# Dr. Paul Clayton

> Leading scientist in the field of nutrition


## Posts

- [Polly Wants a Steroid: a small clinical observation](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/polly-wants-a-steroid-a-small-clinical-observation/): 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 stiffness. Patients tell you it hurts to move, it hurts to be still, joints are stiff and painful (although not swollen), sleep fleeting, the aching and fatigue ever-present, life barely worth living. Until the condition is diagnosed, and the doctor prescribes (typically) prednisolone, or prednisone. Within a day or two the pain […]
- [This Heart’s on Fire](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/heartburn-the-inflammation-fibrillation-conversation/): 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 double or even triple by the year 2050 (3). It’s important because AF is progressive, and worsens over time (4). It’s important because the disease increases the risk of stroke and heart failure, and therefore mortality (5). And it’s important to me, at least, because I have lived with this condition for […]
- [Stop all the Clocks](https://drpaulclayton.eu/uncategorised/stop-all-the-clocks/): 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, and measure chronological age. Second generation PhenoAge and GrimAge 1 & 2 were trained on mortality and health indicators, and give some indication of life and health expectancy. Third generation DunedinPace measures the rate of epigenetic ageing, and hints at whether you were ageing more or less rapidly than average. Fourth-generation causal […]
- [Bad Coke Habit](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/bad-coke-habit/): 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 Make America Healthy Again movement, concedes that sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) are the leading source of added sugars in the American diet, and that people who consume these regularly are more likely to develop non-communicable diseases (1). The situation is broadly similar in Mexico (2), Canada (3), and almost everywhere else around the […]
- [Frukt og Grønt ](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/frukt-og-gront/): 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). Grönt is a low-level grunt who is defeated by Super64 in Smashtasm Season Two (3). (References 2 and 3 supplied by various grandchildren). So are the mighty humbled, and so it is with ultra-processed plant foods. Hailed by the politically correct but morally illiterate thought leaders of our time as the solution to […]
- [Seagull wine, so sweet and heady](https://drpaulclayton.eu/uncategorised/seagull-wine-so-sweet-and-heady/): 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 Seagull wine although, on reflection, entry-level indulgence might be enough. Seagull wine is allegedly made by cramming a dead seagull into a bottle of water and leaving it to ferment in the sun until it produces a vile and powerful booze, with top notes of guillemot and base notes of regret. This […]
- [À bout de souffle](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/a-bout-de-souffle/): 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 likely to acquire PH (4), so the two conditions may co-exist in the same unhappy patient; but pulmonary hypertension can and often does arise in the absence of COPD. The various sub-types of PH include pulmonary artery hypertension (PAH), a condition which originates in pulmonary arterial inflammation, re-modelling and increased resistance to […]
- [The Doctor is Out, Pt 2. THE BUGS ARE BACK IN TOWN](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-doctor-is-out-pt-2-the-bugs-are-back-in-town/): 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 therefore health to decline, the original antimicrobial bullets are being blunted. At the same time, the bugs are taking advantage of our malnourished and enfeebled status to fight back. We’ve been firing Paul Ehrlich’s magic bullets at them since 1910 (1), and resistance is growing; antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become a global […]
- [The Doctor is Out](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-doctor-is-out/): Why are so many doctors so resistant to nutrition, let alone pharmaconutrition, when diet-related disease is the leading cause of death in the world (1, 2)? Is it the continuing failure of the biggest sellers, fish oil and multivitamins, to show material benefits (3)? The persistent problems with quality control (4-7), the unsubstantiated claims (8, 9)? Or something more profound? We cannot know who we are unless we know where we come from; so let us gaze into the glaze of the rear-view mirror, until it gazes back into our souls. The history of medicine, like much of the history […]
- [Quantum fried chicken](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/quantum-fried-chicken/): Sir Roger Penrose has a remarkable mind, whatever that is. His contributions to math and physics lead to, among other things, a shared Nobel prize for his work on the inevitability of black holes. He subsequently became interested in the question of consciousness, and in his 1994 book Shadow of the Mind (Owen Clough’s time-tangled romance came much later, and the current iteration of me hasn’t read it), he developed a theory that consciousness is a manifestation of quantum events occurring in the brain. This theory was criticised, especially by neuroscientists, as another example of brilliance corroded by hubris, and […]
- [From Cod to Cannabis](https://drpaulclayton.eu/uncategorised/from-cod-to-cannabis/): In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter (an alleged victim of mercury poisoning) asks the koan ‘Why is a raven like a writing desk?’ The best answer I’ve seen (better than Carroll’s own) is that Poe wrote on both of them. My question is, why are cod like cannabis? To begin with, there is more to fish than PUFAs and polyphenols. They also contain lesser-known omega 3-polyphenol conjugates termed lipophenols, which play a critical role in mediating the anti-inflammatory effects of a fish-based diet. I will return to these important molecules in a pending post (1). The removal of […]
- [NOVA No Va](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/why-nova-doesnt-go/): Racoons, rats and pigs are opportunistic omnivores. Insects, grubs, birds, fish, plants, reptiles and carrion are all on the menu, as are humans when available. We are opportunistic omnivores too. Humans eat a huge variety of things, which is one reason for our evolutionary success. Nothing prepared us, however, for modern industrial food. They are best regarded as an evolutionary dead-end, and are clearly harming us (1); but can we always recognize UPF products when we see them? As foods are altered in ways which make them more processed, do they inevitably become unhealthier? Are UPFs always unhealthier than basic […]
- [SAME AMES SEAM? Phoenix Rising, Part Deux](https://drpaulclayton.eu/uncategorised/same-ames-seam-phoenix-rising-part-deux/): June 20th, 2025. The window of the cell in the monastery where I currently reside, on the windswept Jutland coast, looks out over the Limfjord. This morning I walked along three miles of narrow beach, with the scents of salt, beach roses and cow shit mingling on the breeze and a millennium of marine exoskeletons whispering under my feet. And I remembered a debate I waged 16 years ago with the late, great Bruce Ames at a conference in Vejle, just a few miles to the south. Bruce presented his theory about why cancer rates increase with age, which he […]
- [Walking in the Uncanny Valley](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/walking-in-the-uncanny-valley/): Bison disappeared from Central Europe over 200 years ago. Now they are once again crossing the Southern Carpathian Mountains thanks to WWF Romania and Rewilding Europe, a non-profit organization focused on restoring wild nature across Europe. The bison is a keystone species. In the ecologically impoverished areas where they were implanted and are now thriving, a lot has changed. By trampling undergrowth, grazing (eating grass) and browsing (consuming leaves and fruits from shrubs and smaller trees), fertilizing the ground and simultaneously spreading seed, they have transformed nutrient-poor scrubland into a patchwork of forest, grasslands and micro-environments in which diversity rapidly […]
