. [14] A group of small shapes made it look bigger. [14] Brain scans showed the change in the parts of the brain that first handle what the eyes see. [14] It is a group version of an old optical illusion. [14]

Why it matters. It shows the brain does not judge a group on its own; it compares it with the groups nearby. [14] Areas higher up in the brain tracked how strongly each person was fooled. [14]

Dentists at the University of Hong Kong built PlaqueSAM, a tool that finds plaque, the sticky film that causes tooth decay, from six phone photos. [15] It learned from 3,402 photos of 567 children in 11 kindergartens. [15] Tested on 81 children, it was right about 80% of the time. [15] It needs no dye, which dentists usually use to show plaque. [15]

Why it matters. Parents could one day check their child's brushing at home. [15] The authors say it still has to be tested in homes, with parents taking the photos. [15]

Doctors studied 311 people with cirrhosis, a scarred liver that no longer works well. [16] Those with low HDL, the 'good' cholesterol, or low levels of its main protein were more likely to need antibiotics for an infection within a year. [16] Infections hit about a quarter to a third of patients. [16] Among those who got an infection, 41% died during the study. [16]

Why it matters. A simple blood test might one day show who needs closer watching. [16] The study was in one hospital, and the authors say it must be checked elsewhere. [16]