Columnist George Will first sounded the alarm on January 28. As he reported, the stimulus legislation now approved by Congress and signed into law by President Obama “create(s) a council for Comparative Effectiveness Research. This is about medicine but not about healing the economy. The CER would identify (this is language from the draft report […]
Vitamin D has been called the “buzz” vitamin of 2008. It’s early 2009 and current medical research demonstrating the benefits of optimal vitamin D supplementation is still coming in. Vitamin D has now been found to help diminish age-related mental decline, and vitamin D deficiency is linked to erythropoietic protoporphyria photosensitivity, a metabolic disorder characterized […]
On December 18, a petition was filed with the FDA by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. It asks the FDA to require that diabetic medications in the thiazolidinedione class of drugs like Avandia include labeling that states a low-fat vegan diet has been shown to be as effective or more effective than medications taken […]
A recent Wall Street Journal article told the story of a group of 600 volunteers at Emory University who underwent an exhaustive predictive health assessment in order to prescribe lifestyle changes. Emory plans to use the data to help identify areas for intervention, assigning half the participants to health coaches to determine their effectiveness. While […]
Over the past few years, there have been a series of research reports critical of vitamins.
According to an article in the current issue of Journal of Pediatrics, Johns Hopkins University researchers have termed the current RDA guidelines inadequate to correct the widely prevalent vitamin D deficiency in children suffering from cystic fibrosis. In their attempts to restore normal vitamin D levels, their trials used the recommended 50,000 IU of vitamin […]
The old “normals” for total cholesterol, blood pressure, blood sugar, and LDL are coming under new scrutiny. We may not live longer or better with lower cholesterol readings, lower blood pressure numbers, and lower blood sugar levels.
How active you are may be the most important indicator of your good health. In a world where health is defined by your cholesterol reading, your blood sugar level, your blood pressure, or your adherence to early detection screening, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that activity affects your function in innumerable […]
Will Medicare Break the Bank? The economic crisis fills the news, and rightly so. But there is another crisis on the horizon that may dwarf the dizzying “rescue fund” figures—the funding of Medicare, as Treasury Secretary Paulson indicated over a year ago.
When Time magazine asked to Dr. Water Willett, of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard, to name the most significant scientific news of the 20th century, he said simply, “We changed the fats in our diet.”