Various web links related to health issues.
The doctor most responsible for creating a billion-dollar juggernaut has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the vitamin D industry.
Dr. Holick's role in drafting national vitamin D guidelines,
and the embrace of his message by mainstream doctors and wellness
gurus alike, have helped push supplement sales to $936 million in
2017. That's a ninefold increase over the previous decade. Lab tests
for vitamin D deficiency have spiked, too: Doctors ordered more than
10 million for Medicare patients in 2016, up 547 percent since 2007,
at a cost of $365 million. But few of the Americans swept up in the
vitamin D craze are likely aware that the industry has sent a lot
of money Dr. Holick's way. A Kaiser Health News investigation for
The New York Times found that he has used his prominent position in
the medical community to promote practices that financially benefit
corporations that have given him hundreds of thousands of dollars --
including drug makers, the indoor tanning industry and one of the
country's largest commercial labs.
...
In an interview, Dr. Holick acknowledged he has worked as
a consultant to Quest Diagnostics, which performs vitamin D
tests, since 1979. Dr. Holick, 72, said that industry funding
"doesn't influence me in terms of talking about the health
benefits of vitamin D." There is no question that the hormone is
important. Without enough of it, bones can become thin, brittle
and misshapen, causing a condition called rickets in children and
osteomalacia in adults. The issue is how much vitamin D is healthy,
and what level constitutes deficiency.
But the overall death rate for cancer-adjusted for the aging of the
U.S. population-has fallen by only five percent since 1950,
Kolata points out. During this same period, the death rate for
heart disease plummeted 64 percent and for flu and pneumonia 58 percent.
...
"The much touted recent drops in some cancer rates," she (Kolata) writes,
"were mostly attributable not to cancer breakthroughs but to a
decline in smoking that began decades ago--propelled, in part,
by federal antismoking campaigns that began in the 1960s."
...
Spector explains: "First, if one discovers a malignant tumor very early
and starts therapy immediately, even if the therapy is worthless,
it will appear that the patient lives longer than a second patient
(with an identical tumor) treated with another worthless drug
if the cancer in the second patient was detected later."
Tanzi believes that in many cases of Alzheimer's, microbes are probably the initial seed that sets off a toxic tumble of molecular dominoes. Early in the disease amyloid protein builds up to fight infection, yet too much of the protein begins to impair function of neurons in the brain. The excess amyloid then causes another protein, called tau, to form tangles, which further harm brain cells.
But as Tanzi explains, the ultimate neurological insult in Alzheimer's is the body's reaction to this neurotoxic mess. All the excess protein revs up the immune system, causing inflammation - and it's this inflammation that does the most damage to the Alzheimer's-afflicted brain.
They also found that people who take probiotics after antibiotic
therapy-a common practice meant to help restock the gut with
healthy bacteria-aren't necessarily better off, either.
Rather than speed up the process, people using probiotics actually
took longer to have their microbiome return to normal than did
people who took nothing at all, sometimes as long as five months
after they stopped taking them.
...
"However, our studies do demonstrate in a very direct way
that probiotic effects in healthy conditions are personalized
and transient at best, and if you take a probiotic that you buy
at your local supermarket, you have no way of knowing whether
it would pass from one end to the other or colonize your gut,
where it may (or may not) induce health effects," he said.
A Lancet study shows everything that's wrong with nutritional epidemiology, and the way we talk about it.
"But while the paper is so nice and so useful [at estimating alcohol's disease burden]," Stanford meta-researcher John Ioannidis told me, "at the last moment it destroys everything." Instead of focusing on the message about the dangers of excessive drinking, "it focuses on making a claim that no alcohol use is safe."
Not only did the data in the paper not support a zero drinks recommendation, but the authors were also guilty of doing what too many nutrition researchers do: They used definitive, causal language to talk about studies that are only correlational. That's something Ioannidis, a longtime critic of nutrition science, recently called out as a major source of confusion for the public. In a new paper, he argues that the field of nutritional epidemiology is in need of radical reform.
Here's a description of the study they are criticizing: No healthy level of alcohol consumption, says major study.
But a US study over 25 years indicates that moderate carb consumption - or
switching meat for plant-based protein and fats - is healthier.
The study relied on people remembering the amount of carbohydrates they ate.
...
However, there are limitations to the study.
... The findings show observational associations rather than
cause-and-effect and what people ate was based on self-reported data,
which might not be accurate.
... And the authors acknowledge that since diets were measured only
at the start of the trial and six years later, dietary patterns
could have changed over the subsequent 19 years.
IMO, this is one of those non-reproducible results that should never have been published.
One of science's best tools for understanding obesity is debunking myths about metabolism.
The big theme in many of these studies: Our metabolism silently shifts under new conditions and environments in ways we're not usually aware of.
When it comes to diets, the researchers have also debunked the notion
that bodies burn more body fat while on a high-fat and low-carb ketogenic
diet, compared to a higher-carb diet, despite all the hype.
...
Research from the chamber won't alleviate these socioeconomic drivers
of obesity. But a better understanding of human physiology and
metabolism - with the help of the chamber - might level the playing
field through the discovery of effective treatments. As Lex Kravitz,
an NIH neuroscientist and obesity researcher, told me, "Even if a slow
metabolism isn't the reason people become obese, it may still be a
place to intervene for weight loss." The same goes for the other common
illnesses - diabetes, cardiovascular disease - linked to extra weight.