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Are Supplements the New Snake Oil?

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There is little guarantee that a dietary supplement will actually contain what is advertised on the packaging and not have undeclared contaminants. In one of my videos a few years ago, I talked about how press releases on the latest science coming out of even top medical centers were filled with overstatements and omissions. Medical journal press releases suffered from similar problems, and press releases from the drug companies were no different, filled with hype and exaggeration. What about press releases issued by the supplement industry? (I’m not even talking about supplement manufacturers, but trade organizations representing the multibillion-dollar dietary supplement industry.) Researchers found that 100% of supplement industry press releases contained “spin,” meaning “strategies to hype or denigrate findings” to distort clinical studies’ results. Here’s the wild part: Industry press releases advocated for supplement use in response to more than 90% of studies reporting no ...
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The Best Foods to Fight H. Pylori

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What food can eradicate H. pylori in the majority of patients? The salting and pickling of fish produce a novel DNA-mutating chemical called CMBA, which is formed from a reaction of salt, nitrite preservatives, and methionine, an amino acid found concentrated in animal proteins. The nitrites can also interact with other protein components to form N -nitroso compounds, a powerful class of carcinogens found in cigarette smoke. This may explain why processed meats such as bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, and sausage have been tied to increased stomach cancer risk, but this extends to fresh, unprocessed, unsalted meats as well. But isn’t most stomach cancer caused by an infection with a stomach bacteria called H. pylori ? There is a synergistic interaction between H. pylori -induced inflammation gastritis and diet in the formation of stomach cancer. Check this out: Researchers in China discovered that even genetically vulnerable individuals infected with a particularly pathogenic...
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Yoga Put to the Test: What the Science Really Shows

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The origins of yoga go back thousands of years, and the practice of yoga for health has become popular worldwide. A 2016 survey estimated that 36 million Americans may be involved in yoga to varying degrees , for example. With so many practitioners, what do we really know about yoga?   What Are the Benefits of Yoga? As I discuss in my video How to Prove Whether Yoga Has Special Benefits , researchers have found that yoga users have better health status and are less likely to be obese, but that could be reverse causation––meaning instead of yoga leading to better health and a normal weight, maybe being in better health, not being obese, is leading to more yoga. Same with the flipside. When you read that yoga practitioners are more likely to have mental health conditions, such as depression or anxiety, and musculoskeletal conditions, like arthritis, gout, lupus, fibromyalgia, joint pain, sprains, and asthma, yoga may be contributing to some of these conditions, like muscle sprains...
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Pickled Paradox: Kimchi’s Link to Stomach Cancer

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What explains the Achilles’ heel in certain Asian diets? For decades, Japan has had the longest life expectancy in the world, while spending just a fraction on healthcare compared to other high-income countries. This longevity has been attributed in part to Japanese dietary patterns, which are thought to have contributed to their comparatively low rates of coronary artery disease. Japan has historically had among the lowest rates of colon, breast, ovarian, prostate, bladder, and blood cancers. Japan, however, has among the highest rates of stomach cancer, as you can see below and at 0:42 in my video The Role of Kimchi and H. Pylori in Stomach Cancer . Japanese men may have had seven times less prostate cancer than Americans, but they had six times more stomach cancer. Is there some Achilles’ heel in the Japanese diet? One of the first theories, proposed in the 1970s, was that it was the talc used to polish white rice to give it a glossy sheen. That was the case with ovarian ...
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Can Coffee Help Parkinson’s Symptoms?

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Coffee can improve Parkinson’s symptoms within three weeks compared to placebo, but do the benefits last? When James Parkinson described the classic symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, “he could hardly foresee the evolution of our understanding over the next two hundred years”—like the role of nutrition. High dietary intakes of animal fat, mercury, iron, and dairy products seem to increase Parkinson’s disease risk, while a plant-based dietary pattern and the intake of antioxidants may be protective. “Plant-based diets are known to preserve body tissues from oxidative stress and inflammation, both hallmarks of chronic-degenerative diseases” like Parkinson’s. However, animal-based foods, particularly those rich in animal proteins and saturated fats, are correlated with the promotion of neurodegenerative diseases, in addition to some of our leading killers like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Not all plants are necessarily good, though. For example, consider the potential neurotox...
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Feeding Our Gut Microbiome for Better Health

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Our gut flora is determined by what we eat, for good or for ill. When we eat meat (including seafood), dairy, or eggs, our gut flora can take certain components in them (carnitine and choline) and produce something that ends up as a toxic compound called TMAO , which may set us up for a heart attack, stroke, and death. The process is illustrated below and at 0:26 in my video How to Cultivate a Healthy Gut Microbiome with Food . Give people two eggs, and they get a spike of TMAO in their bloodstream within hours of consumption. However, because gut bacteria play a critical role in this process, if they are then given a week of antibiotics to wipe out their gut flora and fed two more eggs, nothing happens. There’s no TMAO in their bloodstream because they have no egg-eating bacteria to make it. But once their gut bacteria have a month to start growing back, the eggs start to cause TMAO production once again, as you can see below and at 1:12 in my video . The same thing happens wi...
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Why Don’t Health Insurers Promote a Healthier Diet?

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Why don’t more big payors in health care embrace plant-based eating? Many of the diseases “that cause a constant drain on health care budgets can be prevented by nutrition;” so, why aren’t the big payors getting involved? Even a 1% decline in excess body fat could alone save tens of billions in medical costs. You’d think at least the health insurance industry would try to get people to eat more healthfully to try to pay out less money. Well, one could say “the insurance industry benefits from high health care costs because these rising costs are simply passed on to both individuals and employers in terms of higher premiums and insurers take a fixed percentage of these premiums as increasing profits.” They get a piece of the pie; so, the bigger the pie—the unhealthier everyone is—the bigger their piece. “As such, insurers have not done as much as they could to help reduce health care costs because lower costs would hurt their bottom line.” Could you imagine “there was a medication t...
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