In any experiment, randomization is the central criterion necessary to make an inference about cause and effect. This is true whether we are studying inanimate objects, isolated proteins, cells, animals, or people. Randomization helps us remove the influence of both known and unknown confounders. The ultimate confounders are choice and the passage of time. People …
Last year around this time, I culled a few pearls of wisdom from folks much wiser than I am to provide a reflection on the holiday of Thanksgiving and the actual practice of giving thanks, for which the holiday is named. I can’t top that this year, so if you missed it or you’d like …
Dr. William Davis, Milwaukee-based “preventive cardiologist” and Medical Director of the Track Your Plaque program, argues in his new book, Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health, that “somewhere along the way during wheat’s history, perhaps five thousand years ago but more likely fifty years ago, wheat …
O Solid Fat, turn not thy face from thy Lord, for my budget is in trouble. In “Fructose, Public Policy, and the Low-Fat Reeducation Camp,” I made the following prediction: If they come for our fructose, they will come for our fat next. It seems that Denmark has provided some evidence for this postulate by …
I’ve written a few posts about advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) in the past, which can be found here. These posts include a refutation of the common belief that the “receptor for AGEs” (RAGE) is actually a receptor for AGEs, and a refutation of the implausible and unreliable data suggesting that butter is a major source …
This post is basically a technical footnote to my next post on advanced glycation endproducts (AGEs) and all subsequent posts on AGEs explaining why I will give preference to certain studies that use what I consider reliable methods for measuring these compounds. In my previous posts, “Is Butter High in AGEs?” and “Is the Receptor …
Warning: A Serious Blog Post Occurs Somewhere Below Some controversy recently erupted in the Twitter-sphere when a number of us including Dave Dixon and Dallas Hartwig were recently discussing Denise Minger’s angular hypothesis of atherosclerosis, in which she proposed that increased concentrations of serum bananas and increased concentrations of other plasma constituents with pointy ends or sharp edges penetrate the …
In “Genes, LDL-Cholesterol Levels, and the Central Role of LDL Receptor Activity in Heart Disease,” as well as my most recent presentations at Wise Traditions and AHS, I described the overwhelming genetic evidence for the theory that LDL receptor activity centrally governs the risk of heart disease and the large amount of other evidence from …
Andrew over at Evolvify just linked to a new review of Sex at Dawn, a book that challenges our cultural standard of monogamy. The review has been submitted to the journal Evolutionary Psychology: The Human That Never Evolved Although Andrew’s post and the review itself inspired me to write this post, this post is not …
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the word dogma comes from the Greek dogmatos, literally meaning “that which one thinks is true.” This dictionary further states that it derives from dokein, meaning “to seem good” or “to think,” a root which also gave rise to the English word decent. Basil the Great, a fourth-century bishop …