Despite the most widely accepted and well-established chronic disease practice guidelines uniformly calling for lifestyle change as the first line of therapy, doctors often don't follow these recommendations. As seen in my video, The Best Kept Secret in Medicine,......

After about age 20, we may have all the insulin-producing beta cells we're ever going to get. So if we lose them, we may lose them for good. Autopsy studies show that by the time type 2 diabetes is......

Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in the United States, after lung cancer. The rates of lung cancer around the world vary by a factor of 10. If there was nothing we could do to......

More than 2000 years ago Hippocrates (460-377 BCE) said, "If we could give every individual the right amount of nourishment and exercise, not too little and not too much, we would have found the safest way to health." What......

Gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) is one of the most common disorders of the digestive tract. The two most typical symptoms are heartburn and regurgitation of stomach contents into the back of the throat, but GERD is not just burning......

Pesticides have been classified as probable carcinogens for 25 years. Different pesticides have been associated with different cancers through a variety of mechanisms, including genetic damage--direct hits to our DNA or chromosomes--and epigenetic modification, changes in the way our......

Generally, adherence to healthy lifestyle patterns has decreased during the last 18 years. Obesity is up, exercise is down, and the number of people eating just five servings of fruits and veggies a day dropped like a rock. And......

If oatmeal is so powerful that it can clear up some of the ravages of chemotherapy just applied to the skin (see my video Oatmeal Lotion for Chemotherapy-Induced Rash), what might it do if we actually ate it? Oats......

Recent studies have shown that higher Mediterranean diet adherence scores are associated with a significant reduction of the risk of death, heart disease, cancer, and brain disease. The problem with population studies like these is that people who eat......

No matter where we live, how old we are or what we look like, health researchers from the Institute of Circulatory and Respiratory Health have discovered that 90% of the chance of having a first heart attack "can be......

Intake of saturated fats and added sugars, two of the primary components of a modern Western diet, is linked with the development of Alzheimer's disease. There has been a global shift in dietary composition, from traditional diets high in......

Ever since smoking was prohibited in night clubs, customers have increasingly noticed other unpleasant smells present in the club--like body odors. So, researchers in Europe thought they'd try to cover them up. The researchers measured the effects of peppermint,......

A hundred years ago, the New York Times reported on a rather sophisticated study for the time: 4,600 cases of cancer appearing over a seven year period, suggesting that the increased consumption of animal foods was to blame. A......

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......

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......

58,000 Americans are diagnosed with kidney cancer every year, and 13,000 die. And the numbers have been going up. Approximately 4 percent of cases are hereditary, but what about the other 96 percent? The only accepted risk factor has......

Just like mosquitos are the vectors of spread for malaria, a landmark article published last year in one of the most prestigious medical journals, Lancet, described large food corporations as the vectors of spread for chronic disease. Unlike "infectious......

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......

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......

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......

Hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States every year are attributed to obesity, now overtaking smoking as perhaps the main preventable cause of illness and premature death. In particular, excess body fatness is an important cause of......

The food industry spends billions on advertising. Promotion costs for individual candy bars can run in the tens of millions. McDonald's alone spends a billion dollars on advertising every year. Such figures dwarf the National Cancer Institute's million dollar......

Recently, there has been research examining the connection between poultry consumption and weight gain. One study out of the Netherlands examining about 4,000 people, correlated chicken consumption with weight gain. Another study followed 89,000 people in four other countries......

When the history of the world's attempt to address obesity is written, one researcher writes, "the greatest failure may be collaboration with and appeasement of the food industry." For instance, Yum! Brands, who owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, linked up......

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......