- [The wrong week to quit antioxidants](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-wrong-week-to-quit-antioxidants/): Science does not exist in a vacuum. Like every other human activity it is socially, culturally and therefore financially embedded. For example, with hindsight it is easy to see that the Covid catastrophe was a toxic blend of political power-seeking, medical cowardice and pharmaceutical greed. We might not like what we see in the rear-view mirror, but ignoring it makes it even less likely that we will arrive at anything like a correct destination. I was scrolling through the archives when I stumbled across an article in the February 28, 2007 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. […]
- [Let me Count the Ways](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/let-me-count-the-ways/): We are all products of our environment. Being mildly Jewish, raised in a Presbyterian culture and the eldest of 4 children, I am ridiculously obsessed with taking care of others and racked with guilt when, for whatever reason, I fail to carry out what I believe to be my duties. If I had known then what I know now, I am certain I could have offered my beloved parents a little more life. I miss their wisdom. Every day I regret that my brother accepted the widely promoted fear porn of the Covid mRNA shots. I miss his obduracy. Had […]
- [The Sandpile of Health](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/1516/): In previous posts I have attempted to develop the idea of a perpetual slight instability (or ‘relaxed static stability’) at the core of life, which enables us to quickly adapt to and survive changes in the outside world. This manifests inter alia in the intrinsic variability of rhythm in the healthy heart, the vasomotor fluxes that compensate for changes in position or workload, the shifting rhythm waves that ebb and flow through our capillary beds, and the neuromuscular juggling act of remaining upright. We must be resilient and able to adapt when required, but the changes we make are at […]
- [That Touch of Minke](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/that-touch-of-minke/): I have long held that oily fish and fish oil are two very different things (1-4). This morning, ten years after the first paper I wrote on the subject (1), a fishing expedition into the archives turned up a couple of gems I had previously missed because they are not about fish oil. They concern cold-pressed, extra-virgin Minke oil (5, 6). The redoubtable Bjarne Østerud, Edel Elvevoll and Karl-Erik Eilertsen, professors at the University of Tromsø and the Arctic University of Norway respectively, are pioneers in this area of nutrition. They have been casting their investigative nets into the deep waters […]
- [In Vein](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/in-vein/): Thrombosis kills 1 in 4 of us (1). It is the underlying cause of most heart attacks, strokes, and venous thromboembolism (VTE), which includes deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. And it is, like so many other bad things, increasing (2, 3) … Isn’t modern medicine wonderful? Some of this increase reflects an ageing population (at least in some countries), and the figures were given an additional boost by Covid and the Covid mRNA vaccines (ie 3-8), both of which expose the victim to pro-inflammatory spike protein (9-11). And some of it talks to us about the modern exposome. I looked […]
- [Crossing the Food Desert](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/crossing-the-food-desert/): It is possible to find good food in North America but it’s expensive, thin on the ground and crusted around the edge of the continent. You won’t find it on the interstates, where fast food chains reign. Here food is assembled rather than cooked, portion control is king and what flavor there is comes in single-serve sachets. When you travel across the USA, you are crossing a food desert. The food deserts, areas where access to affordable, healthy food is restricted or nonexistent, are growing. Desertification is spreading in the heartland, and in expanding areas of poverty in the inner […]
- [Be Cool](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/be-cool/): At the sweet-smelling University of Cologne, elegant work with the nematode C elegans recently showed (1) that switching the worm temperature to cool activates proteasomes. These tiny barrel-shaped structures, present in all cells, are essential for protein quality control and therefore life. Protein production is a complex process with a lot of room for error. After transcription, translation and post-translational modifications are completed, over 80% of finished proteins do not meet spec (2-4). If they were to be incorporated into the enzymatic, structural or other cellular processes they were built for, they would cause havoc. Every cell therefore operates a quality […]
- [Winter Break for Research](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/winter-break-for-research/): Dear readers, I am writing to inform you of a forthcoming pause in my regular posts. Over the next few weeks I will share three or four more articles before stepping away towards the end of November to work on a collaborative project with a gaggle of economists. We’re analysing the potential cost savings associated with implementing a pharmaco-nutritional / preventative model of healthcare. As this research is complex and largely out of my area, it will keep me offline until February – but I think it worth doing. I have come to realise that while our political ‘elites’ are […]
- [The New Vulnerability](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-new-vulnerability/): W.H.O. Panjandrum Ted Ghebreyesus recently declared Monkeypox to be a public health emergency of international concern. The 2022 outbreak was linked to 140 deaths worldwide (a mortality rate of approximately 0.04%) and the new strain, which is described as being more dangerous and which is emerging just a little too late for the 2024 USA election, will likely kill more. Unless it loses virulence over time … Loss of virulence is not inevitable, but commonly occurs as an emergent pathogen evolves towards an ‘optimal level’ of virulence which overcomes host defenses sufficiently to allow multiplication in the infected individual, but […]
- [Watch Your Six](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/watch-your-six/): In supplemental circles, omega-6 fatty acids are not very popular. They have been linked to chronic inflammation, and all the many health conditions driven by chronic inflammation. The fact that so many of these diseases have increased – by up to 10-fold since 1900 (ie 1) – roughly over a period during which our intakes of omega 6 fatty acids increased by up to a thousand-fold (2), has led many nutritionists and nutritional scientists to connect those two trends. I tend to do so myself, although chronic inflammation is a complex process and there are many other factors, dietary and […]
- [Disorderly Conduct](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/disorderly-conduct/): There are difficult children, and there are children with conduct disorder (CD). CD is defined as a consistent pattern of severely antisocial and aggressive behaviors. If the kid from next door bullies others, kicks the cat, lies, steals and uses drugs and/or alcohol, you may have a CD player on your hands. CD is more serious than opposition defiant disorder (ODD), which is mostly about defiance to parental and school authority; but both can worsen over time before eventually emerging in young adulthood as antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), particularly if drugs are involved and social support is lacking. There is […]
- [Displacement](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/displacement/): Where does free will stop, and frittata begin? Last week during gaps between appointments I reviewed a few old posts and started to doubt the dubito cogito sum I borrowed for the recent sundowner article (1). Descartes was describing the autonomy of reason, but from there by easy stages I drifted over to the autonomy of self. Displacement is one of our common defences against a cruel world. It can be an effective coping mechanism but it makes us less authentic and it reduces our autonomy. Displacement is relatively easy to recognise, and there are recognised methods for undoing it, […]
- [Children of the Corn](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/children-of-the-corn/): One far-off June I drove south from Marquette in the UP down to Kalamazoo, then turned southwest to Champaign. Instead of an 8-hour sprint across the Interstates I navigated 23 hours of blacktop and chert backroads, tacking through green oceans of corn, corn, soy, soy and corn. These oceans cover 200 million acres in all, endless strobing waves of plant life interspersed with an archipelago of silos, a sprinkling of farmhouses and the occasional two-horse four-way outpost. Each year the US produces almost 500 million tonnes of corn and soy. Where does it all go? A little goes to plastics, […]
