Checklist Health Can your health be reduced to a bunch of numbers? American medical care is about to test that idea. Beware the results. Checklists – and the checked off numbers – do not a healthy population make. Why Are Checklists Taking Over? People love numbers. They like to count things. Medical care costs enormous […]
Diets: What Don’t We Know
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has just come out with its latest dietary guidelines. Most of us won’t read them. Many of us should. Media attention immediately went to the cholesterol recommendations. No surprise there. That’s where “the money is,” in terms of drugs and the food industry. A few things which skipped attention you might consider […]
Why You Have a 30 Foot Gut (5/5/14)
Is It Time to Eat Your Fruit and Veg? Consider. Humans adults have a 30 foot gut. Within it live 100 trillion bacteria. Dogs have a six foot gut. Why are dogs so foreshortened? The tale lies not in the tail or the untailed. It’s about what you eat. The Omnivore’s Opportunity There’s […]
Statins and the New Numbers Racket (12/9/13)
The Old Numbers Racket One way to keep a population unhealthy is to endlessly worry them about getting sick. For the last few decades, purveyors of cholesterol as the core of heart disease have created a medical industrial complex that has been hard to suppress. Now that complex is changing its spots again with new […]
Secrets of Statins (6/6/13)
More Secrets Statins are portrayed as the “wonder drugs” of the last two decades. Officially HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors, their ability to decrease heart attack and stroke was originally laid down to their ability to decrease cholesterol synthesis. They did lower cholesterol. But that was not the main reason they worked. Statins, like many drugs, were […]