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What Does Personalized Nutrition Actually Deliver?

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There’s a lot of focus on personalized nutrition, but maybe we should focus on taking personal responsibility for our health. “Personalized nutrition (PN) is rooted in the concept that one size does not fit all,” and who doesn’t want to think they’re special? The idea of personalized nutrition is inherently appealing to our ego; that’s why simple messages recognizing individuality deeply resonate with us and why such messages are popular in marketing and sales. This focus on uniqueness has spurred the creation of personalized foods, along with the suggestion that “3D Food Printing seems to be a good candidate for food customization.” Now, there certainly are some legitimate differences between people. Some have a peanut allergy and keel over if they eat a peanut, others have celiac disease and need to avoid gluten, and some are genetically lactose-intolerant. There’s an enzyme mutation common in some parts of Asia that protects against alcoholism because people with the altered...
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The Link Between Milk and Parkinson’s Disease

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Is the brain damage associated with milk consumption due to the banned pesticide heptachlor or the milk sugar galactose? Parkinson’s disease is a neurodegenerative brain disorder that affects millions of people. What causes it? Well, if you look at lifestyle factors associated with Parkinson’s disease, dairy consumption is the strongest dietary factor associated with an increased risk of Parkinson’s disease. In fact, dairy products are the only food group consistently linked with a high risk of developing Parkinson’s. Five large prospective studies have confirmed the link. This includes the two Harvard cohorts, the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, which followed more than 100,000 people combined for decades in “the largest analysis of dairy and PD [Parkinson’s disease] to date,” analyzing more than 1,000 newly diagnosed cases. All the studies found a link between dairy and Parkinson’s, with most finding a significant link—about a 50% increase in ...
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Can Onions Help with Weight Loss, Cholesterol, and PCOS?

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Let’s talk about treating weight loss, cholesterol, and PCOS with diet. What can an eighth of a teaspoon a day of onion powder do for body fat, and what can raw red onion do for cholesterol? In one of my previous videos about onions, I talked about the data supporting—or not supporting—the role of onions in boosting testosterone in men, protecting bone health, controlling allergies, and dealing with the side effects of chemotherapy. What about weight loss? Enter the “Effect of Steamed Onion (ONIRO) Consumption on Body Fat and Metabolic Profiles in Overweight Subjects.” Researchers used steamed onions, which aren’t as spicy and have a weaker smell, so they could better disguise them as a placebo. They dried them into onion powder and gave people a minuscule amount—about an eighth of a teaspoon (300 mg) a day. Surely, a little daily dusting of onion powder wouldn’t affect people’s weight. But check out the results reported in the abstract: Measurements using a DEXA scan showed a signif...
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Weight-Loss Devices to the Extreme

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Let’s discuss the safety and efficacy of various weight-loss methods, ranging from Botox and corsets to siphons and tapeworms. A moderately obese person doing moderately intense physical activity, like biking or brisk walking, would burn off approximately 350 calories an hour, but most drinks, snacks, and other processed junk are consumed at a rate of about 70 calories (293 kJ) per minute. Therefore, it only takes five minutes to wipe out a whole hour of exercise. Enter the AspireAssist siphon assembly. It’s a percutaneous gastrostomy device, meaning surgeons cut a hole in a person’s stomach and tunnel a fistula out through the abdominal wall. So, after each meal, the person can attach a suction gadget to the hole and directly drain out their stomach contents, as you can see below and at 0:47 in my video Extreme Weight-Loss Devices . This means you could gorge on donuts, spew them out through the hole in your stomach, then gorge on more donuts. Have your cake, and eat it, too...
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From Gastric Balloons to Fake Knee Surgeries: When the Fix Is an Illusion

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Sham surgery trials have shown that some of our most popular surgeries are themselves shams. Intragastric balloons “ arrived with much fanfare in the 1980s,” since they could be implanted into the stomach and inflated with air or water to fill much of the space. Unfortunately, surgical devices are often brought to the market before there is adequate evidence of effectiveness and safety, and the balloons were no exception. The “gastric bubble” had its bubble burst when a study at the Mayo Clinic found that 8 out of 10 balloons “spontaneously deflated,” which is potentially dangerous because they could pass into the intestines and cause an obstruction, as you can see below and at 0:40 in my video Is Gastric Balloon Surgery Safe and Effective for Weight Loss? . Before balloons deflated, however, they apparently caused gastric erosions in half the patients, damaging their stomach lining. The kicker is that, in terms of inducing weight loss, they didn’t even work when compared to ...
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Nuts, Sperm, and Sex: The Surprising Connection

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Walnuts, almonds, and hazelnuts are put to the test for erectile and sexual function, sperm count, and semen quality. In 2013, I posted a video based on a study that found that men with erectile dysfunction who ate 100 grams of pistachios (a little more than three handsful) a day for three weeks had “a significant improvement in erectile function.” It’s always nice to see a whole-food intervention have clinical effects, and I was curious to revisit the topic and see what’s been published since. Even if you ignore all the lab animal studies on hazelnuts improving the function of rat testicles—really, there’s a study titled “Hazelnut Consumption Improves Testicular Antioxidant Function and Semen Quality in Young and Old Male Rats”—you still never know what you’ll find searching the medical literature for nuts and sexual function. I found “a case of penile strangulation with a metal hex nut” in which someone put one on his penis “for sexual pleasure” but couldn’t remove it. (I guess ...
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Which Foods Help a Leaky Gut?

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What is the recommended diet for treating leaky gut? Which foods and food components can boost the integrity of our intestinal barrier? Our intestinal tract is the largest barrier between us and the environment. More than what we touch or breathe, what we eat is our largest exposure to the outside world. Normally, our entire gastrointestinal tract is impermeable to what’s inside of it, allowing our body to pick and choose what goes in or out. But there are things that may make our gut leaky, and the chief among them is our diet. The standard American or Western diet can cause gut dysbiosis, meaning a disruption in our gut microbiome, which can lead to intestinal inflammation and a leaky intestinal barrier. Then, tiny bits of undigested food, microbes, and toxins can slip uninvited through our gut lining into our bloodstream and trigger chronic systemic inflammation. “To avoid this dysbiosis and intestinal inflammation, a predominantly vegetarian diet”—in other words, eating plants...
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