- [Shed Your Skin. A multiple vector strategy to reverse skin ageing](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/shed-your-skin-a-multiple-vector-strategy-to-reverse-skin-ageing/): The photo is a colored scanning electron micrograph of the epidermis, the outermost layer of the skin you see, at lower magnification, when you look in the mirror. It consists of dead cells, so anti-ageing cosmeceuticals do not work here. They work in the deeper tissues, and they are becoming more effective. But we are still only scratching at the surface. As the science of ageing has developed it has become apparent that the phenomenology of ageing is driven by multiple sub-routines. The ageing of the skin is a good example of this. The characteristic macroscopic changes are driven by […]
- [Ice Fishing](https://drpaulclayton.eu/uncategorised/ice-fishing/): Freshly caught fish are one of life’s primeval pleasures. For most inland consumers, however, fish must be preserved before it can be served. It might not be an obvious question, but how is preserving done? And could it be done better? I fly too frequently, and have left flotsam and jetsam in many countries. Jetsam (items too heavy, bulky or illegal to carry onto the jet) include dull coffee table books given to me as unwanted corporate gifts, bottles of ill-favoured local liqueurs, a clip of 9mm hollow point and, on one tragic occasion, a bone-in Jamon Iberico ham. In […]
- [Don’t let the sun go down on me](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/dont-let-the-sun-go-down-on-me/): ‘Sundowning’ describes a state of confusion in the elderly that develops in the late afternoon and lasts until sleep finally knits up the raveled sleeve. Disorientation may be accompanied by anxiety, agitation, aggression, pacing, ignoring directions, hallucinations. It signals progressive brain damage, and foreshadows the slide into dementia. The most notorious sundowner of our time is Joe Biden. The arc of his decline runs eerily parallel to that of Leonid Brezhnev, whose dementia was equally concealed during the last years of his dying empire but who had been, unlike Joe, a war hero and an effective politician in his younger […]
- [An Exercise in Bureaucracy](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/an-exercise-in-bureaucracy/): Slugs secrete slime, bureaucrats secrete bureaucracy. They polish the seats of their office chairs and do the bidding of their masters, which is generally directed towards money. They are highly motivated to protect their polishing rags, and thus naturally costive. In my experience they too grow towards money, as office plants grow towards the window. Good bureaucracy provides the order and stability that any complex organization or society requires to thrive. But bureaucracy can go bad (as it generally has done in the West), and le trahison des petits clercs turns away, with potentially fatal results, from the interests of […]
- [Tied To the Mast](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/tied-to-the-mast/): When most people think of mast cells, they mostly think about histamine intolerance (HI). HI symptoms include, in no particular order, asthma, congestion, diarrhea, facial flushing, headache, hypotension, urticaria, vertigo and vomiting. Then they think about avoiding mast cell triggers. Alcohol, aspirin, hot food insect stings, these are a few of their un-fav’rite things. But there is so much more to mast cells than histamine. They are a pharmacological treasure chest. Under the right conditions (and sometimes the wrong ones) they also secrete the anticoagulant heparin, together with a horde of proteases, leukotrienes and cytokines such as tumour necrosis factor, […]
- [Do Not Attempt To Adjust The Picture](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/do-not-attempt-to-adjust-the-picture/): According to UK Biobank data, excessive television-watching raises the risk of depression, dementia and Parkinson’s disease. Not just CNN, Fox News and the BBC, all of which are obviously neurotoxic, but TV in general (1). And what about computers? A screen is a screen is a screen, no? Maybe not. While full-time computer work does seem to make folk more prone to depression (2-4), moderate daily recreational computer use appears to protect against developing dementia (1). This is rather odd, especially when you consider that depressive illness is associated with an increased risk of dementia (5). How does this all […]
- [All About EVA](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/all-about-eva/): Vascular ageing describes changes in the structural and mechanical properties of the vascular wall which lead to increased arterial stiffness. Stiffness of the arteries is now recognized not only as a key component of vascular ageing, but as one of the most important structural biomarkers of overall biological age (1). Arterial stiffening is largely due to endothelial dysfunction, with substantial medial fibrosis and a variable degree of calcification. Reduced compliance in large arteries then exposes smaller vessels to increased down-stream hydraulic and laminar stresses which promote the closure or loss of arterioles and capillaries, altered tissue perfusion and end-organ damage […]
- [Player 2](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/player-2/): The fatty acid amides, compounds formed in the body but also found in certain foods (cited below), modify the activity of the endocannabinoid system. Amongst other things they inhibit the breakdown of the endocannabinoid anandamide, an entourage effect which is relaxing and calming. You may have experienced this at some point in your reckless youth. The best-known and the most commercialized of these compounds is palmitoylethanolamide, known to its many friends as PEA. PEA is well-established as an effective (and legal) analgesic and anti-inflammatory alternative to CBD, with anti-convulsant and sleep-enhancing benefits on the side. If you want to try […]
- [The New Order](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-new-order/): The photo shows actor-rapper Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) being force-fed, as a protest against procedure at Guantanamo Bay Prison. Force-feeding was not uncommon in Gitmo, and the medical profession disgraced themselves – as they often do – by agreeing to participate in this barbaric practice. It is a form of torture, although there may be very few exceptions where it might conceivably be justified (1, 2). Food can be torture, then, but it is many other things too. It is nutrition, of course, and pleasure, but there is more to it. Almost all religions have food laws of one sort […]
- [Sea Horses](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/sea-horses/): I have always loved the Beaufort wind scale, first developed in 1805 and woven into shipping forecasts since 1867. Despite its genuine functionality it is purely descriptive, and full of accidental poetry. Beaufort Force 3 (a gentle breeze to landlubbers) is almost a haiku: ‘Large wavelets. Crests begin to break. Foam of glassy appearance, Perhaps scattered white horses.’ The syllable counts may be wrong, but it is rather beautiful. Induce the poem’s seasonal reference while I misuse it to introduce the piscivorous equine. But don’t worry; from here on, it’s prose all the way to the end. Ahem. Horses don’t […]
- [The Unbroken Heart](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/1376/): Hi, my name is Paul and I’ve had a drug habit for 15 years. It started with personal trauma, which triggered Graves’ Disease, which led to persistent atrial fibrillation (AF). I was in fib, on anticoagulants and walking around with snakes writhing in my chest for 5 months prior to being scanned, electro-converted and put onto flecainide. Thanks, NHS. 50 mg flecainide b.i.d. has kept my heart beating more or less regularly since 2007 (1). It’s been good for me. I never experienced adverse effects, nor would I expect to at such a low dose. I admit that I didn’t […]
- [Ask your Doctor if Death is Right for You](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/ask-your-doctor-if-death-is-right-for-you/): The number of people with chronic degenerative diseases is rising, and so are the prices of pharmaceuticals. Healthcare costs everywhere are overflowing their budgetary banks (1) and if we were a rational species rather than a rationalizing one, reactive healthcare systems based on pharmaceuticals would have been replaced by now with low-cost, preventive systems based on pharmaco-nutrition. Thanks to the military/industrial/congressional / pharmaceutical / IT complex, however, we remain stuck at Do Not Pass Go. We can see the promised land of better health through nutrition but we cannot yet set foot there; stakeholders bar the way, and have made […]
- [Dying to Live, Living to Die](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/dying-to-live-living-to-die/): The modern diet condemns so many of us to chronic degenerative disease and premature death that it is dragging average life expectancy down (1, 2). If we all shifted to a healthier diet the incidence of non-communicable diseases would fall, likely by up to 90% (ie 3), and first health and then life expectancy would rebound. How could we achieve this shift? How could we best measure it? If we could affect such a change, what would this do to us as individuals, and to society? And finally, what might our experience then be of living, dying and death? When […]
- [The Bug is a Feature Pt 4: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-bug-is-a-feature-pt-4-good-fences-make-good-neighbors/): ‘Good fences’ is lifted, of course, from Robert Frost’s sinewy poem Mending Wall. Written in 1914, as fences were starting to fall across Europe, Africa and the Middle East, it reflects an elemental truth. Diversity may or may not be a strength but division definitely is the definition, identity, integrity and function. And so it is in us. We and our microbiota are co-dependent. We are not the same. The barriers between us divide us, define us and engender a relationship that benefits both parties. We allow those barriers to decay at our peril. The gut epithelial barrier, the largest […]
- [Autoimmunity](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/autoimmunity/): I was not born in the USA. I landed late in life, at the spot where Ponce de Leon sought the Fountain of Youth, and found instead a land of accelerated ageing. Three-quarters of all Americans are now overweight or obese (1). A 2018 survey found that only 12.2% of Americans were metabolically healthy (2). A mere four years later (post-Covid), that figure had fallen to 7% (3). Metabolic stress speeds up the aging process. It is not surprising that non-communicable diseases are occurring earlier in life, and that life expectancy is falling (see below). American public health is a […]
- [Class, Health and Universe 25](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/class-health-and-universe-25/): In the USA, and in many other developed nations, diet quality used to follow a socioeconomic gradient. Those at the top table ate a more diverse and generally healthier diet with more whole grains, lean meats, fish, low-fat dairy products, and more fresh vegetables and fruit (1, 2).  Those who sat below the salt ate foods containing more salt. Their diet also had a higher energy density, a lower nutrient density, and was crammed with more refined carbohydrates and more fats. In other words, it contained more ultra-processed foods (UPFs) (1, 2). This is one reason why obesity is more […]
- [Hothead](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/hothead/): Would you kill for a burger, fries and a shake? Today’s lifestyle promotes dysbiosis, endotoxemia, systemic chronic inflammatory stress, and metabolic disorders. All of these fan the slow-burning fires of neuroinflammation (1-4). Neuroinflammation in the hypothalamus, hippocampus, and other parts of the brain is a pivotal link between negative elements in our exposome such as the modern diet (5-7), social stress (8,9), a sedentary lifestyle (10, probably!), and a whole range of brain-related pathologies. These include anxiety (11, 12), depression (12, 13), reduced impulse control (14), impaired memory (15), and autonomic dysfunction (16) – which may feed negatively back to […]
- [Regarding participation in the event in Poland](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/regarding-participation-in-the-event-in-poland/): My sincere apologies for not being able to participate in the health conference in Poland. I was looking forward so much to being present in the event, but my  family illness forced me to change my plans. However, I will try to be available as long as possible after the presentation (online, obviously) to answer your questions.    
- [Phoenix Rising](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/phoenix-rising/): After half a century of extensive (and wildly expensive) research, and vast numbers of clinical trials – ClinicalTrials.gov currently lists 433,955 studies (1) – cancer remains the second-leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease. It is first or second cause in all developed countries, and it’s getting worse; over the last few decades, the incidence of cancer in adults under 50 years of age has steadily increased in those countries (2). We currently experience a 50% and rising lifetime risk (3, 4). Shuji Ogino is a professor at Harvard Chan School and Harvard Medical School, and […]
- [Superfluous Foods](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/superfluousfoods/): Every year the health editors launch a new Superfood. Blueberries, kale, kombucha, sea buckthorn, green tea, yerba mate, so passé … What’s new? According to a recent meta-analysis, which summed up no fewer than 80 prospective cohort studies, one of the most powerfully chemoprotective of foods is the humble carrot. Carrot consumption apparently reduces overall cancer risk by as much as 20% (1). The magic marker is, allegedly, alpha-carotene. The authors described the inverse association between carrot intake and cancer as “robust,” and recommended that “carrot consumption should be encouraged, and the causal mechanisms further investigated in randomised clinical trials.” […]
- [A Cure for Work](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/a-cure-for-work/): Karoshi is the Japanese term for death by overwork. The word first appeared in the second half of the seventies, and the term karojisatsu (suicide due to overwork) emerged shortly thereafter. These are not just individual but social problems. In 2015, the Japanese National Police Agency recorded 2,159 cases of karojisatsu (1), and the figures are trending up (1, 2).  Karoshi, too, is on the up and up, and it is extending its geographical reach. China has overtaken Japan, and with around 600,000 deaths from overwork per year likely tops the international league tables (3).  In 2021 the W.H.O. reported […]
- [Running Away](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/running-away/): Between 2013 and 2020 the USA population increased by 4.5%, and the number of cancer deaths increased by 4.3%1, 2. What is more, most cancers are occurring in progressively younger victims3. Whatever Big Pharma barkers might tell you, the situation is not improving.  We should focus more on prevention. This may be less lucrative (for some), but it is far better for us. Whereas the side effects of cancer treatment are uniformly harmful, cancer prevention brings multiple health benefits.  There are many ways of reducing the risk of cancer, and because they work in substantially different ways their protective effects […]
- [Magic Bullets vs the Smart Bomb](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/magic-bullets-vs-the-smart-bomb/): Earlier posts have mapped the rise and rise in the numbers of people developing one (and usually more than one) of the non-communicable chronic degenerative diseases, especially but not exclusively in the higher-income countries (1). These multiple negative trends are clearly driven by our profoundly unhealthy diet and lifestyle.  For the sake of balance, it is worth pointing out that the numbers of patients contracting and dying of infection are also increasing (ie 2) – and here too, our exposome is implicated. The increasing prevalence of malnutrition (3), which dysregulates and degrades our immune systems (4), feeds into this. But […]
- [The Calculus of Tartar](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-calculus-of-tartar/): The first recognizable toothbrush, comprising hog’s hair bristle embedded in a bamboo handle, was constructed by an unsung Chinese genius some 1000 years ago. The historical roots of tooth care run, however, far deeper. 5000 years ago, the Babylonians and Egyptians were keeping their teeth clean with chew sticks made from the twigs and roots of Salvadora persica.  That plant, widely known as the Toothbrush Tree, is still in use to this day.  S Persica has a wide range of medicinal properties (ie 1) and the chew sticks, called Miswak or Siwak, are just about as good as modern toothbrushes […]
- [Meat and the Mediterranean](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/1273/): Roughly 6 million years ago, when the Mediterranean was cut off from the Atlantic, the middle sea started to shrink. Water inflows from river systems could not keep up with rates of evaporation and the once-fertile sea became a morass of marshes, salt flats and isolated brackish lakes. 700,000 years later the barrier to the Atlantic collapsed, and the Zanclean flood tore across the proto-European landscape. It has been estimated that 250,000 square kilometers of low-lying land were submerged within the first 48 hours (1, 2).  Now the Mediterranean is receding again; not the sea this time but the diet. […]
- [Innately Trained](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/innately-trained/): The above illustration1 represents one of the most important recent developments in immunology. It has radically changed the way we think about the innate immune system, and immunity in general. It turns out that the innate immune system has a memory2. This is not like the memory of the adaptive immune system, which can be life-long; the bulk of innate immune memory lasts for only a few days, although certain aspects of it may remain for a few years3. But it is critically important, and it can be trained. Positive innate immune training enhances health, and dietary tools can be […]
- [End of the Road](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/end-of-the-road/): ‘If something cannot go on forever, it will stop’. This statement might seem blindingly obvious, but it was coined in 1986 by the economist Herb Stein and is formally known as Stein’s Law. Herb was describing economic trends, but it is surely a general truth. It certainly applies to the current model of health care in which cost, supply and demand are locked in a mortal combat which cannot go on for much longer. On one hand, the West is moving into recession and thence, probably, depression. On the other, the average cost of biological drugs is currently anywhere from […]
- [Bones Brains and Automobiles](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/bones-brains-and-automobiles/): In older adults, dementia and osteoporosis often coincide.  Standard theory holds that as brain cells die off, physical activity, appetite and dietary quality fall so that bone is lost too. But it appears to be more complicated than that. A recent Neurology paper indicates that bone mineral loss predates the clinical diagnosis of dementia by up to a decade1, and the authors suggest that bone loss, particularly at the femoral neck, might be an early and robust risk factor for neurodegenerative disease. But is bone loss really a contributory risk factor, or is it just an association?  Is the relationship […]
- [The Mandible Claw](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-mandible-claw/): As an adolescent I used to occasionally watch professional wrestling on a dusty old black and white 12” TV set my parents kept in the attic. Catweazle, Mick McManus and Giant Haystacks grappled with simple morality tales in three rounds on Saturday afternoons when I returned home bruised and patched from playing rugby at Myreside. Then I learned about kayfabe1. The ring of pro wrestling is a stage, and the wrestlers mostly ringers. Catweazle played the underdog, McManus the heel, Haystacks the monster. I was, clearly, the Rube. Childhood heroes and underdogs generally prevailed, even when – especially when – […]
- [THANKS FOR ALL THE FISH](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/thanks-for-all-the-fish/): Don’t panic. I’m not going to start with a Hitchhiker quote. HHGTTG has not worn well, IMHO, and should be put away with other childish things. If you like science fiction, set the controls for the heart of Vonnegut, Philip K, Ballard, Brunner, Burroughs (William, not Edgar Rice), Gibson, Stephenson, Atwood possibly, even Zelazny.  Hitchhiker author Douglas Adams died young, of a heart attack, at age 49. If he had eaten more fish he might still be alive, and a better writer1. Fish are significantly cardio-protective2-4, and a growing body of evidence shows that they are good for the brain […]
- [Liver In The Coalmine](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/liver-in-the-coalmine/): Is it just me, or is everything getting worse?  Each time I stumble on a new interest and start digging up the epidemiology of some health condition or other, the picture is nearly always the same. Gout, BPH, diabetes, chronic pain, cancer, depression, allergy, preeclampsia, Parkinsonism, infertility, autism, essential hypertension, kidney disease, trauma-induced brain damage – I could go on – all are occurring in larger numbers of people, and, with the obvious exception of autism, in progressively younger ones.  The pharmaceutical industry, a notoriously corrupt and unethical business1, has been wildly successful in one metric at least, namely its […]
- [The Fat Controller](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-fat-controller/): 1954 was my first year at school, a Presbyterian establishment which built large numbers of doctors, lawyers and civil servants. Of around 2000 boys, only one had a weight problem. His name was Thomas so naturally we called him the Fat Controller, from the Thomas the Tank Engine books. The rest of us had body shapes more like this:  Thomas seemed out of place but he was, in retrospect, one of the first over-sized swallows of an endless summer. The fat pandemic, which started around 19801, continues unabated to this day. Despite vast sums of research funds wasted on finding […]
- [The Plastic Prostate](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-plastic-prostate/): Benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) has become very common in ageing males. Like so many other chronic disorders it is increasing, with a near-doubling in the last 2 decades1, 2. And as with the case of so many other chronic disorders, that increase is obviously due to our unhealthy diet and lifestyle because BPH hardly occurs in vestigial groups3.  The prostate grows rapidly during puberty (which is occurring at progressively earlier ages4), and remains at a fighting weight of circa 20g for a decade or two before – in the industrialised nations – it starts growing again. These two phases of […]
- [Heavy Metal](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/heavy-metal/): A surprising number of people requested a post on heavy metals. They are certainly a nutritional issue in some parts of the world, and although they are not universal drivers of disease their toxic effects may add to pathologies more directly caused by the industrial diet. And our exposure to them is increasing1. The term ‘heavy metal’ refers to a group of metallic chemical elements which have a relatively high density and are toxic at low concentrations, causing damage to multiple organ systems. They are also known or probable human carcinogens.  The grouping is rather arbitrary. It generally includes arsenic, […]
- [Matrix Reloaded](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/matrix-reloaded/): In the 18th century, before cells were identified as the basic unit of life, scientists believed we were made out of self-organising and self-replicating fibers. At the start of the 19th century Virchow’s ideas of cellular primacy became accepted, and fibers receded into the background. Today, the apparent dichotomy between cells and fibers is re-categorised as a deep mutual inter-dependency, which occurs on and around the extra-cellular matrix. The extra-cellular matrix, our ‘soft skeleton’, is an anomaly. Initially recognised as a tissue back in the ‘70’s, the extra-cellular matrix (ECM) was promoted to quasi-organ status around the turn of the […]
- [Dry Spell](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/dry-spell/): A recent research paper (1) which linked better hydration to extended health and slower biological ageing, generated a lot of publicity. The lay press overflowed with puff pieces claiming that drinking more water was the simplest and cheapest road to a longer and healthier life. Could it really be so simple? The story is not a new one. The current paper was derived from the US Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) study, and was the second in a series of similar results published by the same research group, but utilising an extended data set (2). A different research team, working […]
