Nutrition
In Elemental. More on Medium.
How exposure to misinformation inoculation sometimes makes things worse
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? …
There’s a scientific reason to just eat what you want
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…
Staying healthy in a pandemic means both avoiding infection and shoring up our immune systems
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.
New study shows time-restricted eating can cause weight loss, but no more than a healthy diet
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…
It can be hard to keep up with ever-changing guidelines. Marion Nestle shares a few principles to help steer you right.
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…
The Nuance
Studies highlight potential life-saving benefits. But some experts aren’t convinced.
The study’s findings were significant — “spectacular” even, in the words of at least one expert commenter.
A team of doctors at Reina Sofía University Hospital in Córdoba, Spain, split 76 newly admitted Covid-19 patients into two groups. One group got the standard treatment at the time, which included a cocktail of antibiotics and immunosuppressant drugs. The second group got the same standard treatment — plus a drug designed to raise vitamin D levels in the blood.
Among the 26 hospitalized people who received standard care alone, fully half went on to the intensive care unit (ICU) because their disease…
The Nuance
A combination of several popular approaches could yield the best long-term health benefits
Americans are notoriously unhealthy eaters. The so-called Western diet—one that adores meat, abhors fat, and can’t get enough of processed food — has dominated menus and mealtimes for nearly half a century and has become synonymous with obesity and metabolic dysfunction. Short of swallowing actual poison, it’s hard to imagine a more ruinous approach to eating than the one practiced by many U.S. adults.
If this story has a silver lining, it’s that the dreadful state of the average American’s diet has helped clarify the central role of nutrition in human health. A poor diet like the one popular in…
Another objective will make a far greater difference.
One goal I encourage for all my clients is to feel deeply satisfied after each meal. I am a nutritionist, so that may seem surprising — aren’t I supposed to enforce meager portions? Not exactly. It turns out that being satisfied after each meal helps ensure your body is getting the nutrients it needs and helps you avoid reaching for unhealthy foods when you get too hungry later.
Whether you’re trying to manage your weight or autoimmunity or improve your cardiometabolic parameters (in the unlucky case that heart disease and metabolic dysfunction have joined forces to kill you), listening to…
