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that’s how you get on the bestseller list. You promise the moon and stars, you say everything you heard before was wrong, and you blame everything on one thing. You get a scapegoat; it’s classic. Atkins made a fortune with that formula. We’ve got Rob Lustig saying it’s all fructose; we’ve got T. Colin Campbell [author of The China Study, a formerly bestselling book] saying it’s all animal food; we now have Perlmutter saying it’s all grain. There’s either a scapegoat or a silver bullet in almost every bestselling diet book.”

The recurring formula is apparent: Tell readers it’s not their fault. Blame an agency; typically the pharmaceutical industry or U.S. government, but also possibly the medical establishment. Alluding to the conspiracy vaguely will suffice. Offer a simple solution. Cite science and mainstream research when applicable; demonize it when it is not.

“It makes me sad that somebody like you is going to reach out to me, so you can get what I’d like to think are sensible comments about a silly book. If you write a sensible book, which I did—it’s called Disease Proof , and it’s about what it really takes to be healthy, brain and body—nobody wants to talk about that. It has much less sex appeal. The whole thing is sad.

About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with meals, a large and rigorous new study has found.

The magnitude of the diet’s benefits startled experts. The study ended early, after almost five years, because the results were so clear it was considered unethical to continue.

The diet helped those following it even though they did not lose weight

when it comes to diet and heart disease, doctors — and patients — have been going on hunches.

Dr. Estruch said he and his colleagues were so buoyed by the success of their study that they were planning another one. They intend to randomly assign people to consume the Mediterranean diet or to exercise while following a similar diet that is lower in calories. The hope is that adding weight loss and exercise will prevent even more heart disease.

for now, chaos reigns. The public is bombarded with diet advice, often contradictory and often lacking a rigorous scientific grounding, medical experts said.

When you think of heart attacks, you might assume the most common causes are smoking, high cholesterol, or obesity. Mental health issues probably don't spring to mind.

Depression—which for this study, was determined by a checklist of mood symptoms, including anxiety and fatigue

“depressed mood and exhaustion holds a solid middle position within the concert of major cardiovascular risk factors.”

“We’ve reached a point where patients are increasingly facing five- and six-figure price tags for medications that they will take over the course of their lifetimes,” said Matthew Eyles, an executive vice president for America’s Health Insurance Plans, the national trade association for the insurance industry. “If this is the new normal to treat common and chronic conditions, how can any health system sustain that cost?”

Doctors with patients who maintain they are intolerant to statins say they are confronted with a clash between the art and the science of medicine.

Dr. Peter Libby, a doctor and researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said that in his role as a physician, “the patient is always right.” But, he added, “as a scientist, I find randomized, large-scale, double-blind studies more persuasive than anecdote.”

It is startling to realize just how much the social safety net expanded during Barack Obama’s presidency. In 2016, means-tested entitlements like Medicaid and food stamps absorbed 3.8 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, almost a full percentage point more than in 2008

Public social spending writ large — including health care, pensions, unemployment insurance, poverty alleviation and the like — reached 19.3 percent of G.D.P.

Government in the United States still spends less than most of its peers across the industrialized world to support the general welfare of its citizens.

Regularly drinking, even in moderation, raises the long-term risk of many kinds of cancer. A burgeoning body of research links alcohol to cancers of the breast, liver, colon, pancreas, mouth, throat, larynx and esophagus. A large new study last week added lung cancer to the list—even for people who have never smoked cigarettes.

For some of these cancers, such as lung, larynx and colorectal, the cancer risk only sets in when people drink heavily—three or four drinks a day on a regular basis. But just one drink a day raises the risk for cancers of the mouth and esophagus, several studies show.

"It's the repeated exposure to alcohol over a long period of time that will cause damage and it has a cumulative effect."

The characters in Gary Shteyngart’s novel “Super Sad True Love Story” inhabit a continuously surveilled and scored society.

Consider the protagonist, Lenny Abramov, age 39. A digital dossier about him accumulates his every health condition (high cholesterol, depression), liability (mortgage: $560,330), purchase (“bound, printed, nonstreaming media artifact”), tendency (“heterosexual, nonathletic, nonautomotive, nonreligious”) and probability (“life span estimated at 83”). And that profile is available for perusal by employers, friends and even strangers in bars.

Even before the appearance of these books, a report called “The Scoring of America” by the World Privacy Forum showed how analytics companies now offer categorization services like “churn scores,” which aim to predict which customers are likely to forsake their mobile phone carrier or cable TV provider for another company; “job security scores,” which factor a person’s risk of unemployment into calculations of his or her ability to pay back a loan; “charitable donor scores,” which foundations use to identify the households likeliest to make large donations; and “frailty scores,” which are typically used to predict the risk of medical complications and death in elderly patients who have surgery.

How did experts get it so wrong?

the primary problem is that nutrition policy has long relied on a very weak kind of science: epidemiological, or “observational,” studies in which researchers follow large groups of people over many years. But even the most rigorous epidemiological studies suffer from a fundamental limitation. At best they can show only association, not causation.

Instead of accepting that this evidence was inadequate to give sound advice, strong-willed scientists overstated the significance of their studies.

If I were writing the dietary guidelines, I would give them a radical overhaul. I’d go so far as to radically overhaul the way we evaluate diet. Here’s why and how.

Lately, as scientists try, and fail, to reproduce results, all of science is taking a hard look at funding biases, statistical shenanigans and groupthink. All that criticism, and then some, applies to nutrition.

Prominent in the charge to change the way we do science is John Ioannidis, professor of health research and policy at Stanford University. In 2005, he published “Why Most Research Findings Are False” in the journal PLOS Medicin

Confirmation bias occurs when an individual looks for and uses the information to support their own ideas or beliefs. It also means that information not supporting their ideas or beliefs is disregarded. Confirmation bias often happens when we want certain ideas to be true. This leads individuals to stop gathering information when the retrieved evidence confirms their own viewpoints, which can lead to preconceived opinions (prejudices) that are not based on reason or factual knowledge. Individuals then pick out the bits of information that confirm their prejudices. Confirmation bias has a long history. In 1620, Francis Bacon described confirmation bias as: “Once a man’s understanding has settled on something (either because it is an accepted belief or because it pleases him), it draws everything else also to support and agree with it. And if it encounters a larger number of more powerful countervailing examples, it either fails to notice them, or disregards them, or makes fine distinctions to dismiss and reject them, and all this with much dangerous prejudice, to preserve the authority of its first Conceptions.” (Bacon 1620)

The impact of confirmation bias can be at the level of the individual all the way up to institution level. DuBroff showed that confirmation bias influenced expert guidelines on cholesterol and was highly prevalent when conflicts of interests were present (DuBroff 2017). He found that confirmation bias occurred due to a failure to incorporate evidence, or through misrepresentation of the evidence, which had the potential  to skew guideline recommendations

Regulators on Friday said a new version of a popular diabetes medicine could be sold as a weight-loss drug in the U.S.

In company-funded studies, participants taking Wegovy had average weight loss of 15%, about 34 pounds (15.3 kilograms). Participants lost weight steadily for 16 months before plateauing.

"With existing drugs, you're going to get maybe 5% to 10% weight reduction, sometimes not even that,"

Frequent memory lapses are likely to be noticeable because they tend to interfere with daily living.

What’s being forgotten?

may cause individuals to get lost in a familiar place or put something in an inappropriate place because they can’t remember where it goes (think car keys in the refrigerator).

Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.

At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as—who wanted to be—a girl. 

Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone.