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Showing posts from April, 2019

Why Doesn't Eating More Solve Cachexia (Weight Loss From Cancer)?

When cancer patients complain of losing weight, they are told to go home and eat ice cream. But this advice doesn't work. Why? The loss of weight and muscle mass during cancer has less to do with calories and more to do with the process of fighting cancer. One of the things that happens is that the body starts to use its own muscles to provide essential amino acids for defense. The process of eating your own muscles leads to increased fatigue, less activity, and more muscle loss from inactivity. It's a downward spiral. But simply adding more calories isn't going to reverse that cycle. The body needs amino acids, not calories. Providing the body with specific amino acids, or taking a hormone that forces the body to build lean muscle, may provide more benefit than eating more. Even adding drugs may not help. Two drugs, Megace and THC were not effective at increasing quality of life. Megace did give patients more fat, and THC did help appetite, but neither significantly

Will poor diet kill one in five of us?

The Lancet just published a comprehensive report that states that 22% of human deaths are directly caused by poor diet . Just to put that in perspective, poor diet kills 11 million people a year, while tobacco only kills 7 million people a year . So eating better is going to make your life better even if you smoke like a chimney? I have to admit, this study is comprehensive. You're going through the data from 195 countries. And it all sounds very convincing. Right up to the point where they estimate that salt kills three million people a year. Wait, what? We had a New England Journal of Medicine report on salt being a killer back in 2014. These researchers estimated that too much salt killed 1.5 million people a year. They assessed every study on salt up through 2014. So we would have to assume that A) either deaths from salt intake have doubled in the last four years or B) either the Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine is wrong. There's a third option, that the