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Showing posts from October, 2011

The China Study II: Gender, mortality, and the mysterious factor X

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WarpPLS  and HealthCorrelator for Excel were used to do the analyses below. For other China Study analyses, many using WarpPLS as well as HealthCorrelator for Excel, click here . For the dataset used, visit the HealthCorrelator for Excel site  and check under the sample datasets area. As always, I thank Dr. T. Colin Campbell and his collaborators for making the data publicly available for independent analyses . In my previous post  I mentioned some odd results that led me to additional analyses. Below is a screen snapshot summarizing one such analysis, of the ordered associations between mortality in the 35-69 and 70-79 age ranges and all of the other variables in the dataset. As I said before, this is a subset of the China Study II dataset, which does not include all of the variables for which data was collected. The associations shown below were generated by HealthCorrelator for Excel. The top associations are positive and with mortality in the other range (the “M006 …” and “M005 …”

The China Study II: Animal protein, wheat, and mortality … there is something odd here!

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WarpPLS  and HealthCorrelator for Excel  were used in the analyses below. For other China Study analyses, many using WarpPLS and HealthCorrelator for Excel, click here . For the dataset used, visit the HealthCorrelator for Excel site  and check under the sample datasets area. I thank Dr. T. Colin Campbell and his collaborators at the University of Oxford for making the data publicly available for independent analyses . The graph below shows the results of a multivariate linear WarpPLS analysis including the following variables: Wheat (wheat flour consumption in g/d), Aprot (animal protein consumption in g/d), Mor35_69 (number of deaths per 1,000 people in the 35-69 age range), and Mor70_79 (number of deaths per 1,000 people in the 70-79 age range). Just a technical comment here, regarding the possibility of ecological fallacy . I am not going to get into this in any depth now, but let me say that the patterns in the data suggest that, with the possible exception of some variables (e.g.

Book review: Perfect Health Diet

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Perfect Health Diet is a book that one should own. It is not the type of book that you can get from your local library and just do a quick read over (and, maybe, write a review about it). If you do that, you will probably miss several important ideas that form the foundation of this book, which is a deep foundation. The book is titled “Perfect Health Diet”, not “The Perfect Health Diet”. If you think that this is a mistake, consider that the most successful social networking web site of all time started as “The Facebook”, and then changed to simply “Facebook”; which was perceived later as a major improvement. Moreover, “Perfect Health Diet” makes for a cool and not at all inappropriate acronym – “PHD”. What people eat has an enormous influence on their lives, and also on the lives of those around them. Nutrition is clearly one of the most important topics in the modern world - it is the source of much happiness and suffering for entire populations. If Albert Einstein and Marie Curie w

Certain mental disorders may have evolved as costs of attractive mental traits

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I find costly traits fascinating, even though they pose a serious challenge to the notion that living as we evolved to live is a good thing . It is not that they always deny this notion; sometimes they do not, but add interesting and somewhat odd twists to it. Costly traits have evolved in many species (e.g., the male peacock’s train) because they maximize reproductive success, even though they are survival handicaps. Many of these traits have evolved through nature’s great venture capitalist – sexual selection. (Source: Vangoghart.org) Certain harmful mental disorders in humans, such as schizophrenia and manic–depression, are often seen as puzzles from an evolutionary perspective. The heritability of those mental disorders and their frequency in the population at various levels of severity suggests that they may have been evolved through selection, yet they often significantly decrease the survival prospects of those afflicted by them (Keller & Miller, 2006; Nesse & Williams,

Egg yolks for eye health

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Lutein and zeaxanthin are found in egg yolks. This morning I spoke with a lady in a coffeeshop who told me she "heard on Dr. Oz" that she should be eating an egg a week for her eyes. I told her differently: she may need to eat them more often than once a week, turn to spinach, or supplement with lutein and zeaxanthin for her aging eyes. Now, because she said she'd get online and read this blog, I want to back my statements up. In 2009, University of Massachusetts researchers (1) evaluated lutein and zeaxanthin from egg yolks on older adults with low macular pigment optical density, most whom were taking statins to lower cholesterol.* They found that eating four egg yolks per day, and possibly two egg yolks per day, improve macular health after five weeks. Notably, the treatments also increased HDL cholesterol, but not LDL cholesterol. Previous studies showed lutein and zeaxanthin from spinach, corn or supplements (2 to 30 milligram doses) can also increase macular pigment

Omega-3 Overview and Book Review of "Queen of Fats" by Susan Allport

You can’t swing a dead fish these days without hearing about its good fats. The term “omega-3” is now well known throughout the world of nutrition, but this wasn’t always so. Science writer Susan Allport accomplishes the task of chronicling the discovery and rise to stardom of omega-3 oils in The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed from the Western Diet and What We can Do About Them . Omega-3s, specifically long-chain omega-3s DHA and EPA found naturally in fish, have overtaken the world of nutrition as one of the most exciting areas of research in the last few decades. They are now recognized as essential for cardiovascular health and guarding against heart disease; DHA for being the most abundant fat in our brains and a key nutrient for infant and brain development as well as long-term brain health in adults; and EPA because it acts to replace other fatty acids in eicosanoid pathways to reduce inflammation in joints and the body overall. No one would have predicted these facts h

Great evolution thinkers you should know about

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If you follow a paleo diet, you follow a diet that aims to be consistent with evolution. This is a theory that has undergone major changes and additions since Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Darwin proposed it in the 1800s. Wallace proposed it first, by the way, even though Darwin’s proposal was much more elaborate and supported by evidence. Darwin acknowledged Wallace's precedence, but received most of the credit for the theory anyway. (Alfred Russel Wallace; source: Wikipedia) What many people who describe themselves as paleo do not seem to know is how the theory found its footing. The original Wallace-Darwin theory (a.k.a. Darwin’s theory) had some major problems, notably the idea of blending inheritance (e.g., blue eye + brown eye = somewhere in between), which led it to be largely dismissed until the early 1900s. Ironically, it was the work of a Catholic priest that provided the foundation on which the theory of evolution would find its footing, and evolve into the grand t