The New USDA Dietary Guidelines: Total Hogwash, and Here’s Why « Raw Food SOS: Troubleshooting on the Raw Food Diet

February 6, 2011

The USDA recently released their 2010 dietary guidelines. To steal a snippet from the blog article below:

Can we live without bread yet? Leave the fat on our dairy? Ditch the rancid vegetable oils? Gobble down butter and coconut oil without fearing imminent death? By golly, has the USDA finally pulled its head out of the soybean fields and given us something useful, emerging as a reliable authority instead of a food industry puppet? Nah.

I’m not sure sure about endorsing the “passable” recommendations regarding exercise (I’m not saying that exercise is black or white, bad or good, but that the type, frequency, duration, etc. makes a tremendous difference in terms of the effects of exercise on your body). In any case, I wouldn’t call the exercise recommendations “duh”.  That quibble aside, this post is a good counterpoint to the USDA document:

The New USDA Dietary Guidelines: Total Hogwash, and Here’s Why « Raw Food SOS: Troubleshooting on the Raw Food Diet.

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Posted by Greg

A midday nap markedly boosts the brains learning capacity

October 1, 2010

It looks as though a nap can help increase learning capacity, perhaps by clearing out a backlog of facts and making room for more. From the article:

“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full and, until you sleep and clear out those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail. It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder.”

If you couple this with the boost in growth hormone that you can obtain from the same nap (a topic I want to post more on soon), it seems that it may be well worth scheduling a daily siesta.

A midday nap markedly boosts the brains learning capacity.

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Posted by Greg

A Summary of Transcend by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman

August 3, 2010

The following is a chapter-by-chapter summary of Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, by Kurzweil and Grossman. Kurzweil believes that we are nearing an era in which medical science will advance fast enough to outpace aging and other chronic illnesses.

Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by Greg

Money Talks

May 11, 2010

A paper published by Children’s Hospital (in Boston) examines whether food-industry funding influences the results of published nutritional studies. A significant correlation was found between positive results and funding sources that had a financial benefit. Indeed, not a single industry-funded study returned an unfavorable conclusion. Not one.

I’m cynical enough that this doesn’t surprise me, but it is a reminder of the benefits of skepticism. Including this blog. Don’t believe a word I wrote… I wouldn’t.

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Posted by Greg

Snake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplements

May 10, 2010

See a very nice interactive graphic for visualizing the popularity of, and supporting research for, popular supplements.

Supplement Bubble Race from informationisbeautiful.com


Snake Oil? The scientific evidence for health supplements.

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Posted by Greg

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