January 14, 2023 — Defining healthy eating is somewhat like trying to define art. Everyone thinks they know it when they see it, but actually pinning it down in specific terms is not so easy. Nonetheless, we keep on trying and much of the focus from thoughtful people is on healthy patterns of eating, not individual foods. The exemplar […]
April 9, 2021 — Nostrums for overcoming obesity litter the landscape of health policy. “Obesity is preventable,” says the World Health Organization. We like the can-do spirit this reflects. Yet the how-to details are missing – or at least details with evidence to support them. Instead we have glittering generalities and beautiful metaphors. WHO recommends making healthy choices the […]
October 7, 2020 — In 1826, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote: Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are. Those words appeared in The Physiology of Taste, a work of seven volumes. Now we’ve boiled it down to you are what you eat. A new study in PLOS Medicine suggests there’s real wisdom in that […]
February 14, 2019 — Last year, the New England Journal of Medicine retracted and then published a revised analysis of the landmark PREDIMED study. With that action, it shook the world of nutrition science. Even now, there’s still a whole lot of shakin going on. What About 267 Secondary Publications? Just last week in the BMJ, Arnav Agarwal and John […]
January 3, 2019 — January has arrived and thus, so has the annual ratings of “The Best Diets” by U.S. News & World Report, guided by a distinguished panel of experts. However, here’s the thing. There is not just one best diet. In fact, the top two “diets” on this list – the Mediterranean diet and the DASH diet – […]
June 14, 2018 — What are we supposed to think now about our precious Mediterranean diet? Somebody took the randomized out of our favorite randomized controlled trial. Yesterday, authors of the landmark 2013 PREDIMED study retracted it from the New England Journal of Medicine. They did this because of problems with the randomization. In its place, they published a new […]
May 26, 2018 — The Mediterranean diet is all but dead to children in Mediterranean countries. The WHO’s Jao Breda described the problem at ECO2018 this week: The Mediterranean diet for the children in these countries is gone. There is no Mediterranean diet any more. Those who are close to the Mediterranean diet are the Swedish kids. The Mediterranean […]
December 5, 2014 — A new study this week has the news media buzzing that following a Mediterranean diet can help keep people young by protecting their genetic code as they age. How can this be? The study, published in the BMJ, analyzed the association between how closely people in the Nurses Health Study followed a Mediterranean diet and […]
April 9, 2014 — Behaviors matter for helping people reduce health risks, perhaps more than weight outcomes. This rule of thumb is useful, because people have more direct control over their behaviors than they have over their weight. Good news from the REGARDS study is that they’ve found three behaviors that indeed matter more than weight in preventing another […]
May 1, 2013 — Good news keeps rolling in about the health benefits of following a Mediterranean diet. The latest study published by investigators from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) adds evidence that following a Mediterranean diet helps to keep your brain functioning well. These findings come on the heels of a randomized study in the New England […]
