Naturopathic Maine

What causes popcorn lung? Short answer: we don’t know. That should terrify you. Short guess: the added aldehydes. Longer answer: Most states are scrambling to just identify e-cigarettes, to decide on when kids should be able to get them, and to regulate them in some way. It’s the Wild West out there, with ages anywhere from 18–21, and many states not classifying vaping in the same way as tobacco use. [1]  A cynical person might be suspicious that vaping is an end run by certain manufacturers to entice and addict more young smokers. In my blog post on popcorn lung I connect the dots and - no surprise - vaping is funded and owned by big tobacco. [2] The two solvents most commonly used in vaping, PG and glycerine, are relatively nontoxic, but the flavoring agents they are often combined with can be extremely toxic. We have almost no regulation of these, as many are considered safe for eating. But the chemistry changes when you vaporize something. One study found “detectable ...

I was reading an article about the best single supplement that experts in their fields take every day. The list was good. Turmeric in your coffee to help with inflammation. Vitamin D for people living in a northern climate. Probiotics and prebiotics to help balance the gut. And then one expert decided that all his colleagues (why is it always a guy?) were wrong and that nobody should take any supplements, ever. Can we put this in context? The entire supplement industry in the U.S. is $42 billion  or maybe it's just $31 billion  or maybe that's how big the global market is growing in the next three years . Anyway, who cares if the numbers are off by billions, it's enormous! Or is it? We spend $2 billion in the U.S. on Oreo cookies last year, not cookies, just Oreos. We spent $ 36 billion at McDonalds . Not all fast food, just McDonalds. And in 2018 we spent $253 billion on soft drinks in the U.S. $32 billion on Coke alone. Now, I'm not saying that spending a...

Most stories that feature shock diseases aren't very credible. But this story about blindness as a result of junk food was reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine . The teen, who was "otherwise healthy," meaning he reached his full height and didn't seem ill, continues his junk food diet with the addition of a multivitamin. The story has been picked up by various news groups, including the Washington Post , who took a moment to attack veganism as a problem when the issue was junk food. Newsweek mentions an expert who estimates that 2 billion people suffer from nutrient deficiencies but that we have little information on what this does to eyesight. Not to argue with an expert, but we do. As I write in The Eye Diet , we are suffering from a global pandemic of blindness. I've been wondering about why African eyesight is better than Asian eyesight, but the difference may just be the amount of junk food as well as the lack of sunlight. More disturbing is th...