New post over at Mother Nature Obeyed: Did Cod Liver Oil Contribute to the Historical Decline in Measles Mortality and Mortality From Other Infectious Diseases? Enjoy!
Immune System
New Evidence of Synergy Between Vitamins A and D: Protection Against Autoimmune Diseases
I have a new post over at Mother Nature Obeyed: New Evidence of Synergy Between Vitamins A and D: Protection Against Autoimmune Diseases Enjoy!
Highlights From Experimental Biology 2011
I arrived in Washington, DC on Friday evening to meet with 13,000 other biological scientists for the Experimental Biology 2011 meeting and just got home Wednesday night. I was there to give a 15-minute presentation on how I fed an overdose of fructose to a couple dozen rats and it didn’t do any of the …
What Can Familial Hypercholesterolemia Mortality In the 19th Century Teach Us About Genetics?
by Chris Masterjohn Not much, simply because the data are so poor. However, let’s take a look at some data for the very weakly supported hypothesis that people in the 19th century with familial hypercholesterolemia lived longer than other people and perform a little “thought experiment” to see what it could teach us about genetics if …
The New Genetics — Part I: How Our B Cells Create Their Own Antibody Genes
Among the cells of our immune system, the B cells make our antibodies. Each B cell makes a different antibody. We make an estimated one trillion different antibodies, giving us the capacity to respond to virtually any pathogen. Even more remarkably, each of these antibodies reacts with a variety of different antigens (an antigen is …
The New Genetics — Introduction
The rapid advance of the sequencing of the genome of humans and other species has revealed how little we actually understand about how our cells operate. Consider this passage from the fifth edition of Molecular Biology of the Cell (2008, p. 207): Accurate gene identification requires approaches that extract information from the inherently low signal-to-noise …
What Can Modern Toxicology Tell Us About Food Toxins and Food Intolerances?
“The dose makes the poison.” — Paracelsus (1493-1541) “What is food to one is bitter poison to others.” — Lucretius (ca. 99 BC — ca. 55 BC) This post will be the first in a series of posts on food toxins and food intolerances. As an introduction, I’d like to review some of the recent …
Review of Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet’s “Perfect Health Diet”
Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet’s The Perfect Health Diet is a great book. I have discussed some caveats, but ultimately I think it is excellent and many people would benefit from reading it. You can read my review here: Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet’s The Perfect Health Diet If you’d like, come back and post your comments here!
Is the “Receptor for AGEs (RAGE)” Really a Receptor for AGEs?
RAGE. It sounds pretty mad. Angry. And it’s out to get you. How? By punishing you for eating overcooked food, igniting your tissues with the hellfire of inflammation and oxidative stress. Or not. Maybe it’s just there to make your brain grow. Welcome to the controversies of science department snack rooms and rarely published critical …
Proven: Viamin D Prevents the Flu — Throw Out Your Tamiflu
Well, technically we only “prove” things in math and logic, when we assume our premises. But the most recent study on vitamin D and the flu, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, gets as close to proving anything as we can get in nutritional and medical science. Researchers from Japan conducted a double-blind, …