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Obesity’s Impacts on Gallstones, Acid Reflux, and Heart Disease 

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Sufficient, sustained weight loss may cut the risk of fatal heart attacks and strokes in half. In the ABCs of health consequences of obesity, G is for Gallstones. The top digestive reason people are hospitalized is a gallbladder attack. Every year, more than a million Americans are diagnosed with gallstones, and about 700,000 must have their gallbladders surgically removed. It is a relatively safe procedure, with complication rates tending to be under 5 percent and a mortality rate of only about 1 in 1,000. However one in ten may develop a post-cholecystectomy syndrome of persistent gastrointestinal symptoms long after their gallbladder is removed. What are gallstones made of? In 80 to 90 percent of cases, gallstones are mostly crystalized cholesterol, forming like rock candy in our gallbladder when cholesterol gets too concentrated. This was used to explain why some small, early studies found that non-vegetarians had a higher incidence of gallstones. However, results from mo...
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Obesity’s Impacts on Our Brain, Dementia, and Fertility 

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Weight loss can decrease dementia risk and improve mental performance and fertility. As I’ve discussed previously, in the ABCs of the health consequences of obesity, A is for Arthritis, B is for Back Pain and Blood Pressure, C is for Cancer, and D is for Diabetes. That brings us to E , which is for Encephalopathy. Encephalopathy means brain disease. There are consistent data linking obesity in middle age to a higher risk of dementia later in life. Researchers found that individuals who are overweight have about a one-third higher risk of dementia and those who are obese in mid-life have about 90 percent greater risk. The risk isn’t limited only to future dysfunction, though. People with excess body weight don’t appear to think as clearly at any age. “It was found that obese participants showed broad impairments on executive functions” of the brain, including working memory, decision-making, planning, cognitive flexibility, and verbal fluency. “From resisting temptation to kee...
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Obesity’s Impact on Back Pain, Blood Pressure, Cancer, and Diabetes 

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Losing weight can reduce sciatica, hypertension, and cancer risk, as well as reverse type 2 diabetes.  In the ABCs of the health consequences of obesity, A is for Arthritis, as I discussed in my previous blog post, and B is for Back Pain. Being overweight is not just a risk factor for low back pain, but it is also a risk factor for sciatica (a radiating nerve pain), as well as degenerating lumbar discs and disc herniation. Similar to what we learned in the arthritis story, this may also be due to a combination of the excess weight, high cholesterol, and inflammation associated with being overweight. Why cholesterol? Studies of autopsies and angiographies show that the lumbar arteries that feed our spine can get clogged with atherosclerosis and starve the disks in our lower back, as you can see below and at 0:47 in my video The Effects of Obesity on Back Pain, Blood Pressure, Cancer, and Diabetes .  B is also for Blood Pressure. Excess visceral fat—for exampl...
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Top 10 NutritionFacts.org Videos of 2024

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We create more than a hundred new videos every year. They are the culmination of countless hours of researching, writing, editing, animating, and producing. We comb through thousands of scientific papers from the peer-reviewed medical literature so busy people like you don’t have to! In 2024, I covered a wide variety of hot topics. I released an update on why I changed my mind on water fluoridation , a series on the benefits and side effects of flu, pneumonia, and shingles vaccines , and, of course, a lot on aging and anti-aging based on my research for How Not to Age . Which videos floated to the top last year?    #10 Benefits and Side Effects of the Flu Vaccine Randomized placebo-controlled trials show that flu shots can be extraordinary lifesavers. Can you prevent the flu with foods and supplements, like elderberry and echinacea? See Elderberry Benefits and Side Effects: Does It Help with Colds and the Flu? .     #9 The Pros and Cons of Testing PSA Leve...
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The Best Alternative to Knee Replacement for Osteoarthritis 

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Is there a non-surgical alternative to knee replacement surgery that treats the cause and offers only beneficial side effects?  The largest study in history on the health effects of being overweight, analyzing data from more than 50 million people from nearly 200 countries, found that excess body weight accounts for the premature deaths of about four million people every year. Most of these deaths are from heart disease, but the researchers “found convincing or probable evidence” linking obesity to 20 different disorders—a veritable alphabet soup of potential health concerns. In the ABCs of the health consequences of obesity, A is for arthritis. Obesity can make rheumatoid arthritis worse and increase the risk of another inflammatory joint disease—gout, the so-called disease of kings. The most common joint disease in the world, though, is osteoarthritis, and obesity may be its “main modifiable risk factor.”  Osteoarthritis develops when the cartilage that lines and c...
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Does Fasting Help Autoimmune Diseases? 

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Various fasting regimens have been attempted for inflammatory autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, ankylosing spondylitis, chronic urticaria, mixed connective-tissue disease, glomerulonephritis, and multiple sclerosis, as well as osteoarthritis and fibromyalgia. The strongest evidence of the benefits of fasting surrounds the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune joint disease, as I detailed in my previous blog post. A German study suggested benefits for osteoarthritis, too, and reported improvements in pain and joint function, but we’d really need randomized controlled studies to know for sure. The researchers despaired they only had 30 patients, but that’s 30 times more than many reports on fasting in the medical literature, which may detail only single cases. One woman, for example, with a rare autoimmune disease known as mixed connective-tissue disease, which can cause all sorts of painful and distressing symptoms, was treated with steroids in an attempt to suppress h...
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Does Fasting Help Rheumatoid Arthritis? 

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Fasting, followed by a plant-based diet, is put to the test for autoimmune inflammatory joint disease.  Alan Goldhamer is the founder of the TrueNorth Health Center in Santa Rosa, California, where 10,000 individuals have fasted for “a variety of conditions from diabetes and cardiovascular disease to autoimmune diseases.” He noted that “conditions that seemed to be tied to dietary excess tended to respond predictably to the use of fasting followed by a health-promoting diet,” which he describes as one that is “low salt, vegan, high fiber, low fat, low protein, and low sugar.” “This approach offers people an option to make lifestyle changes, eliminate the cause of the problem, and stabilize their conditions, to the point where the medication is no longer needed.” It’s in contrast to “conventional medicine, which is more about the suppression of the symptoms associated with the disease, rather than removing the underlying mechanisms by which they are caused.” Said Dr. Goldham...
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