Public Health

The Biden administration recently issued a new report showing causal links between alcohol and cancer, and it's about time. The link has been long-known, but alcohol carcinogenic properties have been waved away with 'use in moderation' rhetoric. We don't tell young people to use cigarettes 'in moderation', even though nicotine doesn't cause cancer, only cigarettes smoke does, so that alcohol has gotten political free pass shows science is always second to politics. Realistically, while any cell mutation can happen any time, you are unlikely to get cancer caused by an occasional drink, but US…

Two Presidents ago, political appointees engaged in behavior that didn't make much sense(1) and had no benefit for public health. For example, they declared there was an epidemic of something they invented called "pre-diabetes" and insisted that smoking cessation tools that were twice as effective as gums and patches but were not controlled by Big Pharma, plus cigars and pipes that have never killed anyone, were an epidemic in kids. One thing President Obama's team of social authoritarians never took on was alcohol. Cigarettes, sure, even though Obama smoked them, but not alcohol. The…

Vaping in kids had its day. While useful before and since for smoking cessation and harm reduction in cigarette smokers, vaping only became a fad in teens when, as predicted, social authoritarians in the Obama administration declared it an epidemic - if on a survey a young person claimed to have tried one in the previous year and began rolling out commercials of children filmed in black and white looking like zombies.(1)  It was Reefer Madness for the 2010s and did the same thing Reefer Madness did; it caused teens to think it was cool to outrage their elders. The government created an…

“This is a new and emerging epidemic, and we must increase awareness of this disease process so we can avoid delays in diagnosis and treatment for our patients,” says University of California in Los Angeles radiology resident Sundus Lateef, M.D. Epidemic? Again? No. Americans are now so healthy that we have migrated from promoting nonsensical fear about virtual pollution (PM2.5) and weedkillers and lumber all the way down to...kitchen countertops. According to a presentation at the Radiological Society of North America, employees making stone countertops are developing silicosis due to…

Cigarettes are the top lifestyle risk factor for getting cancer, though alcohol and obesity have begun to close the gap as awareness of the risks of cigarettes, coupled with more nicotine smoking cessation and harm reduction tools, have caused cigarette use to decline. Even if you get cancer, quitting smoking improves outcomes.  A new analysis found a 22-26% reduction in cancer-related mortality among those who had quit smoking within three months of using smoking cessation and harm reduction techniques. The best outcomes were observed in patients who were abstinent from smoking three…

In ancient Egypt, the heart was the key to a happy afterlife. It lived on after death, they believed, and in the Duat, the Netherworld, it revealed a truth man's words could not hide. The 42 gathered gods would measure the heart and if it weighed more than the Feather of Truth which adorned the head of Maat, their Goddess of Justice, Order, and Truth, it was consumed by the Goddess Ammit, Devourer of the Dead, who had the body of a crocodile, a lion, and a hippopotamus, and you were gone from existence forever. People had a lot of ways to get heavy hearts. Theft, anger, even eavesdropping…

The World Health Organisation, the last major body to accept that COVID-19 was a pandemic, is out in front extending its highest emergency level over, of all things, monkeypox. We now know WHO held off on declaring COVID-19 an emergency because former President Donald Trump said it was an emergency and we should cut travel from China. Then he instructed FDA to prepare emergency use authorization standards for a vaccine they believed the private sector could create fast if government got out of the way.(1) Either they have learned their lesson or SARS-CoV-2 made their politically-motivated…

Most people who try a diet don't succeed in keeping weight off long-term and that is trumpeted as a huge failure of dieting by people who, wait for it, are often selling a competing diet. The health truth is that even if you fail, you improved your health. Claims that people whose weight go up and down are dying earlier are just the same bad epidemiology that has journalists lamenting that International Agency for Research on Cancer activists claim pickle juice and aloe vera cause cancer.(1) Most people do fail at diets but blaming the diet is like blaming the spoon for making them fat. Most…

Fermented foods have become popular in recent years, partly due to their perceived health benefits. For instance, there is some evidence eating or drinking fermented foods can improve blood glucose control in people with diabetes. They can lower blood lipid (fats) levels and blood pressure in people with diabetes or obesity. Fermented foods can also improve diarrhea symptoms. But can they help you lose weight, as a recent study suggests? Let’s look at the evidence. Remind me, what are fermented foods? Fermented foods are ones prepared when microbes (bacteria and/or yeast) ferment (or digest)…

Like some soldiers become conscientious objectors if they end up in an actual military situation, or when over 300 armed government union employees suddenly forgot they had guns while kids were being murdered in Uvalde, healthcare workers, 18.8 million strong just in the US, were more likely to exit the workforce during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike the first two, healthcare workers were right to be afraid.  It was hard to have trust in institutions when the CDC, overwhelmingly career bureaucrats, denied COVID-19 existed, then refused to send COVID-19 tests unless hospitals first proved…