Everybody knows how to prevent heart disease. Not really. Everybody just thinks they know. In truth, just about everybody is pretty much wrong.
Heart Disease Myths
Breast Cancer Deaths Reduced by Multiple Vitamin Supplements?
The largest study ever conducted of multiple vitamin use in postmenopausal women with breast cancer found a strong linkage between multiple vitamin use and better prognosis.
Tastes, Vitamin Supplements, and Wild Foods
A controversial but prominent advocate of immunizations in the United States is now becoming a vocal critic of nutrition. In advance of his new book, which advertisements and reviews suggest is a diatribe against acupuncture, chiropractic, supplements, etc., he wrote an editorial for the New York Times espousing the harms of vitamin supplements. In the […]
Telomeres Are Cool
I am fascinated by telomeres. Telomeres aren’t some sort of underwater television or talking mirrors. Telomeres are caps on the ends of your DNA, your genes. They shorten with age. Eventually they are gone and so are we. As they shorten we become more vulnerable to disease and generally poor health. With advancing age, our […]
Strength Training, Health, and Body Image
A large new study of adolescents in the Minneapolis area surprised and excited the study authors and a writer for the New York Times. They found that many of the girls and over 1/3 of the boys were doing things (changing eating patterns, exercising, taking protein drinks or using steroids) to improve their body composition. […]
Coffee and Prostate Cancer
It is nice to report good news. In this case, the good news is that a recent study of prostate cancer found that drinking coffee reduced risk. It is always essential to view dietary studies skeptically. There are so many reasons they can be misunderstood, or just plain wrong. The world is too complicated to […]
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 […]
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 […]
Take That With a Grain of Salt Please
You may have noticed that there is a campaign underway to get Americans to drop their salt intake. This has included discussion of measures as radical as creating a legal limit on salt (sodium) in processed food. Although there is a lot that is good about this, it can also create confusion. I have had […]