- [Posteclampsia](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/posteclampsia/): Preeclampsia affects up to eight percent of pregnant women worldwide, and kills 75,000 mothers and 500,000 babies each year (1). As the stats reveal, the syndrome is neither adequately predicted, prevented nor treated. This is partly due to the fact that preeclampsia presents differently in different individuals, partly due to the lack of sufficiently accurate predictive screening methods and partly due to money and politics. According to the current model, the condition is driven by a complex of related immunological, vascular and inflammatory changes in the placenta (1). This placental dysregulation then drip-feeds pro-inflammatory factors into the circulation which cause chronic maternal […]
- [Heavy Hydrogen](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/heavy-hydrogen/): Isotope 1H, common or garden hydrogen, comprises 99.98% of all hydrogen. It is in the air we breathe and the water we drink. Isotope 3H (tritium) is unstable and mildly radioactive, which is why it is used in luminous watches. From a nutrition and health perspective, however, the most interesting is 2H aka deuterium. It is also called heavy hydrogen, though with a molecular weight of 2 the deuteron is only heavy when compared to 1H. For the last 3 decades or so deuterium has been positioned, rather controversially, as a medical treatment. I had been looking for a new […]
- [Keep yer hair on Jimmeh!](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/keep-yer-hair-on-jimmeh/): The man in the photobooth is Rab C Nesbitt. Earl of alopecia and king of the combover, he was also occasional point man for Hamlet cigars (1). And his hair loss problem is growing. There are different patterns and types of hair loss. Two of the most common are androgenic alopecia, or male pattern hair loss; and alopecia areata, an auto-immune condition characterised by the sudden appearance of circular bald patches which can emerge on the scalp or anywhere else on the body. The global epidemiology of hair loss is not well documented but the incidence appears to be rising, […]
- [I want Candy](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/i-want-candy/): People say you should eschew sugar. My own take is a little more nuanced. I think it’s OK to chew, providing your levels of physical activity are sufficiently high for your skeletal muscle to be able to soak up enough of it from the blood stream, and your oral hygiene is good enough to keep your teeth intact. Starch, however, usually gets a pass – which is odd, because starch is basically slow sugar. Potatoes, bread, rice and pasta are all broken down at various rates into sugars in the small intestine, which impact directly on blood glucose levels. So […]
- [Food Fighters](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/food-fighters/): Malnutrition is rife. When you break the numbers down, it is the number one killer today (1). But there are different kinds of malnutrition. Among the wealthier nations, the industrial diet has triggered pandemics of non-communicable disease by overloading us with calories and seeding us with chronic inflammation, dysbiosis, glycemic overload and multiple micro- and phytonutrient depletion (ie 2).  The poorer nations suffer from a dual burden. They are poisoned by ultra-processed foods in the same way that we are, but they also have to deal with under-nutrition and food insecurity (3). The two different kinds of malnutrition coexist in […]
- [Grow Old With Me](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/grow-old-with-me/): There are various theories, or models, of ageing.  The gerontological model sees the different signs of aging driven by a single underlying process, leading to pre-programmed death (1, 2). According to the epidemiological model, ageing occurs semi-independently in different tissues and organs due to internal and external factors and stresses, which lead towards disease and ultimately death as tissues and organs move towards catastrophic failure (3, 4). Epigenetic ‘clocks’, annoyingly, show features of both models … The evolutionary senescence model holds that errors and problems accumulate in later life because natural selection, which generally removes anti-survival traits, only operates up […]
- [Walking Blues](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/walking-blues/): Gout is an exquisitely painful condition. It often afflicts the first joint of the big toe, which is why Hippocrates called it ‘the unwalkable disease.’ He also described it as ‘arthritis of the rich’, he wasn’t wrong there either. And it is on the march; thanks to our unhealthy lifestyles, the incidence of gout has more than doubled over the last 20 years (1, 2). This is one of many reasons why the numbers of people in pain are increasing in our increasingly sick and sad society (3). The rise in gout was all too predictable. Familiar risk factors such […]
- [Highly Evolved](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/highly-evolved/): Is your doctor trying to kill you?  In the USA, medical errors are claimed to be the third leading cause of death (1), accounting for as many as a quarter of a million fatalities every year (2). In one review, published by the USA Dept Health & Human Services Inspector General, 1 in 7 Medicare patients (ie aged over 65) experienced a serious treatment-related adverse event (3), resulting in 180,000 deaths / year. According to these papers, patients are harmed and killed by eight broad categories of medical error. These include: Diagnostic Errors.  Medication Errors Surgical Errors Labor and Delivery […]
- [Rights of Man](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/rights-of-man/): Although access to pain management is considered a fundamental human right (ie 1), safe and effective pain management is still, for many, an aspiration. In the United States over one in four adults suffers from chronic pain (2), largely because the drugs used to treat pain are so imperfect. The NSAID’s are linked to well-known GI and cardio problems (3), and following the public health crisis caused by the Sacklers’ unscrupulous marketing of opioids, many doctors now deliberately under-treat pain (4).  Has life always been so painful? (5) Actually, no. The prevalence of chronic pain has increased significantly during the […]
- [Xe and Thee](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/xe-and-thee/): The six elements in the far-right column of the periodic table (1), a table first constructed by my maternal great-granduncle Dmitry, are the noble gases. They are termed ‘noble’ because they hardly react to anything; they display a chemically aristocratic amalgam of hauteur and froideur.  Unruly life forms like us fret at the opposite end of the table, far below the salt. We react and adapt constantly to almost everything, although most reactions occur deep inside our cells and tissues and their effects may not become noticeable for decades, if ever. We do this because surviving and procreating in an […]
- [Sleeping with Darth](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/sleeping-with-darth/): CPAP stands for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. Lord Vader sounds like a man wearing a 20th century CPAP device, and should you ever be trapped in a lift with a group of Star Wars obsessives (these are probably not the fans you are looking for), they will explain that Darth’s outfit does indeed provide CPAP, regulating his air pressure and helping him to breath. Darth required CPAP because his lungs were charred when he fell into a lava pit on planet Mustafar, in the Atravis sector. This was an unusual case. Most folk use CPAP devices to alleviate obstructive sleep […]
- [Wasted on the Young](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/wasted-on-the-young/): Having graduated by stages from the turbulent sexual vectors of youth to the detachment of old age, I currently survey the world of puberty from 30,000 feet. From this vantage point the terrain looks challenging, to say the least. Gender dysmorphia is rife (ie 1), locked in an uncomfortable four-way with reduced impulse control (2-6), increased depression and anxiety (7, 8), and accelerated pubescence.  This post focusses on the last of these, the complicated transition into sexuality that has long been a substrate for lycanthropy (9-11). Accelerated onset of puberty predominantly affects females / people with uteruses / the current […]
- [A Place for Everything …](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/a-place-for-everything/): Multicellular organisms like you and me have a complex and shifting relationship with microbes. We need the right amounts of the right ones in the right places if we are to have a chance of good health. If we acquire too few or too many of the right ones, or if the right ones get into the wrong place, and of course when we acquire the wrong ones in any place, we are either sick or heading into sickness. For example. Endogenous probiotic species such as lactobacilli can (rarely) cause serious problems including liver abscess, peritonitis and meningitis, if they […]
