They’ve grown lungs with pigs, and it may only be five years away for humans.
Category Archives: Health
Intermittent Fasting
The evidence of the benefits continues to accumulate. During the week, I’ll go all day without eating, other than coffee and water. Of course, such articles always say this:
“I suggest people talk to their physician first,” Horne says.
In general, physicians are pretty ignorant about nutrition, and much of what they know is wrong.
Low-Fat Diets
LCHF seems to be getting more attention:
The mistaken belief that fats cause heart disease stems from weak, outdated research. Back in 1961, the American Heart Association published its first report recommending that people limit consumption of animal fats and dietary cholesterol. The report cited several studies that showed a correlation between high-fat diets and heart problems.
But that hypothesis had never been put to the test in a clinical trial. A controlled trial is the only way to prove a cause-effect relationship, rather than a mere correlation that could occur due to random chance or some other unknown variable.
As Dr. Phillip Handler, the former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences stated nearly 20 years later, “What right has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so little evidence?”
Eventually, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) started conducting clinical trials. However, these trials were deeply flawed. Additionally, when evidence contradicted the dominant medical narrative, researchers effectively buried it. One NIH study, which found little-to-no relationship between saturated fats and various health problems, was conducted between 1968 and 1973 but wasn’t published for another 16 years.
Despite the flimsy evidence against saturated fats, mainstream nutritionists still advise people to eat lots of carbohydrates and steer clear of fats. The AHA recommends restricting saturated fat consumption to 6 percent of total calories. Federal guidelines encourage people to eat fat-free or low-fat dairy and plenty of grains.
This advice is dooming hundreds of thousands of people to early death and disability. Every 40 seconds, someone in the United States has a heart attack. The disease costs Americans $200 billion annually in medical care and lost productivity.
For decades, our public health leaders have dispensed deadly dietary advice. That needs to change. Many doctors, myself included, have seen with our own eyes how low-carb diets help patients lose weight, reverse their diabetes and improve their cholesterol.
As time goes on I get more and more convinced that this criminally bad dietary advice killed my father in 1979.
[Wednesday-morning update]
Jordan Peterson and his daughter are on an all-meat diet. And of course, this nonsense comes up, as usual:
…doctors don’t think it’s healthy to have all meat, all the time. To prevent heart disease, the American Heart Association and the World Heart Federation recommend a low amount of saturated fats, the kind found in beef, pork, chicken, and other foods. Research links red meat to colorectal cancer. And an absence of vitamins and fibers, which normally come from fruits and vegetables, is a precursor to conditions like scurvy and constipation.
“I don’t see any health benefits of a diet focused primarily on red meat,” said Kristen Smith, a registered dietitian nutritionist with the Academy of Nutritionists and Dietetics, who said she’s seen the carnivore diet’s popularity grow on social media. “There’s currently no research to support that this type of diet has favorable long-term health outcomes.”
…Cholesterol is one of Weiss’s concerns, since too much of a certain kind of cholesterol heightens risk of heart disease and heart attacks. (Saturated fats, found in red meat, have long been assumed to drive up that risk, although some new evidence suggests that they may be less dangerous than believed. In a controversial editorial last year that departed from the recommendations of major public health groups, three cardiologists argued that saturated fats do not clog arteries and are not on their own a problem.)
Unscientific quackery from the usual suspects. And “…less dangerous than believed….” There is zero scientific evidence that saturated fat or dietary cholesterol are a problem at all.
Age Reversal
Will we see twenty-year-old mice soon? Well, not for at least twenty years or so. But this looks encouraging.
Resuscitating A Centaur
No, this isn’t about the upper stage. Glad someone is asking the important questions:
Serious question for #medtwitter: If you show up at a code, and the patient is a centaur who had a cardiac arrest, ignoring the joules question, where do you think the defib pads should go? A, assuming the heart is in the human part, or B, assuming the heart is in the horse part? pic.twitter.com/OJt9haEgx3
— Fred Wu, MD (@FredWuMD) July 28, 2018
The replies are great.
Rejuvenating Brains
Why is that mice get all the fun? I guess they suffer a lot, too, though.
Extending Lifespan In Older Mice
…with gene therapy. At some point, some of these things are going to help humans. Faster, please.
[Monday-morning update]
More from Brian Wang on not just life extension, but age-reversal. Human trials to start in maybe a couple years. But as previously noted, starting with dogs is a useful way to get around the FDA.
[Bumped]
Hyaluronic Acid
Listening to a medical show in south Florida, hearing someone discuss this. I’d never heard of it, but it sounds like quite a useful supplement.
[Update a few minutes later]
You can buy the product at Amazon.
S3x
It really does do a body good.
Well, it certainly feels like that.
Gene Therapy
This looks like a potentially huge breakthrough.