Gums Want to avoid cardiovascular disease? One way is to keep your gums healthy. Teeth gnash, bite, rip and shred the foodstuffs that let us live. And the gums that support them are necessary to keep the critters in those foods from making us sick. But gums also become ill. About 30% of adults have […]
The Meat-Bug Connection (5/13/13)
The Coming Food Information Revolution Beef – and eggs – just got a lot more interesting. A group of researchers fed lean beef (nicely cooked) to a bunch of everyday meat eaters and vegans. They then investigated. Did ingesting lean beef change lipid levels in the blood – you know, the stuff supposed to cause […]
Alert – Bacteria Are Reprogramming Your DNA (2/6/13)
Nerves Into Stem Cells Nerve cells are remarkably reprogrammable. The proof? Leprosy bacteria can take Schwann cells – the stuff that wraps nerve cells axon in white, fatty sheaths so they transmit faster – convert them into stem cells, then use them to flummox the immune system and infect the whole body. Which is rather […]
Dining Out For 100 Trillion (1/2/13)
An Important Six Pounds of You They don’t vote, but they sure make their voices heard. They are legion, but small. They change most aspects of your daily life. But you hardly notice them, rarely show respect, and virtually never give them deserved credit. As a minority group that lives within your extraordinarily diverse ecosystem, […]
New Approaches to Combatting Cancer (11/7/12)
Cancer as An Information System The very word cancer scares us. The definition of cancer involves “uncontrolled, unregulated growth.” It’s as if the cells that sustain and give us life intimately betray us. They turn our bodies into a deformed version of ourselves. Heretics are more frightening than pagans, especially when the heretics take over […]