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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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Could Your Pills and Food Be Causing a Leaky Gut?

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Common drugs, foods, and beverages can disrupt the integrity of our intestinal barrier, causing a leaky gut. Intestinal permeability, the leakiness of our gut, may be a new target for both disease prevention and therapy. With all its tiny folds, our intestinal barrier covers a surface of more than 4,000 square feet—that’s bigger than a tennis court—and requires about 40% of our body’s total energy expenditure to maintain. There is growing evidence implicating “the disruption of intestinal barrier integrity” in the development of a number of conditions, including celiac disease and inflammatory bowel disease. Researchers measured intestinal permeability using blue food coloring. It remained in the gut of healthy participants but was detected in the blood of extremely sick patients with sepsis with a damaged gut barrier. You don’t have to end up in the ICU to develop a leaky gut, though. Simply taking some aspirin or ibuprofen can do the trick. Indeed, taking two regular aspirin (32...
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Keeping Better Score of Your Diet

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How can you get a perfect diet score? How do you rate the quality of people’s diets? Well, “what could be more nutrient-dense than a vegetarian diet?” Indeed, if you compare the quality of vegetarian diets with non-vegetarian diets, the more plant-based diets do tend to win out, and the higher diet quality in vegetarian diets may help explain greater improvements in health outcomes. However, vegetarians appear to have a higher intake of refined grains, eating more foods like white rice and white bread that have been stripped of much of their nutrition. So, just because you’re eating a vegetarian diet doesn’t mean you’re necessarily eating as healthfully as possible. Those familiar with the science know the primary health importance of eating whole plant foods. So, how about a scoring system that simply adds up how many cups of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, chickpeas, split peas, and lentils, and how many ounces of nuts and seeds per 1,000 calories (with or without coun...
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How Low Can LDL Cholesterol Go on PCSK9 Inhibitors?

People with genetic mutations that leave them with an LDL cholesterol of 30 mg/dL live exceptionally long lives. Can we duplicate that effect with drugs? Data extrapolated from large cholesterol-lowering trials using statin drugs suggest that the incidence of cardiovascular events like heart attacks would approach zero if LDL cholesterol could be forced down below 60 mg/dL for first-time prevention and around 30 mg/dL for those trying to prevent another one. But is lower actually better? And is it even safe to have LDL cholesterol levels that low? We didn’t know until PCSK9 inhibitors were invented . Are PCSK9 Inhibitors for LDL Cholesterol Safe and Effective? I explore that issue in my video of the same name. PCSK9 is a gene that mutated to give people such low LDL cholesterol, and that’s how Big Pharma thought of trying to cripple PCSK9 with drugs. After a heart attack, intensive lowering of an individual’s LDL cholesterol beyond a target of 70 mg/dL does seem to work better t...
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How to Beat Heart Disease Before It Starts

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Why might healthy lifestyle choices wipe out 90% of our risk for having a heart attack, while drugs may only reduce risk by 20% to 30%? On the standard American diet, atherosclerosis—hardening of the arteries, the number one killer of men and women—has been found to start in our teens. Investigators collected about 3,000 sets of coronary arteries and aortas (the aorta is the main artery in the body) from victims of accidents, homicides, and suicides who were 15 to 34 years old and found that the fatty streaks in arteries can begin forming in our teens, which turn into atherosclerotic plaques in our 20s that get worse in our 30s and can then become deadly. In the heart, atherosclerosis can cause a heart attack. In the brain, it can cause a stroke. See the progression below and at 0:35 in my video Can Cholesterol Get Too Low? . How common is this? All of the teens they looked at—100% of them—already had fatty streaks building up inside their arteries. By their early 30s, most alrea...
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