Public Health
Like everything else in science and medicine, there is modern controversy about circumcision. In the United States the rate of circumcision is around 81%.
A paper in Mayo Clinic Proceedings finds that the benefits of infant male circumcision to health exceed the risks by over 100 to 1. Brian Morris, Professor Emeritus in the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney and his colleagues in Florida and Minnesota found that over their lifetime half of uncircumcised males will contract an adverse medical condition caused by their foreskin. The findings add considerable weight to the…
Population-based studies have consistently shown that our diet has an influence on health - a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is recommended.
But some people go overboard and just eat meat. Or just eat vegetables. Evidence for health benefits of exclusive diets is scant. Vegetarians are considered healthier, they are wealthier, they are more liberal, they drink less alcohol and they smoke less - but those are a lot of variables in health that don't necessarily result from being a vegetarian.
A cross-sectional study taken from the Austrian Health Interview Survey AT-HIS 2006/07 found that…
A Northwestern Medicine study reports the timing, intensity and duration of light exposure during the day is linked to your weight -- the first time this has been shown, though take population correlations with a grain of sunshine.
People who had most of their daily exposure to even moderately bright light in the morning had a significantly lower body mass index (BMI) than those who had most of their light exposure later in the day, the study found. BMI is a ratio calculated from a person's weight and height.
"The earlier this light exposure occurred during the day, the lower…
There is a great deal of interest how cocoa flavanols (a type of antioxidant ) like monomers and procyanidins might prevent obesity and type-2 diabetes, though little is actually known how they might work.
A new study compared the impacts of long-term dietary exposure to cocoa flavanol monomers, oligomers and polymers on the effects of high-fat feeding. Mice were fed a high-fat diet supplemented with either a cocoa flavanol extract or a flavanol fraction enriched with monomeric, oligomeric, or polymeric procyanidins for 12 weeks.
The oligomer-rich fraction proved to be most…
Imagine lying in bed the morning after a
binge as you reconstruct the night. Oh
right! Now you remember going from the first party to the second. You
remember the drink that put you over the edge. And you barely remember ending
up in a bedroom, your clothes falling away. What
did you do? Some binge drinkers aren’t this lucky; they know even that
night in the haze of many drinks that what’s happening in the bedroom isn’t
right – what they’re doing or having done to them is forced or unsafe or not
anything at all that they want.
Drinking leads to sexual consequences ranging
from reckless and…
In the mood to off yourself? I sure hope not, but if you are contemplating it, there is no need to use a gun, poison, or pills. Just take a sip of Diet Coke.
Because anyone who takes headlines seriously—a universally bad idea—will be afraid to even look at a bottle of diet soda, let alone drink from one.
We can equally thank Dr. Ankur Vyas and his group for publishing the quintessential example of garbage science, and an all-too-willing press, obviously looking for juicy headlines. Or can't be bothered to read the study. Or have their own agenda. Probably all three.
As usual, there is a…
Stephanie Seneff (a computer scientist at MIT), and Anthony Samsel (a retired consultant), have recently been attempting to link the use of the herbicide glyphosate to a long list of modern maladies. Their latest such attempt to is Celiac disease.
The overall argument for the glyphosate/Celiac link has already been quite thoroughly debunked by a Celiac expert, but there is one other good reason to dismiss the "link" which I would like to describe.
It has to do with a "Fishy" study about glyphosate and fish which is so flawed that it should never have…
Only about 1/6th of the world bans smoking and a new paper in The Lancet seeks to increase that, and implied causality is the way to do it.
Implied causality is fine, of course. No one knew smoking was bad until there was implied causality and then real causality, but in the culture war that seeks to control choice, population statistics are being used to sillier and sillier effect and it begins to border on pseudoscience, like third-hand smoke, and then sociology, like that banning smoking will cut premature births by 10 percent.
To do so, they picked data from parts of North America and…
For decades, Americans have been told that high blood cholesterol as a result of heavy saturated fat intake causes cardiovascular disease.
As such, Statin drugs are often prescribed to curb
cardiovascular disease
risk by lowering cholesterol. That convention was challenged by a recent paper.
So now what?
Epidemiology is not science the way many assume it is. Epidemiology can show that organic food causes autism so while studies may show a correlation between high cholesterol and cardiovascular disease, that is not a “cause-and-effect” relationship and never was - good luck explaining…
Thanks to a constant stream of commercials advertising pharmaceuticals, men know that if they are not spending enough time sitting in a bathtub in the forest, a pill can cure that. Apparently it works for erectile dysfunction also.
But that last part may be a symptom rather than the disease and something as simple as changing lifestyle factors can fix it.
A new paper highlights the incidence of erectile dysfunction and lack of sexual desire among Australian men aged 35-80 years. Over a five-year period, 31% of the 810 men involved in the study developed some form of erectile dysfunction…