Monthly Archives: August 2011

Bad Egg

August 31, 2011 – 8:00 am

In 2008, the Harvard Physician’s Health Study, which followed about about 20,000 physicians for 20 years, found that those eating just a single egg a day or more had significantly higher total mortality risk, meaning eating just one egg a day was significantly associated with living, on average, a shorter life. Later that year, that…

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Vitamin B12: how much, how often?

August 30, 2011 – 9:00 am

This week NutritionFacts.org celebrates the upload of its 300th video. Though the site is officially only 9 days old, it launched “preloaded” with 288 videos taken from the last four years of my Latest in Clinical Nutrition DVD series. My primary motivation to move this body of work to the web was to make it…

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Soy and breast cancer: an update

August 29, 2011 – 6:47 am

We’ve known that regular soy consumption appears to both prevent breast cancer—the number one cancer killer of young women—and prolong survival in women battling the dreaded disease, but we haven’t understood why. Soybeans naturally contain weakly estrogenic compounds called phytoestrogens (derived from phyton, the Greek word for “plant”). So the original theory was that the…

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Soymilk: shake it up!

August 28, 2011 – 8:35 am

  When I treasure hunt through the medical literature every year, there are three qualities I find myself using most often to sift the year’s nutritional nuggets into video form. Is it groundbreaking? Is it interesting? Is it practical? In this week’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, for example, one of…

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Vegan B12 deficiency: putting it into perspective

August 25, 2011 – 6:40 am

When CNN’s  documentary The Last Heart Attack premiered—documenting Bill Clinton’s attempt to reverse his heart disease through diet—pundits were eager to point out the downsides. Yes, eating a healthy plant-based diet may make us “heart attack proof“—but, some ask, what about vitamin B12? So on one hand, there’s the possibility of eliminating the greatest killer…

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How to live longer in four easy steps

August 24, 2011 – 7:00 am

The CDC published a paper this week in the American Journal of Public Health suggesting that eating healthy, exercising regularly, and avoiding smoking and excessive alcohol intake can add more than a decade to our lives. And the criteria were not very strict. One could meet the “regular exercise” definition by exercising just 3 times…

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Can antioxidant-rich spices counteract the effects of a high-fat meal?

August 23, 2011 – 11:58 am

In this month’s Journal of Nutrition, researchers at Penn State report on their experiment in which overweight men were fed a high-fat (chicken) meal with or without a healthy dose of herbs and spices such as cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and oregano. This was to see what effect they might have on antioxidant status and metabolism.…

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The Last Heart Attack:
Perfect timing for the launch of NutritionFacts.org

August 22, 2011 – 7:30 am

Though bumped last night due to developments in Libya, the new CNN documentary The Last Heart Attack features Bill Clinton’s attempts to reverse his heart disease with a plant-based diet. In From omnivore to vegan: The dietary education of Bill Clinton CNN details Dr. Dean Ornish’s tough love but not-so-tough dietary plan. Having “believe it…

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Official NutritionFacts.org launch date: Monday, August 22

August 8, 2011 – 10:00 pm

NutritionFacts.org launches two weeks from today, which means that starting 8/22 I’m going to be uploading a new video every day, seven days a week (for at least the first 365 days). I’ll write daily blogs to put the new videos in context, cover newly published papers, and address breaking news. I’ll take research requests,…

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NutritionFacts.org still in Beta testing mode

August 5, 2011 – 5:11 am

We’re still working out some kinks on the site but expect to launch officially within the next few weeks (when I’ll start uploading new videos daily). You can help by giving the site a spin! Please report any glitches you find and offer any suggestions you might have on how we can improve the site…

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