Naturopathic Maine

The short answer is we don't know.  Which should be very scary. And makes me wonder who, if anyone, is regulating anything anymore.  The problem with measuring what a vaping e-cigarette does is that there is no standard for e-cigarettes. The amount of nicotine isn't even necessarily what's on the package. Forget about any consistent level of " tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs), aldehydes, metals, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), flavours, solvent carriers and tobacco alkaloids" So we've got mouse studies that may or may not be relevant. They found that " E-cig vapors... increased bronchoalveolar lavage fluid (BALF) cellularity, Muc5ac production, as well as BALF and lung oxidative stress markers at least comparably and in many cases more than CS (cigarette smoke) ." Now, cigarette smoke tended to build up more nastiness over time, but those e-cigs did a ton of inflammation.  Look, I realize that common sense is in short supply these da...

The title is click bait, as are all titles about nutrition. "Eggs kill you!" "Eggs make the blind see!" "Tofu kills you!" "Tofu cures cancer!"  I could find research articles that might support any of those claims, but I can only make one claim about nutrition and health:  "We don't know!" Why? Because you can't put all the residents of Nebraska in little cages and control everything they eat or do. So you can't be sure that the eggs or bacon or tofu they eat does anything at all. It might be the twenty hours of horror movies that they watch every week that are raising their blood pressure. Or they might be getting too excited about politics. The eggs or tofu or bacon can get blamed for something else entirely. Think for a minute about any nutritional study being done in Flint, Michigan. I'm sure beer drinkers outperformed water drinkers on various health markers, but it has nothing to do with the health...

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...

For those of you who missed the USA Today article , a professor decided that, amid a world awash with animal fats, she needed to single out coconut oil as pure poison. I went looking, and here's what I found: In July of 2018, researchers attempted to compare different fats . They did this by combining every study they could find that compared two fats. If one fat was compared against olive oil, and another fat was compared against olive oil, they assumed that the two fats would perform similarly against each other. If you have a question about this logic, so did they, but they were pretty desperate. No definitive research. Why? Because, and this is important, almost no research has been done on comparing different fats. So when anyone, no matter what their degrees, and no matter how many letters they have after their name, says anything definitive about comparing fats, they literally don’t know what they are talking about. That means if someone tells you that coconut oil is po...

Right before I got diagnosed with colon cancer, I wrote a book on our guts, called Tending Your Internal Garden. In it, I found some pretty exciting things (like you have thousands of unique species living inside you right now).  But science marches on, and now we have research that shows why diet books and diet experts don't agree. They are all right, and they are all wrong. Why? Because you're unique. No, seriously. This isn't a "feel good" moment. This is an "Oops, that means they don't know" moment. Yep. All the diet experts out there cannot tell you what the best diet is for you because you have a unique ecosystem. Your responses to food are your own. You literally can make yourself sick eating like they tell you to if you ignore yourself. Just because it worked for "buns of steel" diet-guru-of-the-week does not mean it will work for you. Here's the TED video detailing how they found this out, with some suggestions about...

It can seem with any chronic illness that the road is one way. You can slow the progression using drugs, but there is no way to go back. This feels particularly true with patients who have diabetes. Yet a new study shows that isn't the case. The researchers in this study used a novel new approach called diet, foregoing the usual drugs. They found that diabetes patients, many of whom had been diabetic for years, were able to reverse their diabetes by using a low-calorie diet and dropping about thirty pounds. The numbers the researchers saw in these patients were similar to those seen in weight-loss surgery patients. Surgical practices advertise that they can reverse diabetes, but it usually involves a major surgery and the subsequent loss of over a hundred pounds. What happened in the low-calorie diet was that diabetic patients were able to reset their insulin levels and increase their body's ability to process sugar. The question is why this study needed to be done at all. ...

Here's the question: if something is amazingly successful, why does it need to saturate the airwaves with advertising? That's the problem with the Outback Vision Protocol , which was first sent to me by a patient. The extremely long infomercial-style presentation promised me that two marvelous supplements would cure very serious vision problems. My hearty presenter informed me that these supplements, with the addition of kangaroo meat, are what a keen-eyed group of soldiers use for superhuman vision. They cured his wife's eye problems and they could cure mine. Some of you already can see what's coming. But if you're one of the millions of people dealing with macular degeneration, you might keep reading and pull out your credit card. So let me save you the time.  At long last, the supplements were revealed to me. They were (drumroll please) lutein and zeaxanthin. If I seem underwhelmed, I am. These are not mysterious or new. They've been around for decades. I...