Lessons in critical thinking: Reader feedback from last week’s post
18 November 2024 Last week’s post, Academia and the new dark age: Part 11 – Nature’s Trump meltdown, generated some thought-provoking comments which are well worth your while to read (particularly the excerpts posted by Freedom Fox from Walter Berns’ essay, ‘Law and Behavioral Science’, which “presciently speaks to what science applied as law might…
Academia and the new dark age: Part 11 – Nature’s Trump meltdown
11 November 2024 I have a general policy of steering clear of political discussion in my posts (although my paying subscriber-only open threads are a different matter!). But when one of the two most prestigious interdisciplinary science journals in the world, Nature, publishes an article about how scientists all over the world are on the…
Antinutrient villain or bone health superhero? The secret life of phytate.
4 November 2024 Recently, a friend reached out for advice after suffering a wrist fracture. She is very health-conscious and had already been doing the single most important thing that one can do to prevent osteosarcopenia – low bone mass and micro-architectural deterioration of bone, combined with loss of muscle mass, strength and function –…
Unpacking the ‘ketogenic diet cures cancer’ myth: Part 2
28 October 2024 In last week’s post, I dissected the claims made by Boston College professor of biochemistry, Dr Thomas Seyfried, in the first 22 minutes of his interview on the Diary of a CEO podcast. I’ve skipped over a fairly lengthy section of the interview because it contains multiple repetitions of Seyfried’s claim that…
Unpacking the ‘ketogenic diet cures cancer’ myth: Part 1
21 October 2024 Just as I was putting the finishing touches to last week’s post, The astonishing rise of cancer in Generation X, I received the following email from a reader (amazing timing, huh?): “Are you familiar with Diary of a CEO podcast/YouTube channel? The channel has a large following (7m+ on YouTube alone) and…
The astonishing rise of cancer in Generation X
14 October 2024 As a child of the 1970s, I take great delight in sharing Gen X memes with my two Gen Z kids. Yes, we Gen Xers were the kids who walked or rode our bikes to school by ourselves, and let ourselves into our empty homes after school when both our parents were…
Diet, biological aging, and evolutionary trade-offs: The Twins Nutrition Study
7 October 2024 In April of last year, I wrote a post called Wholesome plant-based foods – NOT vegan junk food – help you live a longer, healthier life, which discussed a study involving UK Biobank, a cohort study which was established to identify the causes of a wide range of complex diseases of middle…
Academia and the new dark age: Part 10 – Can a chatbot cure “conspiracy theorists” of wrongthink?
30 September 2024 “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” William Casey, former CIA Director Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll be aware that the various and sundry bloblets of what James Howard Kunstler arrestingly dubs ‘the blob’ – “the military-industrial blob, the censorship blob,…
The vitamin D-ilemma
Part 6: Optimising vitamin D activation Fine-tuning calcitriol As I’ve stressed in previous instalments of this miniseries (which has, thanks to the breadth and complexity of the vitamin D research literature, burgeoned into a maxiseries), the only biologically active member of the triad of compounds collectively known as ‘vitamin D’ is the secosteroid hormone calcitriol,…
The vitamin D-ilemma
Part 5: Optimising your vitamin D status 16 September 2024 In Part 4 of this miniseries on vitamin D, I delved into the evidence that the link between low vitamin D (more precisely, 25-hydroxyvitamin D) status and a host of chronic diseases, is one of reverse causation – that is, low serum levels of 25-hydroxyvitamin…