Nutrition and Infectious Disease

Dr. Edward Mellanby's book Nutrition and Disease contains a chapter titled "Nutrition and Infection". It begins: There is general agreement among medical men that the susceptibility of mankind to many types of infection is closely related to the state of nutrition. The difficulty arises, when closer examination is given to this general proposition, as to what constitutes good and bad nutrition, and the problem is not rendered easier by recent advances in nutritional science.Dr. Mellanby was primarily concerned with the effect...

Read More

Fructose vs. Glucose Showdown

As you've probably noticed, I believe sugar is one of the primary players in the diseases of civilization. It's one of the "big three" that I focus on: sugar, industrial vegetable oil and white flour. It's becoming increasingly clear that fructose, which constitutes half of table sugar and typically 55% of high-fructose corn syrup, is the problem. A reader pointed me to a brand new study (free full text!), published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, comparing the effect of ingesting glucose vs. fructose. The investigators...

Read More

A Testament to the Flexibility of the Human Mind

I'm sure you've heard that humans have five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. But we actually have far more senses than that. The canonical list doesn't include equilibrioception-- our sense of balance-- the result of fluid sloshing around in the inner ear. It also doesn't include proprioception, the ability to detect the position of our limbs using nerve endings in our tendons and muscles. Furthermore, the sense of touch is actually several different senses, each detected and transmitted by its own special...

Read More

Images of Tooth Decay Healing due to an Improved Diet

This one's for the skeptics out there. As I mentioned in my previous post, Drs. Edward and May Mellanby and Dr. Weston Price reported that under the right circumstances, tooth decay can be reversed by proper nutrition. Here are images taken from the book Nutrition and Disease, by Dr. Mellanby, showing the re-calcification of decayed human teeth due to the growth of tertiary dentin (formerly known as secondary dentin). These are sections...

Read More

Modern Diet-Health Epidemiology: a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? Part II

Certain ideas about diet and health, for better or for worse, have worked their way deeply into the American psyche in the last few decades. We're advised by health authorities, the news media, food advertisements, our doctors and our friends to eat less saturated fat, red meat and sugar, and more fruit, vegetables and whole grains. This has been the mainstream message for roughly four decades. To some degree, people are listening....

Read More

Modern Diet-Health Epidemiology: a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy? Part I

Epidemiology is the study of population statistics to learn about health. It can provide simple information such as the prevalence of hepatitis C in a particular region, or it can provide more complex information such as the association between dietary patterns and gout. It has brought us many great things, from its roots in understanding the transmission of communicable diseases, to the identification of smoking as the probable cause of lung cancer. Observational studies are a mainstay of epidemiology. In observational...

Read More

Dental Anecdotes

Here are a few anecdotes gleaned from past comments that describe improvements in oral health due to a change in diet. Please feel free to add your own (positive or negative) experience to the comments. I may add it to the post.Stan: My teeth stopped decaying and some breakage (broken tooth due to mechanical damage, 5 years ago) begun sealing itself with new enamel on my high animal fat, low carb diet of the last 10 years. I still have all my teeth including wisdom teeth. My teeth no longer develop plaque/scale and thus no...

Read More

Wow

Last Thursday, the post "Reversing Tooth Decay" made it to the front page of Reddit, a news aggregator site. I ended up getting 46,429 hits that day, and another 8,646 the next day. I normally hover between 1,500 and 3,000.It was a wild ride. I'd like to send out a big thanks to whoever posted the article to Reddit, and everyone who voted for it. I appreciate you helping to spread the messag...

Read More

A New Way to Soak Brown Rice

I've been looking for a way to prepare whole brown rice that increases its mineral availability without changing its texture. I've been re-reading some of the papers I've accumulated on grain processing and mineral availability, and I've found a simple way to do it.In the 2008 paper "Effects of soaking, germination and fermentation on phytic acid, total and in vitro soluble zinc in brown rice", Dr. Robert J. Hamer's group found that soaking alone didn't have much of an effect on phytic acid in brown rice. However, fermentation...

Read More

Reversing Tooth Decay

In the last post, I discussed the research of Drs. Edward and May Mellanby on the nutritional factors affecting tooth formation. Dr. Mellanby is the man who discovered vitamin D and identified the cause of rickets. Nutrition has a profound effect on tooth structure, and well-formed teeth are inherently resistant to decay. But is there anything you can do if your teeth are already formed?Teeth are able to heal themselves. That's one...

Read More

The Benefits of Growing Algae in Your Water Filter

Warning -- Satire -- April Fool's PostOne of the factors that's often overlooked in our efforts to replicate the health of non-industrial cultures is water quality. Traditional cultures don't drink sterilized, chlorinated, fluoridated tap water. They drink from natural flowing streams and lakes, complete with their natural minerals, and... algae.With every gulp, they ingest millions or even billions of tiny green organisms entirely missing from the modern water supply (1).Fortunately, we can drink algae water too. As a matter...

Read More