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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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Fenugreek May Help Sexual Function, Period Pain, and Lactation

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The hormonal benefits of fenugreek extend beyond the muscle-bulking testosterone boost. In my video about the benefits of fenugreek seeds, I profiled a study in which young men were randomized to a sugar pill or fenugreek capsules for eight weeks, and they got a significant improvement in upper body strength, lower body strength, body composition, as well as a significant reduction in body fat percentage. The only side effect? It can make your sweat and pee smell like maple syrup. Seems like a bonus! Studies on immature, castrated rats suggest fenugreek’s muscle bulking is a testosterone effect, as you can see below and at 0:44 in my video Fenugreek Benefits for Sexual Function, Painful Periods, and Milk Production . But its effect on humans wasn’t known until four randomized controlled trials put it to the test and found a significant boost of total blood testosterone. And indeed, fenugreek appears to improve sexual function in men, for example, doubling the frequency of morn...
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How Much Do New Chemotherapy Drugs Extend Life?

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If you put together all the new chemotherapy drugs approved over a dozen years, the average overall survival benefit is only 2.1 months. Though we often hear new cancer drugs described as “game changers” or “breakthroughs,” most afford much more modest benefits. In my last blog, I quoted an editorial in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute suggesting that the majority of new cancer drugs don’t deliver clinically meaningful benefits—at all. When they’re later proven to be ineffective, they’re pulled from the market, right? No. “[E]ven when postmarket studies show the new drugs to have no clinically meaningful benefit compared with [a sugar pill] placebo or observation, most drugs retain FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] approval and remain on the market at prices comparable to those of the most expensive cancer drugs,” the same ridiculous prices. In fact, the most expensive drug the authors looked at, the one costing $169,836 a year, did not improve overall survival a...
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Chemotherapy Is Expensive—Is It Effective?

Most chemotherapy drugs are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) without evidence that they benefit survival or quality of life. By 2030, the number of new cancer cases in the United States is expected to skyrocket by 45%, from 1.6 million to 2.3 million every year. Are we really winning the war on cancer? Sadly, in general, no, despite the hundreds of new anticancer drugs that have been introduced. As I discuss in my video How Effective Is Chemotherapy? , the war on cancer has been likened to the war on terror. No matter how many drone strikes you do, it’s nearly impossible to kill all the bad guys, and no matter how precise the bombing, one must always consider the collateral damage. Toxicity from cancer therapy can be debilitating—and not just health-wise. There is also “financial toxicity.” Some patented anticancer drugs can cost nearly a thousand dollars a day. Even with health insurance, the average cost to patients with stage IV breast cancer, for exa...
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How Many Minutes of Life Does a Burger Cost?

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If you care about your health so much that it would be unthinkable to light up a cigarette before and after lunch, maybe you should order a bean burrito instead of a meaty one. According to the Global Burden of Disease Study, diets high in processed meat, like bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, and sausage, may kill more than 100,000 people every year, due largely to heart disease, but also cancer and diabetes. This results in millions of healthy years of life lost every year around the world, as you can see below and at 0:29 in my video How Much Does Meat Affect Longevity? . It doesn’t take much either. The Union of Concerned Scientists estimated that if Americans could cut down to just an ounce of processed meat a week, thousands of cancer deaths could be averted every year. But that’s on a population scale. How can we better understand our individual risk? In the last few blogs, I’ve talked a lot about the NutriRECS meat papers published in the Annals of Internal Medicine . T...
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The Meat Papers Contradicted Their Own Data

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The meat industry’s own study concluded that meat consumption increased the risk of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and premature death. A series of papers published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that “largely discounted all but the highest quality randomised studies…reached a conclusion directly contrary to the public health advice we’ve heard for years.” They suggested that we should continue our current consumption of red and processed meats. The authors based their exclusion of evidence on the so-called GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation) criteria, which were mainly created for evaluating evidence from drug trials. We need randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trials for drugs, but the “strictness of these criteria will probably cause evidence for just about every dietary, lifestyle, and environmental factor related to chronic disease to be graded as ‘low’ or ‘very low.’ If the GRADE criteria were used to evaluate the evidenc...
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