Public Health
If people need to reduce salt intake, relying on them to do it is less effective than teaching them how to flavor food with spices and herbs, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology&Prevention/Nutrition, Physical Activity & Metabolism Scientific Sessions 2014.
In the first phase of the study, 55 volunteers ate a low-sodium diet for four weeks. Researchers provided all foods and calorie-containing drinks. Salt is the main source of sodium in food.
In the second phase, half of the study volunteers participated in a 20-week behavioral…
How well do you know the Wizard of Oz? Chances are you
remember that Dorothy is accompanied by the Lion, Tin Man and Scarecrow, but do
you remember which one she meets first? Does the Lion help to bring the Tin Man
to life? Was it the Scarecrow who tempted the Lion from the forest? Sequence is
essential to the story.
Similarly, our life stories develop around causes and
effects. You could probably guess that risky sexual behaviors, substance abuse,
and depression go together. But which of these lions, tigers and bears are
causes and which are the results?
It may seem like a silly question: if…
Hank |
In mainstream media, everywhere from Fox News to Time (and here on Science 2.0, though with a little more skepticism) a bizarre study is all the rage - pesticides and other environmental toxins will give your kid a malformed penis and cause autism. And state regulations...prevent it.
This overturns all of epidemiology, right? Now something has to be done. Autism causes might be okay to debate in a reasoned fashion but the public will not stand for giving American men tiny penises. We're already in a new Cold War with Russia and Russian men are supposedly huge.
Well, no, it doesn't turn over…
Leftover cigarette smoke clings to walls and furniture and could pose a far more serious threat, according to a presentation at the National Meeting&Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS) which says that one compound from this "third-hand smoke" can damage DNA and and even potentially cause cancer.
Bo Hang, Ph.D., of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory noted that the idea of third-hand smoke only come into existence in 2009, But that evidence already suggests it could threaten human health. In test tubes, anyway.
"The best argument for instituting a ban on smoking…
You know the challenges of addiction. You’ve seen it in yourself or
someone you love. However, increasing evidence also points to the
experience of substance abuse as an opportunity for self-growth. Not
that anyone wants to become an addict, but if you can, why not turn
lemons into lemonade? After an addiction you will never be the person
you were, and studies show that struggling to make peace with this
trauma, and perhaps with the earlier traumas that fed the addiction, may
help you become more than you could have been without the experience.
What does this growth after addiction look like…
I would like to nominate Arvind Mahankali to be the next head of the USDA.
Why? He is obviously very smart, has an outstanding work ethic, and a superb vocabulary. He may have even reached puberty. And if he hasn’t, give it a year or so.
Arvind is 13.
But if you are concerned that he may not yet have what it takes to run an agency with a $24 billion budget and the responsibility of protecting us from unsafe foods, fear not. Last May, Arvind won the 86th National Spelling Bee championship. The word that gave him the championship was knaidel. For fans of irony, a knaidel is a…
An analysis of 100 million US medical records published in PLOS Computational Biology concludes that autism rates are correlated (at the county level) with incidence of genital malformations in newborn males - and the authors say that may be due to harmful environmental factors such as pesticides. They even say that more regulations can fix it.
The authors found that after adjusting for gender, ethnic, socioeconomic and geopolitical factors, autism rates jumped by 283 percent for every one percent increase in frequency of malformations in a county. Intellectual disability rates increase 94…
The
band, The Who tell the story of a man who spends “Eleven hours in the Tin Pan”
before deciding “there’s got to be another way.” And then the chorus asks the
question “Who are you?” You know the song. And
unfortunately, many of us know exactly what it’s like to be in the Tin Pan. We
know what it’s like to look out at the world and wonder if there’s another way;
we know what it’s like to look in the mirror and wonder, “Who am I?”
A study published in the journal Psychology of Addictive Behaviors shows
that how you answer this question can influence your chance of staying sober. These…
Hank |
Statisticians have a rule of thumb for calibrating claims made in humanities and science papers alike. Andrew Gelman, for example, talks about statistical significance filter - "If an estimate is statistically significant, it’s probably an overestimate."
A good thing to remember when you read weak observational studies, psychology surveys and, in modern times, a shocking number of epidemiology papers.
For health, you can use a different rule of thumb: Does Joe Mercola sell it?
If he does, it is probably suspect.
Mercola is a famous homeopath, alt-medicine guru, anti-GMO, pro-organic and anti-…
Some recent claims have warned about a link between eating red and processed meat and the risk of developing cancer. While vegetarians unleashed their confirmation bias in full force, they were happy to ignore the uncertainties in the evidence.
As often happens, concerns about reports, rather than data, lead to action and there have been called for new nutritional recommendations cautioning people to limit their intake of red and processed meats. A recent review in Meat Science examines the evidence and seeks to improve the foundation for future recommendations on the intake…