Wellness

The same person paid by Big Sugar to downplay the risks of sugar was paid by Big Meat to downplay the risks of meat. A series of articles published in the Annals of Internal Medicine recommending people just keep eating their meat was decried by nutrition researchers as “irresponsible and unethical,” a “travesty of science,” […]

The meat industry comes up with a perversion of evidence-based medicine. A series of articles published in the Annals of Internal Medicine culminated in a recommendation suggesting people keep eating red and processed meat. Nutrition researchers blasted these articles. The chair of the nutrition department at Harvard called it “a very irresponsible public health recommendation,”

How legitimate is the common corporate criticism of the scientific nutrition literature that the credibility of observational studies is questionable? While randomized controlled trials are highly reliable in assessing interventions like drugs, they’re harder to do with diet. Dietary diseases can take decades to develop. People can’t eat placebo food, and it’s difficult to get

How did Big Corn Syrup and other corporate sugar titans hijack the scientific process? In 2016, a Washington-based lobby group published a scientific review that concluded the evidence behind guidelines recommending limits on added dietary sugar was “low quality” and didn’t “meet criteria for trustworthy recommendations.” This was a group funded by multinational food and

International Life Sciences Institute, a nonprofit, is accused of being a front group for Coca-Cola and other junk food giants. In 2019, a series of reviews was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that concluded the same thing that past reviews have concluded: Adhering to dietary patterns that are lower in red or processed

Please note: This blog and its accompanying video discuss the important and troubling issue of weight bias and discrimination, which may be a sensitive topic for some readers. How might weight stigma be a vicious cycle? Although total fasting can dramatically increase blood levels of the stress hormone cortisol, as much as doubling within five

Please note: This blog and its accompanying video discuss the important and troubling issue of weight bias and discrimination, which may be a sensitive topic for some readers. How common is weight stigmatization in health care? Described as the last “acceptable” form of bias, weight stigma is the rampant discrimination and stereotyping of overweight individuals.

Do people who eat nuts live longer simply because they replace protein from animals with protein from plants? The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition “is the highest-ranked peer-reviewed scientific journal in nutrition and dietetics.” That should tell you a lot about the field, since it’s published by the American Society of Nutrition, whose sustaining partners

A micromort, a unit for comparing and communicating risk to patients, is equivalent to a one-in-a-million chance of dying. Hundreds of millions of operations are performed every year, and the risk of death is typically around half a percent, to which patients might say things like, “I could die just as easily crossing the road,”

Hot peppers, soy foods, and pumpkin seeds may help with hair loss. Androgenic or androgenetic alopecia is one of the most common chronic problems seen by dermatologists. In men, it’s called male pattern hair loss, and in women, it’s called female pattern hair loss. It’s characterized by progressive hair loss, mostly of the central scalp.