Can eating grapefruit really fight cancer? Do you need to drink eight glasses of water every day? When you have health questions, are you able to interpret the thousands of health Web sites that promote wonder cures, advice and diets? Most people aren't.

We all know it's wise to read information online with a skeptical eye and consider its source, but it's especially important when you're searching for health advice. The good news is that there are many reliable health sites out there ? the 12 listed below are great resources to get you started down the path to wellness.

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Homeless shelters in East Oakland, California are far from glamourous -- ratty old couches, small and inadequate heaters, dirt-filled floors and walls, shattered light fixtures and unsafe electrical cords sprawled across the floor under a leaky ceiling.

However, a lively social worker decided to make a difference; a green one, at that. The social worker making a difference, Wendy Jackson, has been raising money for ten years in order to replace the decrepit facility with a state-of-the-art $11 million building, and maybe the only "green" shelter built from the ground up.

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Scientists at the Monell Chemical Senses Center report that the ability to perceive the bitter taste of vegetables is a combination of taste genes and the presence of naturally-occurring toxins in a given vegetable. The study appears in the September 19 issue of Current Biology.

Scientists have always assumed that the ability to sense bitterness evolved as a defense mechanism to detect potentially harmful toxins in plants. This study provides support for this hypothesis by establishing that variants of the bitter taste receptor TAS2R38 can detect glucosinolates, a class of compounds with potentially harmful physiological actions, in natural foods.

Glucosinolates are considered anti-thyroid because they inhibit the uptake of iodine into the thyroid which increases the risk of goiter and decreases the levels of thyroid hormones, hence they have come to be collectively known as goitrogens.

The thyroid converts iodine into thyroid hormones which are essential for protein synthesis and for regulating the body's metabolism. The ability to taste glucosinolates and then avoid them could be a selective advantage to the "over 1 billion people who are at risk for thyroid insufficiency."

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