August 22, 2018 — Professor Karin Michels is presenting us with a dilemma today. On one hand, we’ve written before about the absurdity of the coconut oil fad. People have been swallowing tablespoonfuls of this fat, chasing bogus health claims they’ve been reading in social media feeds. Cures everything from obesity to Alzheimer’s. Gwyneth Paltrow recommends swishing it in […]
December 16, 2017 — Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. For a couple of decades, fat was banished from our diets. Food makers took out fat and compensated by adding sugar and other carbs to processed foods. Now sugar is out of fashion and fat is in. So big food is dutifully doing what the nutrition gurus […]
March 25, 2017 — The NRDC has a little ray of sunshine for us this week. Americans are eating less beef and that means less carbon going into the atmosphere to heat up the planet. It might also mean healthier dietary patterns. The Environmental Impact of Beef Production Meat production creates a lot of greenhouse gases. And beef is […]
February 20, 2017 — Atrocious nutrition headlines are back. Health reporters are telling us that “eating two slices of buttered toast a day can double the risk of diabetes.” Fortunately, that’s not what the study says. The study was just published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. The data comes from a randomized, controlled study of the effects of […]
December 13, 2016 — Please, someone hit the pause button on all the fake news headlines about saturated fat. They’ve been burying us all year long, with no sign of a respite. Presently, you can find a fresh batch of such headlines telling you: Saturated Fat Could Be Good for You Saturated Fat Is Actually Good for You Fat […]
November 16, 2016 — Nutrition gurus seem deeply engaged in a delicate dance around the health effects of dairy fat. A new study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition provides some insight. Researchers examined three large cohorts of U.S. adults. They found that “dairy fat intake was not significantly related to the risk of total cardiovascular disease.” But they […]
October 3, 2016 — A casual reading of consumer health advice provides a mountain of tips about “stress-busting” diets. Health.com, for instance, offers up “12 superfoods for stress relief.” But a new study suggests that we might have this concept reversed. In a randomized controlled trial, investigators observed that stressors might blunt the benefits of a healthful meal. The researchers randomized their subjects between […]
April 19, 2015 — It gets harder and harder every day to be sure what foods are kinda healthy. This week, the FDA smacked the makers of the KIND brand of snack bars for labeling some of their products as “healthy” and for putting a plus sign on their products to designate that they have some extra good stuff in […]
March 1, 2015 — Can we talk about issues in obesity and nutrition that people see very differently? It seems way too hard, way too often. Here are four examples of subjects where it seems that people are inclined to listen only to people who share their views. Dietary Guidelines. When the 2015 U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee issued their […]
March 27, 2014 — Food marketing and superficial nutrition advice bombards us daily, coaxing us to eat more of this or less of that. Much better advice is to simply eat better food and slow down to enjoy it in reasonable portions. A new example of this sort of advice run amok comes from a study published last week […]
