April 10, 2025 — It’s a fact. We are eating, drinking, and breathing microplastics. They are accumulating in our bodies – even in our brains. It took painstaking work to figure that out, but even more challenging is the task of nailing down the health effects of all those microplastics. Researchers are doing their best to figure this out. […]
November 13, 2024 — Standing desks arrived with high hopes of countering the health risks of a sedentary office lifestyle, promising to reduce heart disease and improve circulation. However, recent research in the International Journal of Epidemiology casts doubt on whether simply swapping sitting for standing delivers these benefits. Cardiovascular Risk Benefit? In a study of over 83,000 adults, […]
May 20, 2024 — Two updated analyses from the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Study came out in the Lancet over the weekend. They bring a very specific lens to the problem of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and their looming implications for global health. Through this lens, the focus is on risk factors – high BMI and high blood glucose […]
October 27, 2023 — This week’s unexpected result in diet and health comes from PLOS One. In a study of mortality and diabetes risk from added sugar in coffee or tea researchers found nothing. No incremental risk attributable to sugar in coffee or tea. But if you check with CDC, there’s no distinction for those packets of sugar people […]
March 30, 2022 — Objectivity about the risks of drinking alcohol is not easy to find. Just like sweet beverages, alcohol has been part of human culture and a source of pleasure for thousands of years. An awareness of its health risks also has a very long history. Because humans can rationalize just about anything, we embrace assurances from […]
March 25, 2022 — Sweet drinks never cease to activate controversies. For millennia, people have enjoyed them. But that enjoyment has also long sparked a reaction from folks who find fault with enjoying them. So often, people turn to science to justify their beliefs that these sweet beverages are either a good source of refreshment or a hazard to […]
January 26, 2022 — The relationship between diabetes and COVID-19 grows more interesting by the day. Early in the pandemic, it became clear that diabetes is an important risk factor for severe complications with COVID-19. As more research emerged, it became clear that inflammation is a mediator for this risk. And now it seems that diabetes might even raise […]
January 25, 2022 — Some people really don’t like low calorie sweeteners. So once again we have a wave of fear-mongering headlines. This time, they’re suggesting that pregnant women who consume these sweeteners may harm their babies. The proposed harm is a change in the baby’s microbiome and a higher risk of obesity. The evidence? A study of rats […]
January 10, 2022 — Many of us are on an anxious journey right now. We know that being older, or living with a condition like obesity, means added risks for COVID. So we’ve been careful. But now the Omicron variant adds a bit of uncertainty because it is so contagious and so many people are getting the infection. Yet, […]
August 20, 2021 — Between 2011 and 2019, the rate of gestational diabetes rose from 48 to 64 cases per 1,000. The rate rose across all racial and ethnic subgroups. But the risk is highest for Asian Indian individuals – twice the risk in the non-Hispanic White population. These data, published in JAMA this week, raise a note of […]
