Public Health

When you ingest sugar from honey or sugar from cane, your body converts it to a common currency - adenosine triphosphate (ATP). The same goes for fat and protein. It's the calories that matter and too many of any of those will result in body fat - and that is not all equal. The location of where fat is stored in the body can have significant implications for human health, according to a new study which compared fat cells from under the skin and from the harmful fat inside the abdomen, creating the first comprehensive genomic map that reveals unique features, which appear to 'hard-wire'…

It's generally believed that if you are going to be heavy, pear-shaped (fatter) in the waist and legs) is better than apple (fat around the chest) and a new study validates that holds true for postmenopausal even if they are not heavy and have a normal, healthy body mass index (BMI). That requires some context. BMI is a fine population-level metric but generally useless for individuals. If you have a high BMI but know you are fit, don't think you need to shed muscle mass to lose weight.  In postmenopausal women, storing a greater proportion of body fat in the legs (pear-shaped) whether…

Is honey healthier than bleached white table sugar or brown sugar or high fructose corn syrup? If you ask people selling nutritional fads yes, but if you ask your mitochondria, sugar is sugar. It's the total, which means calories, that matter. in our increasingly wealthy, sedentary society. Yet government standards use "one size fits all" population level metrics and though they are meaningless to individuals, they carry outsized weight for people and companies, so when new Nutrition Labels were posited by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, it created mass confusion, because they wanted…

In 2014, in outlets as diverse as Science 2.0, the Chicago Tribune, American Thinker, and the American Council on Science and Health I began debunking "pre-diabetes" as a fake designation for a non-disease no one else in the world accepts. I had seen the fuzzy claim that a hemoglobin A1c blood sugar level of 5.7 was a big risk for diabetes gaining in popularity since 2010 but despite concern about its relevance by 2016 our own Centers for Disease Control had created a website with a few simple questions (1) which would lead 86 million Americans to believe they have a disease. The problem is…

Eating too much meat is considered a risk factor for high cholesterol, which is a risk factor for hypertension, which is a risk factor for heart disease. Given all that statistical correlation, it's no wonder the public don't know what to believe about red meat. But white meat is no better. This is a relief for cattle ranchers, who have been subjected to decades of claims that white meat is healthier and red meat causes heart attacks. The controversial French statistical group International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) even lists red meat as one of its hundreds and hundreds of things…

Though some diet book authors want to suggest certain food types have magical power - trans fats, non-nutritive sweeteners, corn syrup, sugar, etc. - the rise in type 2 diabetes does not have anything to do with soda and everything  to do with energy balance. People who eat more calories than they burn on a consistent basis gain weight, and that eventually begins to hinder insulin production, which can mean type 2 diabetes.  A recent study in Diabetologia finds that cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), high-intensity physical activity (HPA) and low sedentary time (ST) are all…

In a world where "antibiotic resistance" has been a concern, not just among those opposed to medical science but by mainstream consensus, it may seem odd to discuss the benefits of preventative antibiotics, but a large randomized trial indicates that the World Health Organisation and other national organizations should change antibiotic guidelines, at least for assisted childbirth. In 2016, an estimated 19,500 women died because of pregnancy-related infections globally. Even in high-income settings, infections account for 1 in 20 maternal deaths, and as many as 1 in 8 in the USA. For every…

After a baby is born, the priorities and schedules of parents shift dramatically. This is especially true for mothers (sorry dads, we know you change diapers) but after spending 40 weeks thinking about their health because of the little person they've been carrying, they often neglect their own care during the 'fourth trimester', after an infant is born. And that has repercussions.  A new national survey by Orlando Health found more than 25% of mothers did not think about their own health after giving birth, while more than 40% say they felt anxious, overwhelmed or depressed. With a…

Using patients who were referred to a subspecialty pain medicine clinic to be treated for widespread muscular/connective tissue pain, and then separating people who met the criteria for fibromyalgia into smaller groups by age, a small experiment (n=23) found that patients with medication that targeted insulin resistance, metformin, reported less pain.  Fibromyalgia is a blanket term for chronic pain not caused by a disease such as cancer or a medical event. The global economic impact of fibromyalgia is estimated to be enormous, the way all estimates are because they use virtual money - $…

A recent paper in JAMA should have EXPLORATORY in giant red letter across every page, or else journalists will use it to promote fear and doubt about sunscreens. Which is already happening. A few months ago, FDA proposed a modernization of the guidance on over-the-counter sunscreens as required by the Sunscreen Innovation Act. There is much greater awareness of the harms of too much sun exposure, which means a lot more sunscreen is in use, and because most sunscreens are not regulated by FDA there are newer formulations making claims that are not based on evidence. At the same time, FDA…