While on vacation, Marcial Conte, the Brazilian publisher of my first book, met a woman who asked about his work. Upon learning he was responsible for A Mentira do Glutén: E Outros Mitos Sobre O Que Voce Comê (The Gluten Lie: And Other Myths About What You Eat), she lit up.

Her husband, she said, had followed my revolutionary diet protocol and changed his life. Pounds melted away. Myriad health problems resolved themselves.

“She told me to thank you for saving her husband’s life with the ‘UNpacked Diet,’” Conte grinned at me. “Incredible, no? …

If history tells us anything, we are on the edge of a new age of extreme dieting, disordered exercising, and systemic size bias. It’s a long-held cultural pattern: Periods of hardship and uncertainty tend to yield extreme diet fads and a general rise in disordered eating. As dietary historian Susan Yager notes, some of our most bizarre and restrictive diet trends emerged in the middle of the Great Depression. A century later, we find ourselves one year into a devastating pandemic, slogging through an economic crisis, and at the start of a winter of uncertainty. We are vulnerable and stressed…

During the holidays, the liver tends to work overtime digesting food and cocktails. As Angela Lashbrook reports for Elemental, “like an office manager who remembers everyone’s birthdays and duties while their own contributions are forgotten, the liver keeps the rest of the body’s functions running smoothly.” The liver is a critical body detoxifier and also one of the only irreplaceable organs. Yet it doesn’t always get the credit it deserves. Lashbrook writes:

Luckily for holiday revelers everywhere, the liver is the salamander’s tail of the human body: It’s the only internal organ with regenerative abilities. Scientists aren’t totally sure why…

There are many metrics that are currently used to assess human health that aren’t based in sound science, and yet they persist. The body mass index (BMI) is one of them. Even the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that the BMI “can be used to screen for weight categories that may lead to health problems but it is not diagnostic of the body fatness or health of an individual.”

Writer Annaliese Griffin spoke to health experts and came up with five new metrics to assess your health that have nothing to do with measurements like weight…

In medicine, as in other realms of life, the Covid-19 pandemic continues to unfold as a dark chapter of human history. Physicians have now treated scores of patients with every imaginable permutation of this infection. As unrelenting as this virus is, we have seen infectious disease epidemics before, and we know how to mitigate their spread.

The measures that physicians and public health agencies continue to advocate for — mask-wearing, physical distancing, hand-washing, avoiding large gatherings, and limiting travel — are based on decades of public health outcomes research. And we know they work.

While it is clear that these…

In a blow to the latest dietary darling, a recent study found that people who practiced time-restricted eating (also known as intermittent fasting) didn’t experience any significant weight loss compared to a control group. The paper undermines one of the most popular and seemingly simplest diet and optimization fads of the past decade — eat whatever you want during a specific time window, and you’ll lose weight, achieve mental clarity, and simplify your life.

“It seemed like the ideal intervention,” says Ethan Weiss, MD, lead author of the new study and an associate professor at the University of California, San…

Six years ago on a spring day in Indiana, suddenly and without warning, Will had his first seizure. Shortly thereafter, the previously healthy 5-year-old was diagnosed with generalized epilepsy. Despite starting treatment, Will’s epilepsy continued to worsen.

His mother, Sarah Ackerman, recalls, “We tried medicine after medicine, upping the doses and combining it with others only to see his condition drastically decline. He went from having just a few generalized myoclonic seizures to over 100 a day within the first two months. His numbers continually increased as the months went on with no reprieve.”

Will’s epilepsy was preventing him from…

Everyone eats. Everyone can claim firsthand experience and expertise. Whose experience and expertise should you trust? “Mine, of course,” is my standard (slightly facetious) answer. I can understand why people trust celebrities more than scientists or nutritionists; they feel like friends, even if the relationship is unreal. It doesn’t help that nutritionists have impenetrably confusing credentials, ranging from none beyond personal experience to years of graduate and post-graduate study.

It also doesn’t help that nutrition science is so extraordinarily difficult to do. Just think of what it would take to show whether eggs, the largest dietary source of cholesterol, raise…