Do coffee drinkers live longer than non-coffee drinkers? Is it "wake up and smell the coffee" or don't wake up at all? I discuss these questions in my video, Coffee and Mortality. The largest study ever conducted on diet......

For the first 90% of our evolution, humans ate diets containing less than a quarter teaspoon of salt a day. Why? Because we ate mostly plants. Since we went millions of years without salt shakers, our bodies evolved into......

The endothelium is the inner lining of our blood vessels. Laid end-to-end, endothelial cells from a single human would wrap more than four times around the world. And it's not just an inert layer; it's highly metabolically active. I've......

Lasting for 3,000 years, ancient Egypt was one of the greatest ancient civilizations--with a vastly underestimated knowledge of medicine. They even had medical subspecialties. The pharaohs, for example, had access to dedicated physicians to be "guardian[s] of the royal......

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,......

In the United States, most deaths are preventable and related to nutrition. Given that the number-one cause of death and the number-one cause of disability in this country is diet, surely nutrition is the number-one subject taught in medical......

Fiber continues to be singled out as a nutrient of public health concern. We're getting only about half the minimum recommended intake on average. There is a fiber gap in America. Less than 3 percent meet the recommended minimum.......

During his career at Duke, Dr. Walter Kempner treated more than 18,000 patients with his rice diet. The diet was originally designed as a treatment for kidney failure and out-of-control high blood pressure at a time when these diagnoses......

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......

High dietary fiber intake may help prevent strokes. The belief that dietary fiber intake is protectively associated with certain diseases was postulated 40 years ago and then enormously fueled and kept alive by a great body of science since.......

Rice currently feeds almost half the human population, making it the single most important staple food in the world, but a meta-analysis of seven cohort studies following 350,000 people for up to 20 years found that higher consumption of......

The traditional Mediterranean diet can be considered mainly, but not exclusively, as a plant-based diet, and certainly not a whole foods, plant-based diet. Olive oil and wine can be considered essentially fruit juices. Even if one is eating a......

Olives and nuts are plant foods, and as such, are packed with antioxidants, raising the antioxidant level of our bloodstream resulting in lower fat oxidation and free radical DNA damage, but what's happening inside people's arteries? Researchers measured the......

In the PREDIMED study, from the Spanish "PREvencio ́n con DIeta MEDiterranea," a whopping 7,447 patients were randomized into three groups. These were folks at high risk for a heart attack, about half were obese, diabetic and most had......

The Mediterranean Diet is an "in" topic nowadays in both the medical literature and the lay media. As one researcher put it, "Uncritical laudatory coverage is common, but specifics are hard to come by: What is it? Where did......

Our epidemics of dietary disease have prompted a great deal of research into what humans are meant to eat for optimal health. In 1985, an influential article highlighted in my video The Problem With the Paleo Diet Argument was......

A recent article in the journal, Meat Science, acknowledged that a sector of the population perceives meat as a food that is detrimental to their health because of studies associating meat consumption with heart disease and cancer. So, the......

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......

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......

In response to concerns raised about the toxicity of Monsanto's roundup pesticide, which ends up in GMO foods (See Is Monsanto's Roundup Pesticide Glyphosate Safe?), Monsanto's scientists countered that these in vitro experiments used physiological irrelevant concentrations, meaning dripping......

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,......

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......