- [Controlled Flight into Terrain](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/controlled-flight-into-terrain/): The darkest hour is just before dawn. And that’s when the trouble really starts. Previous posts looked at the decline in our collective intelligence, and the ways in which epigenetic programming will likely make that negative trend worse. Other posts considered our failing mental health, and the rising tides of anxiety disorders and depressive illness. The non-elites are being crushed, consumer confidence is at an all-time low (1), deaths of despair are at an all-time high (2). If the recent China-Eastern crash is confirmed (3), pilot suicide is now the leading cause of civil aviation deaths (4); but whether you […]
- [AfterMath](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/aftermath/): According to Jennifer Ruef, Assistant Professor of Education Studies at the University of Oregon, math trauma is ‘a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics. It causes stress which destroys careers and damages lives.’ (1) There are certainly individuals who are thrown into a spin by vortex math, but is this really trauma? Is math trauma really analogous to PTSD? And if so, what does that tell us about who and what we have become? PTSD, previously called shell shock or war neurosis, was originally defined as the lasting trauma caused by combat exposure. Lateral concept […]
- [The Knee Thing](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-knee-thing/): Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa is either under a Jersey City landfill, a barn in the Detroit suburbs, the turf of the Giants old football stadium in East Redford or the 9th hole of a golf course on Wilmington Island. Nobody really knows (1). We do know, however, where Hoffa’s fat pad is buried. Named after Albert Hoffa, a German surgeon who may have been Jimmy’s paternal great-uncle, the pad is located behind the patella and inside the knee joint capsule. It is part of the shock-absorbing structure of the knee joint (2). And because it extends into the space between the […]
- [Why I hate supplements](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/why-i-hate-supplement/): In medieval times, relics were the thing if you wanted to stay well. Some opted for fragments of the bones of a saint, others preferred splinters from the one true cross. Less godly but equally gullible, we prefer supplements. Fish oil capsules and multivitamins are our relics, and they are every bit as effective as the bone and wood they displaced.  In a previous post (1) I debunked fish oil, now more or less abandoned by the Cochrane Collaboration and all those who swim with them. The fish oil industry is worth about $12 billion per annum (2), and is […]
- [Peto’s Pets](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/petos-pets/): Peto’s Paradox (1), named after the great epidemiologist and statistician Sir Richard Peto, is well known in cancer circles. If every cell has a similar chance of becoming cancerous (due to random DNA hits / mutations), then larger animals with longer life-spans and more cells in their bodies should have higher rates of cancer. They don’t, and that is the paradox.  Larger and longer-lived animals must have developed highly effective chemo-protective machinery, because animals with 1000 times our number of cells do not have 1000 times more cancer than us. In fact, some of the largest animals such as Great […]
- [The Politically Correct Diet](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-politically-correct-diet/): The period formerly known as the Dutch Golden Age, which ran through much of the 17th century, was a golden and pluralistic age indeed. Dutch masters included not only painters Hals, Vermeer, Rembrandt and Steen, but also scientists / philosophers such as microscopists Antonie van Leeuwenhoek and Jan Swammerdam, the physicist Christiaan Huygens, the refugee Rene Descartes and the stoical Benedict Spinoza. These masters influence us to this day. When Spinoza argued that a state that did not allow for freedom of expression encouraged violence, he was praising the Dutch values of tolerance, free thought and inclusion. These were not, […]
- [A Hooligan’s Game](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/a-hooligans-game/): Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be rugby players. A recent research paper (1) found that after a single season, every single player in an un-named (Welsh) pro rugby team of test monkeys showed significant loss of brain function.  As the professional rugby season runs a mere 16 games, this makes the sport more acutely cognitively damaging than watching too much TV (2). Depending on where you start from, a couple of playing seasons could bring your IQ down to game show host level. Other studies of rugby playing gentlemen have generated broadly similar findings (3-5). The trans-Atlantic […]
- [Gut-brain Short-circuit](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/gut-brain-short-circuit/): The gut-brain connection is increasingly well-documented. From autism (1) to emotional well-being (2), multiple aspects of personality (3), disorders of affect and anxiety (4) and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinsonism (5) and perhaps Alzheimer’s (6), it is abundantly clear that the bugs in our gut have major short- and long-term effects on our brains, and our artificially insular construct of self. Further evidence for the microbes in ‘me’ comes from the weird world of bariatric surgery.  A relatively successful surgical procedure in terms of achieving weight loss in the morbidly obese, it has long been associated with post-operative personality and […]
- [The Methyl Lab](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-methyl-lab/): Almost all of the cells in your body have the same genes, but they display different forms and functions in different tissues because of epigenetic differences.  Epigenetics is a fairly new science.  The word was first coined in 1942 by Conrad Waddington, in whose Edinburgh lab my mother was principal researcher and portrait painter (1). I remember him, hazily, and a host of brilliant scientists who tumbled through my childhood like white water. They included Aubrey Manning, Charlotte Auerbach, Goro Eguchi and Tokindo Okada, who I drove around Edinburgh on the back of my first motorbike long before he became […]
- [Asleep at the Wheel](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/asleep-at-the-wheel/): Sleep well last night? If so, you are apparently in a minority. The American Sleep Association, the Sleep Foundation and the American Association of Sleep Technologists all claim that over half of adults have a sleep disorder (ie 1).  These dogs could just be barking in the night, but the only slightly less opaque National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tells us that 1 in 25 drivers fall asleep at the wheel (2), and that this accounts for nearly 100,000 crashes a year (3). So there does seem to be a real problem.  Stress, pain, poor sleep hygiene, crying children and […]
- [Shake hands](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/shake-hands/): First impressions are important, and a limp handshake is not a good calling card (1). It’s not particularly good news for you either, if you have one, because it is strongly associated with early death. Research in this area initially focused on poor handgrip as a prognostic for cardiovascular disease (CVD), but it soon broadened out. Handgrip strength, commonly used as a measure of general muscular strength, has been shown in a series of prospective studies to be inversely associated with CVD, Type 2 diabetes, cause-specific mortality and all-cause mortality outcomes (2-12), plus the closely related conditions of sarcopenia (13) […]
- [Border Crossing](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/border-crossing/): Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) comes with a difficult and shifting mix of behaviours, emotions and psychological traits. Lighter versions of BPD are manifest in Holden Caulfield (and probably his creator JD Salinger), and in Alice Klieg, the protagonist in the wonderfully off-kilter film Welcome to Me. A much darker version is on display in American Psycho, where Patrick Bateman combines elements of BPD with its more extreme analogue, psychopathy.  BPD also shares a border with the collection of symptoms that characterize the Highly Sensitive Personality but in contrast to psychopaths, HSP’s and those BPD’s aligned with HSP have acute awareness […]
