Public Health

This is puzzling many people. COVID19 is now in every continent. So why don't they call COVID19 a pandemic? You are right, if a flu outbreak got this far, the WHO would say it is a pandemic, for sure, indeed they would have called it a global pandemic weeks ago. Definition: a pandemic (as the WHO use the word) is a disease that is spreading by community transmission throughout the world with no possibility of stopping it by quarantine. A viral pandemic can only be stopped with vaccines. Meanwhile you do your best to protect the most vulnerable from it. But this is not spreading like a…

In recent years the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have manufactured a lot of concerns they then ask Congress for money to help solve - Zika, Prediabetes, vaping in kids are all examples of where they hyped concern or even defy the international consensus to worry the American public. Hopefully there is one thing they can feel comfortable eliminating - telling adults to get diphtheria and tetanus booster shots every 10 years. A new study found that if adults were fully vaccinated as kids, booster shots are just increasing health case costs while subsidizing manufacturers. The…

What do you conclude when different foods are claimed to be eaten on surveys by people who have one type of stroke but not another? Not much. But it will still be a food frequency questionnaire epidemiology paper, the bane of public trust in science. What about confounders? Were people on medication, like statins?  The people who had strokes were 59-60 when they enrolled in the survey, so what about their lifestyle choices prior to that? The epidemiologists have no idea, but they believe fruit, vegetables, and dairy products caused fewer ischemic (blood clot) strokes while eggs caused…

A new paper claims that the Mediterranean diet may increase "longevity" and it created its mystical conclusion using the favored magic wand of food studies, epidemiological correlation, sprinkled with biological speculation. You may be old enough to remember other claims using similar kernels of scientific truth that became popular diet fads; cigarettes, grapefruit, cabbage. the Adkins diet, Paleo.  Now we have similar mysticism about our microbiome, epigenetics, and probiotics, all of those buzzwords is the Mediterranean diet. Epidemiologists use a lot of fancy terms for what is simple…

In a world of New York Times best-selling diet books and epidemiological claims about food and chemicals - even that if your mother used cosmetics it may have made you fat - it can be difficult for the public to know what to trust. It won't be intermittent fasting, juice cleanses, or 10,000 steps, it will always be the calories. Energy balance matters, no matter how many times Center for Science in the Public Interest claims it's conspiracy to claim calories are why we gain weight. For years, 10,000 steps have been an easy number even if, like Macolm Gladwell's popularization of '10,000…

A new paper by epidemiologists in Europe will overturn centuries of diet and health thinking; the thinking that eating too much makes people gain weight. Instead, the new statistical correlation argues, the weight gain is due to pregnant women who used cosmetics containing parabens, which triggered epigenetic changes in the babies, who then grew up to be fat. It is yet another thing you can blame on your mother. Parabens are simply preservatives. In cosmetics they keep microbes from ruining those all-natural lotions. Parabens are natural too, created from the para-hydroxybenzoic acid that is…

Environmental Working Group, a litigation group devoted to food and chemical issues, is most famous for publishing its annual "Dirty Dozen" list to promote publicly available pesticide residues on food. While neglecting to mention that their organic industry clients are not tested separately. Today, they charge that career scientists inside the U.S. government are in a conspiracy to violate the The Food Quality Protection Act of 1996, which requires the Environmental Protection Agency to protect children's health by applying an extra margin of safety to legal limits for pesticides in food.…

The opioid crisis and deaths related to e-cigarette use among teenagers have dominated news headlines recently. Recently, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 34 people had died as a result of vaping and, in 2017, opioid addiction was responsible for more than 47,000 deaths in the U.S. Opioid addiction has been declared a public health emergency. Yet these serious public health threats obscure an ever-present and growing calamity of obesity in the United States. Obesity is second only to cigarette smoking as a leading preventable death in the U.S. Nearly one in five…

The Obama administration mandated that the U.S. Department of Agriculture tell schools to add more fruits, vegetables, and other vegetarian fare and USDA did as it was told. They had data showing it would just lead to a lot of food waste, and it did, but it is often better to let the other side undo things than to take on your boss and have to find new work in a bad economy and USDA rode it out. Now it is going away. Yet it is a small victory. It will be replaced by some other new fad project. It isn't just Democrats who do it, it is just this century they have been more tedious about it.…

There is no question that our microbiome is important to health, but just like science behind mitochondrial function inside cells set off an antioxidant craze in the 1970s, all of the applied health claims about probiotics in the 2000s are nonsense. If you enjoy the taste of expensive yogurt buy it, but if there was any chance it was really impacting your trillions of bacteria, it could just as easily be doing harm. Mechnikov and Ehrlich got a Nobel prize in 1908 for their pioneering work regarding phagocytes and immunity, so there is a science basis to living organisms living in us and our…