Health Tips

Weird News : Niacin is also known as vitamin B3, or nicotinic acid. It is an essential vitamin whose deficiency leads to pellagra. In large doses of 1 to 3 g per day it has several effects on blood lipids, including an increase in HDL cholesterol and...

Weird News : Cortisol is a hormone that plays several very important roles in the human body. Many of these are health-promoting, under the right circumstances. Others can be disease-promoting, especially if cortisol levels are chronically elevated.Among...

Weird News : Excessive dietary fructose has been shown to cause an unhealthy elevation in serum triglycerides. This and other related factors are hypothesized to have a causative effect on the onset of the metabolic syndrome. Since fructose is found...

Weird News : Many sports combine three key elements that make them excellent fitness choices: play, resistance exercise, and endurance exercise; all at the same time. Soccer is one of those sports. Its popularity is growing, even in the US! The 2010...

Weird News : Many people think that the prettiest faces are those with very unique features. Generally that is not true. Pretty faces are average faces. And that is not only because they are symmetrical, even though symmetry is an attractive facial...

Weird News : Tripe dishes are made with the stomach of various ruminants. The most common type of tripe is beef tripe from cattle. Like many predators, our Paleolithic ancestors probably ate plenty of offal, likely including tripe. They certainly did...

Weird News : Trying to understand each body response to each diet and lifestyle change, individually, is certainly a losing battle. It is a bit like the various attempts to classify organisms that occurred prior to solid knowledge about common descent....

Weird News : The notion that exercise reduces blood glucose levels is widespread. That notion is largely incorrect. Exercise appears to have a positive effect on insulin sensitivity in the long term, but also increases blood glucose levels in the short...

Weird News : Many animals take naps during the day. Our ancestors probably napped during the day too. They certainly did not spend as many hours as we do under mental stress. In fact, the lives of our Paleolithic ancestors would look quite boring to...

Weird News : An adult human has about 5 l of blood in circulation. Considering a blood glucose concentration of 100 mg/dl, this translates into a total amount of glucose in the blood of about 5 g (5 l x 0.1 g / 0.1 l). That is approximately a teaspoon...

Weird News : The other day I showed a YouTube MovNat video clip to one of my sons, noting the serious fitness of Erwan Le Corre. I also noted that the stunts were somewhat dangerous, and that they tried to replicate some of the movements that our Paleolithic...

Weird News : There have been many references recently on diet and lifestyle blogs to the China Study. Except that they are not really references to the China Study, but to a blog post by Denise Minger. This post is indeed excellent, and brilliant,...

Weird News : The photos below, from Wikipedia, show two patterns of abdominal fat deposition. The one on the left is predominantly of subcutaneous abdominal fat deposition. The one on the right is an example of visceral abdominal fat deposition, around...

Weird News : The two photos below (click to enlarge) were taken 4 years apart. The one on the left was taken in 2006, when I weighed 210 lbs (95 kg). Since my height is 5 ft 8 in, at that weight I was an obese person, with over 30 percent body fat....

Weird News : In the comments section of Denise Minger’s post on July 16, 2010, which discusses some of the data from the China Study (as a follow up to a previous post on the same topic), Denise herself posted the data she used in her analysis. This...

Weird News : In this previous post I analyzed some data from the China Study that included counties where there were cases of schistosomiasis infection. Following one of Denise Minger’s suggestions, I removed all those counties from the data. I was...

Weird News : Too much complexity in the last few posts and related comments: multivariate analyses, path coefficients, nonparametric statistics, competing and interaction effects, explained variance, plant protein and colorectal cancer, the China Study,...

Weird News : Hormone replacement therapies are prescribed in some cases, for medical reasons. They usually carry some risks. The risks come in part from the body down-regulating its own production of hormones when hormones are taken orally or injected....

Weird News : The July 26, 2010 issue of Fortune has an interesting set of graphs on page 14. It shows the rise of allergies in the USA, together with figures on lost productivity, doctor visits, and medical expenditures. (What would you expect? This...

Weird News : Cortisol is a hormone that has a number of important functions. It gets us out of bed in the morning, it cranks up our metabolism in preparation for intense exercise, and it also helps us memorize things and even learn. Yes, it helps us...

Weird News : Some studies become classics in their fields and yet are largely missed by the popular media. This seems to be what happened with a study by Levine and colleagues (1999; full reference and link at the end of this post), which looked at...