In public health school, you learn there are three levels of preventive medicine. Primary prevention would be like trying to prevent someone at risk for heart disease from getting his or her first heart attack. Secondary prevention is when......

Where do the international consensus guidelines to dramatically lower saturated fat consumption come from? (I show the list in my video, The Saturated Fat Studies: Buttering Up the Public). They came from literally hundreds of metabolic ward experiments, which......

Time magazine's cover exhorting people to eat butter could be viewed as a desperate attempt to revive dwindling print sales, but they claimed to be reporting on real science--a systematic review and meta-analysis published in a prestigious journal that......

One of my favorite cancer-specific charities, the American Institute for Cancer Research, lauds the China Study and the documentary Forks Over Knives, with which they share the same bottom-line message: The healthiest diets are those that revolve around whole......

Much of the low-carb and paleo reasoning revolves around insulin. To quote a paleo blogger, "carbohydrates increase insulin, the root of all evil when it comes to dieting and health." So the logic follows that because carbs increase insulin,......

There are dietary guidelines for food, but what about for beverages? A Beverage Guidance Panel was "assembled to provide guidance on the relative health and nutritional benefits and risks of various beverage categories." They ranked them from one to......

Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought us through the Great Depression and World War II. Who knows how history would have been different had he not died in his fourth term as President from a massive stroke. In the following days......

Low back pain became one of the biggest problems for public health systems in the Western world during the second half of the 20th century. The lifetime prevalence of low back pain is reported to be as high as......

Medical myths and dogmas die hard. Researchers creating a new body of knowledge for prevention and control of heart disease had to disprove a bunch of doozies. For example, we used to think that heart disease, high cholesterol and......

In the prevention of cardiovascular disease, the consumption of fruits and vegetables is crucial. Preventing the oxidation of cholesterol may be one of the mechanisms by which fruits and vegetables reduce the risk of heart attacks and strokes. However,......

It's safe to say that Alzheimer's disease research is in a "state of crisis." For the past two decades, over 73,000 research articles have been published, averaging 100 papers per day, yet little clinical progress has been made. The......

Recently, researchers from Taiwan pitted the herbal tea hibiscus against obesity. They gave hibiscus to overweight individuals and reported that subjects showing reduced body weight. However, after 12 weeks on hibiscus subjects only lost about three pounds, only one......

Maria Fernandez has received nearly a half million dollars from the egg industry and writes papers like "Rethinking dietary cholesterol." She admits that eggs can raise LDL cholesterol, bad cholesterol, but argues that HDL, so-called "good cholesterol," also rises,......

In my video, Does Meditation Affect Cellular Aging?, I discussed how stress reduction through meditation might be able to lengthen telomeres, the protective caps at the tips of our chromosomes that tend to deplete as we age. What about......

In the film The Holiday, Cameron Diaz exclaims "Severe stress ... causes the DNA in our cells to shrink until they can no longer replicate." Did Hollywood get the science right? The enzyme that builds and maintains the caps......

The United States has one of the worst premature birth rates in the world, now ranking 131st worldwide. Even worse, over the last few decades, the rate of preterm birth in the U.S. has been going up. We've known......

Dioxins are highly toxic pollutants that accumulate in tissue fat. Almost all dioxins found in people who don't work in toxic waste dumps or something similarly hazardous are believed to come from food, especially meat, milk, and fish, which......

Blood cholesterol levels are clearly increased by eating dietary cholesterol. In other words, putting cholesterol in our mouth means putting cholesterol in our blood, and it may also potentiate the harmful effects of saturated fats, meaning when we eat......

Why don't more doctors practice preventive cardiology? Time availability is a reason frequently cited by physicians, but if you probe a little deeper, the number one reason given was their perception that patients fear being deprived of all the......

Thirty years ago, virtually all diabetes in young individuals was thought to be autoimmune Type 1 diabetes, but since the mid-90s, we started to see an increase in Type 2 diabetes among youth, particularly in the United States. Indeed,......

I've talked previously about the anti-diabetic and anti-obesity effects of various phytonutrients in beans, but beans have protective effects on the cardiovascular system as well. As one academic review suggested, plant-specific compounds can have a remarkable impact on the......

Until only a few years ago, almost the whole of the scientific world maintained that the wheat protein gluten would provoke negative effects only in people with rare conditions such as celiac disease or wheat allergies. But by the......

The Global Burden of Disease Study published in 2012, is the most comprehensive and systematic analysis of causes of death undertaken to date, involving nearly 500 researchers from more than 300 institutions in 50 countries, and starting with almost......

The effects of a vegetarian diet on systemic diseases like cancer, diabetes, and heart diseases have been studied and have revealed predominantly less systemic diseases in those eating plant-based diets. However, there have only been a few studies on......

In my video Breast Cancer and Constipation, I discussed how fruits and veggies bind carcinogenic bile acids in our gut. Since bile acids are absorbed back into our systems, they may increase our risk of not only colon cancer......