Naturopathic Maine

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...

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...

In the CNN article , they list alcohol as the leading cause of death for people between the ages of 15 and 49.  But those people weren’t keeling over from heart attacks or cancer, they were running off the road. How often is alcohol mentioned in relation to an accident or injury? We all know this, it’s not a surprise. If somebody lights himself on fire or falls down a well, we know to ask if he’d been drinking. Somebody gets in a fight? Alcohol is probably involved. So yes, I absolutely would agree that alcohol is a major problem for the health of otherwise healthy people if we’re looking at their risk of accidental injury leading to death. Let me know if any of you take issue with this assumption. What was striking about the Lancet’s assessment of alcohol risks is the overwhelming risk for men as opposed to women. Men drinking had three times the risk of dying between 15 and 49 as women. Road accidents and self-harm were leading causes of death, though they also included tuber...