- [D-day](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/d-day/): The past, like the future, is unknown and largely unknowable. Just when you think you have it pinned down it wriggles free and assumes new forms. History, like science, is revisionism.  Take D-day. One of the most amazing episodes on this most terrible of days was the ascent of a battalion of US army rangers on the Pointe du Hoc, a highpoint overlooking Omaha beach, to take a German battery. They succeeded but at terrible cost; of the 580 men 77 were killed, 38 MIA and 152 wounded. Considered a pivotal element in the D-day invasion and a byword for […]
- [The Shadow of Your Smile](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-shadow-of-your-smile/): In 1813, it was a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. In 2022, not so much. Unbalanced sexual endocrinology driven by the modern diet and the indiscriminate use of endocrine disrupting chemicals, solipsism enabled by social media and the fore-shadowing of the shades of the West, have conspired to produce an era of rampant sexual confusion. Will Jane marry Bingley? Or will she prefer Charlotte? In any case, in our accelerated and technically disconnected age there will likely be heartbreak at the end of it. And […]
- [Your Cheating Heart](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/your-cheating-heart/): Atrial fibrillation (AF), like a bad moon, is on the rise. Nutritional standards have fallen so low that within a single generation the age-adjusted prevalence of AF has quadrupled (1), a worrying trend that appears to be continuing (2-4). Even more concerning, the disease itself may be becoming more malignant. Students of medical history and ethnobotany will know something about the Cinchona or fever tree, which provides the closely related alkaloids quinine and quinidine. Their pharmacological properties overlap; quinine is the more effective anti-malarial and quinidine is the more effective anti-arrhythmic. Quinidine fell out of favour in the mid-60’s (5) […]
- [The Price of Eggs](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/the-price-of-eggs/): The most terrifying nine words in the English language, according to president Ronald Reagan, are ‘I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help’. Nowhere is this more true than in the whacky world of nutrition. Let’s start with the egg, and let the chicks fall where they may. Many people still think that eggs are unhealthy, due to their high content of cholesterol. This misconception didn’t start with pure science but from an ugly collision of science, politics and money. At the fatty heart of it all stands Ancel Keys. Although John Goffman blazed the cholesterol trail (1), Ancel […]
- [Dietary Sodium Intake and Morality](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/dietary-sodium-intake-and-morality/): Cutting salt consumption reduces blood pressure at the population level, and reduces the risk of strokes. The Salt Substitute and Stroke Study just confirmed this (1).  21,000 rural Chinese with a history of hypertension and/or stroke were divided into two groups. The intervention group was given a low-sodium / high-potassium salt substitute to cook with, the controls were left with table salt. After 5 years the intervention group had a 14% reduction in stroke, a 13% reduction in major cardiovascular events and a 12% reduction in deaths. The controls stroked, infarcted and died just as they did before the white […]
- [Time and Spice](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/time-and-spice/): As we pass through time, or as it passes through us, a series of changes accumulate which we call ageing.  Superficial changes such as the progressive symptoms of chronic degenerative diseases can in many cases be prevented, and partially or completely reversed using inexpensive pharmaco-nutritional tools.  Deeper delta such as the reduced expression of mRNA splicing factors, the loss of telomeric DNA, declining immune-surveillance, the lack of progenitor cells, the loss of proteostasis and the accumulation of senescent cells, seemed inaccessible.  Until quite recently. For anyone who left college more than 30 years ago, RNA splicing might just be the […]
- [What are You Thinking?](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/what-are-you-thinking/): A previous post (‘Blood Bath’) looked at heterochronic parabiosis, which describes the transfusion of blood from young animals to old ones and vice versa. Blood is a rich and highly bioactive soup of mediators, messengers, inhibitors and growth factors, and when drawn from a young ‘un is capable of de-ageing mice and, probably, men.  The process has been shown to rejuvenate murine mitochondria (1, 2), blood vessels (2, 4), skeletal muscle (3), hearts (3) and central nervous systems (4 – 7). On the basis of pre-clinical findings like these, the US company Alkahest is running clinical trials of young plasma […]
- [Sweet Nothing](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/sweet-nothing/): ALLULOSE (‘all you lose’) may be the perfect match of sweetness and calories that will finally allow us to have that cake, eat it and stay slim. It is the latest in a long line of sugar replacements, and it might be the one that everyone has been waiting for.  It’s not exactly new – preclinical studies started around 2000 (ie 1), and it was first launched commercially in Japan in 2013 – but it has been keeping a low profile. So far. The original name of this molecule was d-psicose. D-psicose / D-allulose is one of around 50 ‘rare […]
- [Stay Hungry](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/stay-hungry/)
- [Is Pisces compatible with Cancer?](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/is-pisces-compatible-with-cancer/): When Bill Lane’s book ‘Sharks Don’t Get Cancer’ was published in 1992, it made quite a splash. It spawned a shoal of shark cartilage extracts which sold at inflated prices to cancer sufferers, without much effect. One of these, Bill’s own product Benefin, was trialed in patients with advanced cancer and found wanting (1). The hurdle may have been set too high and the product might conceivably have done better in earlier cases, but we will never know. Another extract, Neovastat, was demonstrated to have angiostatic properties and showed promise in various pre-clinical models of cancer (2). Four subsequent clinical […]
- [Diet and Destiny](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/diet-and-destiny/): If you have spent time in the American South, you know that Southerners barbeque, fry or deep-fry almost anything that moves or grows. The eponymous Southern fried chicken is a staple on lunch and dinner menus. Breakfast, of course, involves bacon, preferably crispy and carcinogenic. Sugar is shovelled into most things that aren’t fried, and many that are. It resembles the post-transitional Scottish cuisine which gave the world the deep-fried Mars bar, deep-fried pizza and for the morning-after connoisseur, deep-fried haggis. These delights (and copious cigarettes) made Glasgow the heart attack capital of the world (1). Had I not had the […]
- [Swarm from the Swamp](https://drpaulclayton.eu/blog/swarm-from-the-swamp/): Vaccines are the parents – and the poster children – of magic bullet or Pasteurian medicine.  Each vaccine is super-specific, and only protects against the pathogen it is aimed at. Vaccines are super-safe; vaccine injury certainly occurs and can be devastating, but is not in the same league as the pharmaceuticals which kill large, if indeterminate numbers of people every year (1, 2). Now we have mRNA gene therapies which are not vaccines in the classic sense at all, and are still, in regulatory terms, licensed for emergency use only (3).  Q: How do they score when compared to the […]

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- [ABOUT](https://drpaulclayton.eu/about/about-2/): Dr Paul Clayton graduated summa cum laude in Medical Pharmacology from Edinburgh University, prior to obtaining his PhD. A former Chair of the Forum on Food & Health (UK), and Senior Scientific Advisor to the UK government’s Committee on the Safety of Medicines, he was a Fellow of the Institute of Food, Brain & Behaviour (Oxford). He works with leading doctors and clinical scientists at centres of clinical expertise in many countries, designing and supervising pre-clinical and clinical trials of pharmaco-nutritional interventions. Dr. Clayton’s books and e-books include Health Defence, After Atkins, Natural Defences, Out of the Fire, Let Your Food be Your Pharmaco-nutrition and […]


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