Matt Lentzner, Janine Jagger and I have designed a survey for participants of Gluten-free January, using the online application StatCrunch. Janine is an epidemiologist who studies healthcare worker safety at the University of Virginia; she has experience designing surveys for data collection so we're glad to have her on board. The survey will allow us to systematically gather and analyze data on the results of Gluten-free January. It will be 100 percent anonymous-- none of your answers will be connected to your identity...
Monday, 31 January 2011
Thursday, 27 January 2011
The Diabetes Epidemic
Posted by Admin in: diabetes disease
The CDC just released its latest estimate of diabetes prevalence in the US (1):Diabetes affects 8.3 percent of Americans of all ages, and 11.3 percent of adults aged 20 and older, according to the National Diabetes Fact Sheet for 2011. About 27 percent of those with diabetes—7 million Americans—do not know they have the disease. Prediabetes affects 35 percent of adults aged 20 and older.Wow-- this is a massive problem. The prevalence...
Two Wheat Challenge Ideas from Commenters
Posted by Admin in: celiac gluten
Some people have remarked that the blinded challenge method I posted is cumbersome. Reader "Me" suggested:You can buy wheat gluten in a grocery store. Why not simply have your friend add some wheat gluten to your normal protein shake.Reader David suggested:They sell empty gelatin capsules with carob content to opacify them. Why not fill a few capsules with whole wheat flour, and then a whole bunch with rice starch or other placebo. For two weeks take a set of, say, three capsules every day, with the set of wheat capsules...
Monday, 24 January 2011
Blinded Wheat Challenge
Posted by Admin in: celiac diet gluten
Self-experimentation can be an effective way to improve one's health*. One of the problems with diet self-experimentation is that it's difficult to know which changes are the direct result of eating a food, and which are the result of preconceived ideas about a food. For example, are you more likely to notice the fact that you're grumpy after drinking milk if you think milk makes people grumpy? Maybe you're grumpy every other day regardless of diet? Placebo effects and conscious/unconscious bias can lead us to erroneous...
Thursday, 20 January 2011
Eating Wheat Gluten Causes Symptoms in Some People Who Don't Have Celiac Disease
Posted by Admin in: celiac diet disease gluten
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a condition characterized by the frequent occurrence of abdominal pain, diarrhea, constipation, bloating and/or gas. If that sounds like an extremely broad description, that's because it is. The word "syndrome" is medicalese for "we don't know what causes it." IBS seems to be a catch-all for various persistent digestive problems that aren't defined as separate disorders, and it has a very high prevalence: as high as 14 percent of people in the US, although the estimates depend on what diagnostic...
Thursday, 13 January 2011
Does Dietary Saturated Fat Increase Blood Cholesterol? An Informal Review of Observational Studies
Posted by Admin in: Cardiovascular disease cholesterol diet fats
The diet-heart hypothesis states three things:Dietary saturated fat increases blood cholesterolElevated blood cholesterol increases the risk of having a heart attackTherefore, dietary saturated fat increases the risk of having a heart attackTo evaluate the second contention, investigators have examined the relationship between blood cholesterol and heart attack risk. Many studies including MRFIT have shown that the two are related (1):The...
Tuesday, 11 January 2011
Dr. Fat
Posted by Admin
A blog reader recently made me a Wordle from Whole Health Source. A Wordle is a graphical representation of a text, where the size of each word represents how often it appears. Click on the image for a larger version.Apparently, the two most common words on this blog are "Dr" and "fat." It occurred to me that Dr. Fat would be a great nom de plum...
Monday, 3 January 2011
Paleolithic Diet Clinical Trials, Part V
Posted by Admin in: diet Food reward hyperphagia leptin overweight paleolithic diet
Dr. Staffan Lindeberg's group has published a new paleolithic diet paper in the journal Nutrition and Metabolism, titled "A Paleolithic Diet is More Satiating per Calorie than a Mediterranean-like Diet in Individuals with Ischemic Heart Disease" (1).The data in this paper are from the same intervention as his group's 2007 paper in Diabetologia (2). To review the results of this paper, 12 weeks of a Paleolithic-style diet caused impressive fat loss and improvement in glucose tolerance, compared to 12 weeks of a Mediterranean-style...
