Mar 8, 2020Multiple problems with a study linking proximity to major roads to dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and MSI’m often asked how I keep up with a deluge of information on a relatively wide variety of fields in medicine. One thing I do is skim the headlines of the latest news on a particular topic sent to my email from ScienceDaily, a press-release aggregator. …Longevity7 min readLongevity7 min read
Mar 1, 2020The red meat and plant-based recommendation warsA few months ago, the Annals of Internal Medicine published 6 papers by the same group of investigators — part of the Nutritional Recommendations and accessible Evidence summaries Composed of Systematic reviews (NutriRECS) — investigating the impact of unprocessed red meat and processed meat on cardiovascular disease, cancer, and all-cause…3 min read3 min read
Feb 23, 2020The pleasure of finding things outWhy do those last few “O”s in a bowl of Cheerios tend to clump together in the middle of the bowl or around the edges? If you’ve ever wondered about this, you’re not alone. A couple of Harvard mathematicians actually published a paper on the “Cheerios effect” in 2005. The…5 min read5 min read
Feb 16, 2020Alzheimer’s disease and glucose metabolismI recently read an encouraging perspective in JAMA titled, “In Alzheimer’s Research, Glucose Metabolism Moves to Center Stage.” The article points to accumulating research suggesting glucose hypometabolism in the brain is not just a marker of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), but a maker of it. I say “encouraging” because for about…Longevity2 min readLongevity2 min read
Feb 9, 2020The killer(s) on the road: reducing your risk of automotive deathLast week we talked about how we can often conflate the frequency and severity of accidents. We may mistakenly believe that the chances of dying are greater in the air than on the road because the severity of aviation accidents can be devastating. Compare that to automotive accidents where the…10 min read10 min read
Feb 2, 2020Making sense of tragedyAs soon as this week’s podcast with Ryan Holiday went up people began contacting me to say how timely it was, if not outright eerie, given it was recorded a few months earlier. …5 min read5 min read
Jan 26, 2020Nobel retractionsFrances Arnold, a chemical engineer at Caltech, was awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Arnold received the Nobel Prize for the directed evolution of enzymes, a method used in protein engineering to mimic (and speed up) the process of natural selection to manipulate, identify, and design proteins that have…3 min read3 min read
Jan 19, 2020Intermittent fastingIn my previous email, I laid out a nutritional framework, consisting of 3 levers-dietary restriction (DR), caloric restriction (CR), and time restriction (TR)-and alluded to a recent review in The New England Journal of Medicine ( NEJM) highlighting TR (i.e., when you eat and don’t eat). (We also just released…Fasting4 min readFasting4 min read
Jan 12, 2020My nutritional frameworkI recently read a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM): “ Effects of Intermittent Fasting on Health, Aging, and Disease.” This review is one of the latest making the case that when you eat (and don’t eat) can have a profound impact on your health. …Longevity3 min readLongevity3 min read
Dec 29, 2019Why is life expectancy in the US declining?According to a new study in , life expectancy (LE) at birth stopped increasing since 2010 and actually decreased in the US for three consecutive years. …Health2 min readHealth2 min read
