My regular readers know my skepticism about vitamin supplements. I leap at the chance to bring you news that some vitamin has been tested for some disease and found useless. So for balance, I have to also report when a well-designed study finds that a vitamin actually helps something.
This week’s New England Journal of medicine published a study about the treatment of nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH). NASH, also known informally as fatty liver, is a condition in which fat is deposited in ...
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A Dietitian’s Thoughts on Diet Sodas
Two weeks ago I wrote a post about the mistake we make when we think of some medicine or food as generally “good for you” or “bad for you” as opposed to having specific benefits and harms. I started with an anecdote in which a friend asked me whether diet sodas or regular sodas were better for you.
Susan Dopart, a terrific dietitian who I’ve known for over a decade, emailed me to bend my thinking about diet sodas and about non-nutritive...
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Your Food Is Pretty Safe, But it’s Not Getting Safer
In a world where journalism was free of hype the above headline would have been atop the many stories this week relating to a press release by the CDC about food-borne illness. The numbers are far less sensational than the headlines.
The CDC report reviewed statistics about food-borne illnesses in 2009. Overall there were 17,468 laboratory-confirmed food-borne infections in 2009. What the CDC press release doesn’t mention is that this number has stayed about the same for several years. (It ...
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Vitamin C and Vitamin E Do Not Prevent Eclampsia
A friend of mine recently asked me “Is regular soda or diet soda better for you?”
I tried to probe for details. “Are you talking about calories? Obviously, if you’re watching your weight or restricting carbohydrates, you should have the diet soda.”
“No, I don’t mean the calories.”
“Oh, you mean the concern that the citric acid might leach calcium out of your body?”
“No. I just mean overall, are they good or bad for you?”
This precipitated an important revelation that had been percolating...
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Pitfalls in Prostate Cancer Prevention
My regular readers know the controversies and challenges posed by prostate cancer. It is very common. Over half the men who die at advanced age of other causes will have prostate cancer on autopsy. It is very slow. From the time that prostate cancer is detectable on biopsy to the time that it causes symptoms or shortens life can be as long as a decade. It is not very lethal. Because it tends to affect older men, most men diagnosed with it tend to die of other causes. Though it does kill t...
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