Does Calorie Restriction Extend Lifespan in Mammals?

Until about two years ago, the story went something like this: calorie restriction extends lifespan in yeast, worms, flies, and rodents.  Li...

Oltipraz

Oltipraz is a drug that was originally used to treat intestinal worms. It was later found to prevent a broad variety of cancers ( 1 ). Thi...

Polyphenols, Hormesis and Disease: Part II

In the last post, I explained that the body treats polyphenols as potentially harmful foreign chemicals, or "xenobiotics". How ca...

Tropical Plant Fats: Coconut Oil, Part II

Heart Disease: Animal Studies Although humans aren't rats, animal studies are useful because they can be tightly controlled and experime...

Tropical Plant Fats: Palm Oil

A Fatal Case of Nutritionism The concept of 'nutritionism' was developed by Dr. Gyorgy Scrinis and popularized by the food writer Mi...

Nitrate: a Protective Factor in Leafy Greens

Cancer Link and Food Sources Nitrate (NO3) is a molecule that has received a lot of bad press over the years. It is thought to promote dige...

Pastured Dairy may Prevent Heart Attacks

Not all dairy is created equal. Dairy from grain-fed and pasture-fed cows differs in a number of ways. Pastured dairy contains more fat-so...

Corn Oil and Cancer: Reality Strikes Again

The benefits of corn oil keep rolling in. In a new study by Stephen Freedland's group at Duke, feeding mice a diet rich in butter and l...

Skin Texture, Cancer and Dietary Fat

Richard and I exchanged a series of e-mails last week in which he remarked that Thai people generally have nice skin, which is something I...

Low Stomach Acid and Nutrient Absorption

As I mentioned here and here , low stomach acid (hypochlorhydria) causes many problems, including bacterial overgrowth in the small intest...

Sugar, Hydrogen, Bacteria and Maldigestion

There are several ways to cause a nutrient deficiency. The first is to eat too little of a nutrient. Another way is to burn through your b...

Vitamin D and Cancer

I'd like to point readers to a couple of posts by Richard Nikoley over at Free the Animal , on the relationship between vitamin D status...

Book Review: Dangerous Grains

Dangerous Grains is about the health hazards of gluten grains. It's co-written by James Braly, an M.D. who specializes in food allergi...

The Inuit: Lessons from the Arctic

The Inuit (also called Eskimo) are a group of hunter-gatherer cultures who inhabit the arctic regions of Alaska, Canada and Greenland. They ...

Sunscreen and Melanoma

Melanoma is the most deadly type of skin cancer, accounting for most skin cancer deaths in the US. As Ross pointed out in the comments sect...

Melanoma and Sunblock

A report came out recently showing that melanoma incidence has increased dramatically in the US since 1973, particularly among women. The ...

Cancer in Other Non-Industrialized Cultures

In Cancer, Disease of Civilization (1960), Wilhjalmur Stefansson mentions a few cultures besides the Inuit in which large-scale searches ne...

Mortality and Lifespan of the Inuit

One of the classic counter-arguments that's used to discredit accounts of healthy hunter-gatherers is the fallacy that they were short-l...

Cancer Among the Inuit

I remember coming across a table in the book Eat, Drink and Be Healthy (by Dr. Walter Willett) a few years back. Included were data taken ...