Leading scientist in the field of nutrition
A hot button report was recently issued by the UK’s Chief Medical Officer. Bacteria or viruses, it explained, can kill long after they have left the building (1). In older persons, the inflammatory and other stresses caused by an infection can resurface up to a year later as...
In the USA, so-called ‘deaths of despair’ (overdose, suicide and alcohol-related disease) started to rise dramatically in the early ‘90’s, and they have continued to grow (1). A recent Ohio State University study found that these trends likely followed on from a sharp decline in church attendance (1),...
If you develop polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR), you will be as sick as a parrot. It is no fun at all. Textbooks describe it is a common autoimmune inflammatory disease affecting older adults. Typical symptoms include bilateral shoulder and hip pain, with an aching neck and prolonged morning joint...
I wrote previously about how atrial fibrillation (AF) can be avoided, postponed or stabilised (1, 2), but I skated over a key part of the story. I will try to rectify that in this post. It’s important because the numbers of individuals with atrial fibrillation are projected to...
Epigenetic clocks, which count down age-related changes in DNA methylation, are coming up to speed. These are not the only biological clocks, but they appear to be the most promising tools for measuring biological age and vulnerability (1, 2). The first-generation Horvath’s and Hannum’s clocks were trained on,...
Things don’t go better with Coca Cola. At all. A growing body of evidence puts the Atlanta-based ‘total beverage company’, and rivals PepsiCo and Keurig Dr Pepper, close to the centre of global declining health. Even the CDC, a conservative body currently under timely revision by Bobby Kennedy’s...
In Swedish folklore, Frukt and Grönt were the most feared of all trolls. They hunted down children who misbehaved at table, and forced them to eat salad (101). Frukt lives on as a death sandbox in Steam, where you can maim and kill voxel-based humanoids at will (2)....
Piblokto, aka Arctic hysteria, is an Inuit syndrome where the afflicted dance wildly, tear off their clothing and roll naked on the ice; followed by amnesia. Some say it is caused by vitamin A overdose, others favour social stress. I suspect it may be caused by over-indulgence in...
It’s getting harder to breathe. Two of the main degenerative conditions which make breathing difficult, namely chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD) and pulmonary hypertension (PH), appear to be trending upwards (1, 2), and are certainly becoming an increasing global burden (1-3). If you have COPD you are more...
The previous post glossed over the history of magic bullets, their inherent limitations and the way they have distorted the practice of medicine. In an unexpected plot twist, it now appears that due to over-reliance on magic bullets to treat the non-communicable diseases, while allowing public nutrition and...