Naturopathic Maine

We get these disturbing posts on our phones these days. I think of them as "horror clickbait," stories that are so disturbing we have to read more. I can't do anything about many of the stories, but I can help a little with the ones to do with our health. The clickbait story was that processed food will shorten your life . By how much? Oh, about 14%. That sounds terrible until you take a step back and do a little math. 14% of a human life... that's...round to 70 years, round down to 10%... and you have at least seven years of your life lost to processed food. That's pretty dramatic. For comparison, smoking like a chimney your whole life will drop your expected span by about ten years . Are we really saying eating processed food is as bad as chain smoking? Then I went looking for the study. It's not a great format. A survey of English eaters . And a fairly arbitrary splitting up of food into minimally processed, processed, and ultra-processed food. By arbi

The short answer is maybe.  If you have a B12 level higher than normal, being screened for a variety of cancers is not a bad idea. The risk is higher for a range of cancers. Keep in mind this is an elevation in B12 that is not in response to taking a lot of B12 supplements. ( http://www.b12-vitamin.com/ blood-levels/ ) Here's the risk from a range of different cancers. (Image from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848986/) The key is that the marker may not only tell if you are at higher risk, it may also tell your chances of survival. " When testing for trend in survival rates between the three Cbl level groups, we observed trends toward lower survival with higher Cbl levels for all three follow-up periods for both patients with localised and non-localised cancer. The differences in survival with higher Cbl levels were similar after 2, 5 and 10 years" ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/ science/article/pii/S187778211 5002854 ) B12,