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…
The vitamin D-ilemma
Part 4: Reverse causation – cart before horse? 9 September 2024 In Part 3 of this miniseries, I discussed the disconnect between the outcomes of observational studies which found an association between low 25-hydroxyvitamin D levels and a dizzying array of diseases, and clinical trials which found that supplementation with vitamin D did not prevent…
The vitamin D-ilemma
Part 3: What is a ‘normal’ vitamin D level? 2 September 2024 In Part 1 of this vitamin D miniseries, I laid out the basics – vitamin D is not a true vitamin but a sequence of three metabolites that culminates in a secosteroid hormone called calcitriol, and is synthesised when ultraviolet B radiation from…
The vitamin D-ilemma
Part 2: The many faces of vitamin D… or, what doesn’t vitamin D do? As you’ll (hopefully) recall from Part 1 of this miniseries, the substance that we call “vitamin D” is not in fact a vitamin, but a hormone – specifically, a sequence of three metabolites that culminates in a secosteroid hormone called calcitriol…
The vitamin D-ilemma
Part 1: Origin story 19 August 2024 Back in February, I asked my paid subscribers to suggest topics for me to investigate. I’ve been gradually working my way through the excellent list of questions I received, and it’s now time to tackle the thorny issue of vitamin D supplementation. To set the stage for this…
Dr Dog will see you now
12 August 2024 After the last two posts which discussed serious concerns with the framing of depression-as-mental-illness, and the psychiatrisation of everyday suffering and distress as ‘mental illness’, I thought you might appreciate a somewhat lighter topic relating to human psychology. It just so happens that this one is very close to my heart, as…
Stop talking about your ‘mental health’
It’s making you – and everyone else – crazy 5 August 2024 I published last week’s post, The depression misconception, with some trepidation. In a society that has been steeped in the narrative of ‘depression-as-mental-illness’, labelling depression as ‘failure feedback’, and raising the possibility that it is actually a functional, adaptive response to significant failure,…