Public Health

In 2015, I predicted that someone was going to end up in the hospital due to overdoses on supplements. But don't you always say they are useless placebos? a friend asked. No, they are not all placebos, but products sold as supplements that do something are either actual drugs, like kratom, and thus should be regulated as drugs, they are useless placebos adulterated with actual drugs, like many Internet erectile dysfunction and diet pills, or they are useless in normal doses but toxic at high levels.  Like Vitamin D. Vitamin D has been all the rage for the last decade but that was no…

16:8 is a form of daily fasting wherein people eat whatever they choose for 8 hours and fast for the next 16 hours. A new study published in the journal Nutrition and Healthy Aging evaluated this strategy for obese individuals and found that the diet works and lowers blood pressure.      The research was led by Krista Varady, associate professor of Kinesiology and Nutrition at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She and colleagues recruited 23 obese study participants with an average age of 45 and a body mass index of 35. Between 10:00 am and 6:00 pm participants could…

Despite another year of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hyperventilating weeks after a foodborne illness occurs (devastating lettuce farmers while showing how they little they know when exaggerating what they do know), the more evidence-based bodies at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture made 2018 safe to go into the pantry again. Because few people are all that panicked about lettuce, but everyone wants to know about pesticides. You might not think that, if you read the aggressive marketing claims of organic food trade…

In 1918 an Influenza outbreak (Spanish Flu) began which would eventually infect 500 million people (1/3 of the world’s population) and prove fatal to 50 million making it far more deadly then even World War I (estimated 15-19 million dead) which would end that same year. The name “Spanish Flu” is misleading and results from Spain’s neutrality during World War I. While the Spanish media dutifully reported on the extent of the pandemic on its citizenry the press in Germany, France, UK and the US downplayed, even censored, the same in their own countries (while reporting on the flu in Spain…

The Mayo Clinic is a health organization, but they know that marketing works. And so just in time for the holidays they have a new video out trying to scare us about...the holidays. It's not about your 100 percent organic dinner, like that every food you eat will have chemicals known to cause cancer in rats, it is about everything you might binge on during the holidays. They allege it causes a condition called "holiday heart." They are talking about atrial fibrillation, which is often linked to alcohol, along with a lot of other conditions. After smoking and obesity, alcohol is the third…

Obesity is a disease where people accumulate more and more fat. When they reach a certain point, their fat stops working and they develop disease, such as type 2 diabetes. But not all fat is bad. The fat that accumulates in obesity is called white fat, but a second form of fat (brown fat) could actually be used to treat obesity. Brown fat has evolved to turn fuel into heat. In small animals, like mice and voles, brown fat makes heat that helps them survive, even in freezing temperatures. Brown fat can burn a stupendous amount of energy. When fully activated, just 100g of brown fat can burn…

Early this year, I testified at FDA in support of approval for a new smoking cessation tool called iQOS. While it may have seemed odd for the president of the American Council on Science and Health, which has campaigned against smoking for 40 years, to endorse a product made by a tobacco company, the reason was simple data. I'm not in a war on corporations or a plant, I'm in a war on smoking. Nicotine, like caffeine, is addictive, but it is not harmful the way smoking is. And in Japan, the iQOS product caused a 70 percent migration rate off cigarettes, far better than the 10 percent for…

Modern life has many benefits. Transport, comfy furniture, smartphones, TV, the internet, dentistry and advanced medicine would be at the top of most people’s lists. Our bodies also show signs of responding positively to modern life. In almost every part of the world, we are much taller than we used to be. We also live much longer, with life expectancy inching towards 80 in many wealthy countries, while everyone “knows” ancient humans usually died in their twenties. But what I discovered while researching my book, is that things are more complex than that. Being taller may be linked to higher…

Smirnoff, a vodka brand, has tried to place itself under a health halo by claiming it is not only gluten-free but non-GMO as well. That's true, it will now be both of those things - corn, the key ingredient in their vodka, never had gluten. But most U.S. corn is genetically modified. And that is a good thing. Unless you know nothing about science and have terrible taste in vodka, which seems to be the demographic British company Diageo is virtue signaling toward. Genetically modified corn carries a gene that naturally creates an insect toxin (Bacillus thuringiensis - Bt), which is sprayed…

Does the presence of higher levels of biomarkers of dairy fat consumption in people with lower levels of type 2 diabetes mean more dairy means less risk of developing it? According to epidemiology, yes, but epidemiology and politics are the two key reasons public confidence in academic science have plummeted.  A meta-analysis that pooled the findings from 16 prospective cohort studies in PLOS Medicine included data more than 60,000 adults over 20 years as part of the Fatty Acids and Outcomes Research Consortium (FORCE). The reason is simple; in countries where dairy is a cultural…