When you walk into a Walgreens (“at the corner of happy and healthy”) and make your way past the cigarette section, you’ll soon hit the candy aisle. Halloween’s coming up and there are, without exaggeration, at least a thousand big bags of candy for you to pass out to unsuspecting children. This year, don’t do […]
Tag: obesity
The Mystery of the Dying British Bus Drivers
More than 50 years ago, epidemiologists in the UK realized that the death rate among British bus drivers was twice that of bus conductors. This was from all causes of death—heart attacks, cancer, strokes, everything. During their investigations, they concluded the villain was inactivity. Back then, and until recently, there were two operators on every […]
New Hope for Binge Eaters
That box of chocolate chip cookies you never should have purchased in the first place is sitting there on your kitchen table, luring you, taunting. Your period is due in two or three days and you feel grumpy, depressed, bloated. You’re agonizing. “Just a…couple/two, three at the most” you think, knowing you’ll actually feel emotionally […]
MSG In The News Again (And A Personal Story)
It’s seems we’ve always been worrying ourselves about the health consequences of MSG, the world’s most popular flavor enhancer. That’s because monosodium glutamate has been around for more than a century, invented by Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda in 1909, when the professor extracted a substance from a species of seaweed and realized it had a […]
Overweight? Blame Your Car
The endless and usually irritating “which is better?” debate between city dwellers and suburbanites came to a grinding halt in 2003 when a study was published showing suburbanites were on average several pounds heavier than their urban counterparts.
Will Alzheimer’s Skyrocket?
In 2006, the very dark comedy Idiocracy played local theatres for what seemed like a few hours before disappearing into DVD bins and obscure cable channels. Its Rip van Winkle story involves a not particularly bright Army librarian, recruited into a Pentagon hibernation program, awakening centuries into the future and finding himself the most intelligent person in America.
Nutritional Medicine News
Each week I read well over 100 medical articles, summaries, and abstracts of studies sifted from the thousands that are published. Most have nothing to do with nutritional medicine, but there are always a few. Here are some recent highlights:
Obesity by Infection
Here’s a topic I suspect you’ll be reading more about during the next year. For some overweight people (though certainly not all), the villain is not overeating, or even eating the wrong foods, but rather certain bacteria or viruses in the intestines that change the way food is absorbed.