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Cannabis and Cars 

Did traffic fatalities increase or decrease after cannabis legalization? Is cannabis-impaired driving a public health and safety concern? Well, the number of tickets for cannabis-impaired driving went up in Washington State after legalization, as did the proportion of drivers in fatal car crashes in Colorado who tested positive for marijuana use. But, in both cases, this “may simply reflect a general increase in marijuana use” overall. It doesn’t mean that cannabis is causing the crashes, as I discuss in my video The Effects of Marijuana on Car Accidents . There is a lot of evidence correlating marijuana use with car accidents, but who uses marijuana? Mostly young people and males. And guess who has a higher crash risk regardless of what they smoke? Young people and males. However, even taking that into account, it does seem that “roughly 20–30% of traffic crashes involving cannabis use occur because of the cannabis use.” But, to put that in perspective, that number is more like
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A Look at Bariatric Surgery

Obesity isn’t new, but the obesity epidemic is . We went from a few corpulent queens and kings, like Henry VIII and Louis VI (known as Louis le Gros, or “Louis the Fat”), to a pandemic of obesity, now considered to be perhaps the direst and most poorly contained public health threat of our time. Today, 71 percent of American adults are overweight and 40 percent of men and women appear to have so much body fat that they can be classified as obese, and there’s no end in sight. In 2013, the American Medical Association voted to classify obesity as a disease against the advice of its own Council on Science and Public Health . Disease implies dysfunction, but bariatric drugs and surgery are not fixing physiological malfunction. Our bodies are just doing what they were designed to do in the face of excess calories . Rather than some sort of disorder, weight gain may largely be a normal response , by normal people, to an abnormal situation. And with more than 70 percent of
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Celebrating Veterans Day with Bill Muir

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We had the pleasure of talking with Bill Muir about his work in the military and as a Registered Nurse, food access, his book, and Veterans Day. We hope you enjoy this interview.   Thank you for your service. We are grateful for the opportunity to interview you. Please tell us about yourself and your background. Why did you decide to join the military, and when did you enlist? Thank you very much! Hi, everyone. I’m Bill Muir, aka SGT VEGAN. I’m a combat veteran, RN, and 32-year vegan. I joined the U.S. Army after 9/11 to serve my country in its time of need. I had been living in Japan for about eight years at the time the attack happened, and, as an expat, it affected me very deeply. I joined the military because I thought I would be able to make a difference and help save lives, both American and Afghan, if I joined during war. What branch of the military were you in? What was your job? Where did you serve? I was a U.S. Army Paratrooper and served with the 173rd Airborne
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Drinking Water, Losing Weight 

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A few times a day, drink two cups of cold water on an empty stomach for weight loss. After drinking two cups (half a liter) of water, you can get a surge of the adrenal hormone noradrenaline in your bloodstream, as if you had just smoked a few cigarettes or had a few cups of coffee, boosting your metabolic rate up to 30 percent within an hour, as shown below and at 0:22 in my video Optimizing Water Intake to Lose Weight . When put to the test in randomized controlled trials, that appeared to accelerate weight loss by 44 percent, making drinking water the safest, simplest, and cheapest way to boost your metabolism.  Now, this entire strategy may fail if you’re on a beta-blocker drug. (Beta blockers are typically prescribed for heart conditions or high blood pressure and tend to end with the letters lol , such as atenolol, nadolol, or propranolol, sold as Tenormin, Corgard, or Inderal, respectively.) So, for example, as you can see below and at 0:59 in my video , if you give peop
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Boosting Your Metabolism Safely 

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If you drink two cups of water, the adrenal hormone noradrenaline can surge in your bloodstream, similar to the response of smoking a few cigarettes or having a few cups of coffee. Given the 60 percent surge in noradrenaline within minutes of drinking just two cups of water, as shown in the graph below and at 0:13 in my video What Is the Safest Metabolism Booster? , might one be able to get the weight-loss benefits of noradrenaline-releasing drugs like ephedra—without the risks? You don’t know until you put it to the test. Published in the Journal of the Endocrine Society , the results were described as “uniquely spectacular.” Researchers found that drinking two cups of water increased the metabolic rate of men and women by 30 percent. The increase started within ten minutes and reached a maximum within an hour. In the 90 minutes after drinking one tall glass of water, the study participants burned about an extra 25 calories (100 kJ). Do that four times throughout the day, and yo
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Does Drinking Water Affect Our Adrenal Hormones? 

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Drinking water can be a safe, simple, and effective way to prevent yourself from fainting. Within three minutes of drinking a few cups of water (12 mL/kg of body weight), the level of the adrenal gland hormone noradrenaline in our bloodstream can shoot up by 60 percent, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:19 in my video The Effect of Drinking Water on Adrenal Hormones .  When researchers had people drink two cups (500 mL) of water with electrodes on their legs, about a 40 percent increase in bursts of fight-or-flight nerve activity within 20 minutes was documented, as shown in the graph below and at 0:25 in my video .  If you drink two or three cups (11 mL/kg of body weight) of water, blood flow squeezes down in your arms and calves, clamping down nearly in half, as the arteries to your limbs and skin constrict to divert blood to your core, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:42 in my video . That’s why drinking water can be such a safe, simple, and effective
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Ephedra-Like Weight Loss Minus the Risks 

The diving reflex shows that it’s possible to have selective adrenal hormone effects. Thermogenic drugs like DNP can cause people to overheat to death; they can increase resting metabolic rates by 300 percent or more. A more physiological spread would range about ten times less, from a 30 percent slower metabolism in people with an underactive thyroid to a 30 percent higher metabolism when the part of our nervous system that controls our fight-or-flight response is activated. In response to a fright or acute stress, special nerves release a chemical called noradrenaline to ready us for confrontation. We experience this by our skin getting paler, cold, and clammy, as blood is diverted to our more vital organs. Our mouth can get dry as our digestive system is put on hold, and our heart starts to beat faster. What we don’t feel is the extra fat being burned to liberate energy for the fight. That’s why people started taking ephedra for weight loss—“to stimulate the release of noradre
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