Glucagon, Dietary Protein, and Low-Carbohydrate Diets

Glucagon is a hormone that plays an important role in blood glucose control.  Like insulin, it's secreted by the pancreas, though it...

Is Sugar Fattening?

Buckle your seat belts, ladies and gentlemen-- we're going on a long ride through the scientific literature on sugar and body fatness.  ...

The Brain Controls Insulin Action

Insulin regulates blood glucose primarily by two mechanisms: Suppressing glucose production by the liver Enhancing glucose uptake by other ...

Choline and Fatty Liver

I've been writing about non-alcoholic fatty liver disorder (NAFLD) since the early days of this blog, because it's an alarmingly com...

Copper in Food

Sources of Copper It isn't hard to get enough copper-- unless you live in an industrial nation. I've compiled a chart showing the c...

Fatty Liver: It's not Just for Grown-ups Anymore

The epidemic of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of my favorite topics on this blog, due to the liver's role as the body...

Another Fatty Liver Reversal, Part II

A month ago, I wrote about a reader "Steve" who reversed his fatty liver using a change in diet. Non-alcoholic fatty liver disea...

The Diet-Heart Hypothesis: Oxidized LDL, Part II

In the last post, I presented the evidence that oxidized LDL (oxLDL) is a dominant factor in the arterial disease known as atherosclerosis, ...

Another Fatty Liver Reversal

Just to show it wasn't a fluke, reader "Steve" replicates the experiment: I had a similar problem as what Sam described, and i...

Letter to the Editor

I just got a letter to the editor published in the journal Obesity . It's a comment on an article published in October titled " E...

Fatty Liver Reversal

On April 15th, I received an e-mail from a reader who I'll call Sam. Sam told me that he had elevated levels of the liver enzyme ALT (a...

Eicosanoids, Fatty Liver and Insulin Resistance

I have to take a brief intermission from the heart disease series to write about a very important paper I just read in the journal Obesity, ...

Excess Omega-6 Fat Damages Infants' Livers

A nurse friend of mine sent me an e-mail a few weeks ago with a very interesting observation: On the unit I work on we get lots of babies wh...

Peripheral vs. Ectopic Fat

I went to an interesting presentation the other day by Dr. George Ioannou of the University of Washington, on obesity and liver disease. He...

Is Vitamin A Toxicity a Concern?

Several commenters have asked for my opinion on recent statements by prominent health researchers that many Americans are suffering from unr...

How to Give a Rat Metabolic Syndrome

I was doing my usual journal rounds today when I came across an article in the American Journal of Hypertension that caught my eye. It...

Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease

Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is milder form of NASH , in which the liver becomes enlarged and accumulates fat. Ready for a shoc...

How to Fatten Your Liver

Steatohepatitis is a condition in which the liver becomes inflamed and accumulates fat. It was formerly found almost exclusively in alcohol...

More Liver

It's time to celebrate your liver. It's a hard-working organ and it deserves some credit. One of the liver's most important ove...

The Liver: Your Metabolic Gatekeeper

As I've been learning more about the different blood markers of metabolic dysfunction, something suddenly occurred to me. Most of them ...