Tag: diet advice

Mosconi’s Brain Food Diet

Mosconi offers a plan to prevent and treat Alzheimer's and maximize cognitive function in everyone. She claims brain health requires a unique diet, but she fails to make her case. Some of what she says is good standard health advice, but the rest is speculative, not based on good scientific evidence, and sometimes demonstrably wrong.

/ May 29, 2018

Move

For most people, common health goals are best approached with as simple a strategy as possible. This avoids cognitive overload and non-compliance. Get the basics right, as there are diminishing returns from increasingly arcane details.

/ February 14, 2018

What the Health: A Movie with an Agenda

The documentary "What the Health" espouses the fairy tale that all major diseases (heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and many others) can be prevented and cured by eliminating meat and dairy from the diet. It is a blatant polemic for veganism, biased and misleading, and is not a reliable source of scientific information.

/ July 11, 2017

The Skinny on Saturated Fat

The bottom line is that there are trade-offs and complexities when it comes to biology. A high carbohydrate diet is a risk factor for many diseases, and this is highly genetically variable. Types of sugar matter, weight matters, exercise matters, and genetics matter. The same is true of fat.

/ June 28, 2017

Confessions of a Quack: Holistic Harry Tells the Inside Story of Alternative Medicine

Confessions of a Quack is fiction, but it provides real insights into the thinking processes and motivations of quacks, alternative medicine providers, and their patients.

/ May 23, 2017

The Clean Eating Delusion

While some parts of the world are concerned with eating, because of food insecurity, the “worried and well-fed well” are increasingly obsessed with so-called “clean eating.” This is nothing new, but like every cultural phenomenon, it seems, has increased partly due to the easy spread of misinformation over the internet. If you are anxious about your health, and who isn’t to some...

/ January 20, 2016

Ancient Origins of Modern Dietary Demons

There are few aspects of daily existence, particularly in modern society, that are more pervasive than advice on what we should eat. Everyone, including friends, family, strangers on Twitter and self-proclaimed experts in nutrition and health, seems to have an opinion on how to eat in order to improve and prolong our lives. Even legitimate organizations dedicated to the health and well-being...

/ April 24, 2015

Diet Cults vs. Science-Based Healthy Eating

This will be shorter than my usual book reviews and is something of an afterthought. I just finished writing a long article on “Food Myths” that Michael Shermer had asked me to write as a cover article for an upcoming issue of Skeptic magazine, and while researching the subject I read a book that someone had suggested to me (I’ve forgotten who...

/ August 26, 2014

Nature vs. Technology

Nathanael Johnson has written an interesting book about what "natural" means, and doesn't mean, drawing upon his own life but more importantly - the scientific literature.

/ March 18, 2014

Science-Based Nutrition

Nutrition is embedded in mainstream medical teaching and practice, despite efforts to convince patients to the contrary (usually in an effort to sell them something).

/ March 5, 2008