The technological advances of humanity have dramatically changed our lives. They continue to do so in both good and bad ways. The leading cause of death today, cardiovascular disease, is so prevalent because we eat too much of the wrong food and we are not as physically active as human bodies are accustomed to being. […]
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Burying Your Head in the Sand is Bad for Your Vitamin D Level
900 pages and zero thought. That is my summation of the IOM’s new calcium and vitamin D statement. Having been a member of such consensus panels in the past, I am sympathetic to their tendency to fall to the most conservative “lowest common denominator” opinion. However, this document is far from a reasonable scientific assessment. […]
Airport Screening Risks
Many people have been disturbed by new TSA passenger screening. After last year’s “underwear bomber”, TSA decided to examine passengers most private parts, either by rather intimate hand searches or radiation. Not because I believe there are more effective ways to screen large numbers of airline passengers or as any political statement, but for your […]
Mammograms
Unfortunately, the average person places far too much trust in the pronouncements of the medical establishment, not recognizing that these are simply opinions of a group of individuals. Those individuals are often considered to be experts, but therein lies the rub. Experts often hoe a narrow furrow. That is, they often possess a deep but […]
Thought for Food
Water For Weight Loss An interesting weight loss study found that people who drank 2 cups of water before each of their three daily meals lost five pounds more than the unwatered folk in the trial. This was a small study, with only 48 people, all of whom were between 55 and 75 years of […]
Putting One Foot in Front of the Other Equals Success
The recent, very brief hot spell here was good for the souls of Northern California residents who were feeling guilty about how beautiful and temperate our summer has been compared to everyone else’s. I especially loved it as the mild weather helped me train for and achieve a goal I set for myself a couple […]
Safety and Quality – Eggs, Ginseng, Protein Powders, Muscle Supplements
Egg Recall The salmonella-contaminated egg recall is an opportunity to think about numbers. Nearly 1/2 billion eggs have been recalled. That is 1-2 contaminated eggs for every American. 500 million is a staggeringly huge number of eggs. However, the most important questions, “why” and “how”, come down to a very small number. That number is […]
What About Calcium Supplementation?
The most frequent supplement question I’ve been hearing lately is about taking calcium. These questions have been inspired by a recent study of calcium supplementation, which received a great deal of attention. The authors of this study combined data from other studies and determined that calcium supplementation increased the risk of heart attack. Most of […]
Toxin Bombshell – You Can’t NOT Touch This
Last week we experienced one of the landmark “freak out” moments in the history of discovering how we are poisoning ourselves. Years ago we learned that phthalates, the chemicals that make softer plastics, were hormone mimicking and thus very bad for us. They were in widespread use, including in pacifiers and water bottles. So, people […]
Vitamin D and Neurologic Disease
Vitamin D has been all the rage for a few years. Ironically, despite the fact that everyone knows that our bodies create vitamin D in response to sunlight and most of us experience mood changes during the darker months, the high likelihood of a link had not been researched. A study was just published correcting […]