During his career at Duke, Dr. Walter Kempner treated more than 18,000 patients with his rice diet. The diet was originally designed as a treatment for kidney failure and out-of-control high blood pressure at a time when these diagnoses were essentially a death sentence. Patients who would have died in all other hospitals had a […]

Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic systemic autoimmune disease affecting millions. It is characterized by persistent pain, stiffness, and progressive joint destruction leading to crippling deformities, particularly in the hands and feet. What can we do to prevent and treat it? In my video Why Do Plant-Based Diets Help Rheumatoid Arthritis?, I show a famous 13-month randomized […]

In my video How to Prevent Kidney Stones With Diet you can see what the jagged surface of a kidney stone looks like under a microscope. Imagine one of those scraping down your urinary canal! Kidney stones affect approximately 1 in 11 people in the United States. Twenty years ago it was only 1 in […]

The traditional Mediterranean diet can be considered mainly, but not exclusively, as a plant-based diet, and certainly not a whole foods, plant-based diet. Olive oil and wine can be considered essentially fruit juices. Even if one is eating a “vegiterranean diet,” an entirely plant-based version, there are a number of problematic nutritional aspects that are […]

Olives and nuts are plant foods, and as such, are packed with antioxidants, raising the antioxidant level of our bloodstream resulting in lower fat oxidation and free radical DNA damage, but what’s happening inside people’s arteries? Researchers measured the amount of atherosclerotic plaque in the neck arteries going to the brain in folks who for […]

Recent studies have shown that higher Mediterranean diet adherence scores are associated with a significant reduction of the risk of death, heart disease, cancer, and brain disease. The problem with such population studies is that people who eat healthier may also live healthier, and so how do we know it’s their diet?  I explore this […]

What has driven the dramatic increase in prevalence of the inflammatory bowel disease Crohn’s disease in societies that rapidly westernized—a disease practically unknown just a century ago? What has changed in our internal and external environment that has led to the appearance of this horrible disease? Japan suffered one of the most dramatic increases, and […]

Free fatty acids (meaning fat circulating in the bloodstream not packaged into triglycerides) result in inflammation, toxic fat breakdown products, and oxidative stress, which can gum up the insulin receptor pathway and lead to insulin resistance in our muscles. Insulin resistance is what causes prediabetes and type 2 diabetes. I explain the process in my […]

Our epidemics of dietary disease have prompted a great deal of research into what humans are meant to eat for optimal health. In 1985, an influential article highlighted in my video The Problem With the Paleo Diet Argument was published proposing that our chronic diseases stem from a disconnect between what our bodies ate while evolving […]

Much of the low-carb and paleo reasoning revolves around insulin. To quote a paleo blogger, “carbohydrates increase insulin, the root of all evil when it comes to dieting and health.” So the logic follows that because carbs increase insulin, we should stick mostly to meat, which is fat and protein with no carbs, so no […]

Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought us through the Great Depression and World War II. Who knows how history would have been different had he not died in his fourth term as President from a massive stroke. In the following days and months, we learned that Roosevelt had suffered from severe high blood pressure for years. In […]

For people with prediabetes, lifestyle modification is considered “the cornerstone of diabetes prevention.” Diet-wise, this means individuals with prediabetes or diabetes should aim to reduce their intake of excess calories, saturated fat, and trans fat. Too many of us consume a diet with too many solid fats and added sugars. Thankfully the latest dietary guidelines […]

In 1992, a controversial paper was published suggesting sperm counts have been dropping around the world over the last 50 years. However, this remains a matter of debate. It’s notoriously difficult to determine sperm counts in the general population for obvious reasons. If you just go ask men for samples, less than 1 in 3 […]

Low back pain became one of the biggest problems for public health systems in the Western world during the second half of the 20th century. The lifetime prevalence of low back pain is reported to be as high as 84 percent, and chronic low back pain is present in about one in five, with one […]

Up to half of Alzheimer’s cases may be attributable to just seven risk factors shown in my video, Preventing Alzheimer’s with Lifestyle Changes, which include diabetes, high blood pressure, obesity, exercise, smoking, depression, and mental exercise; and that’s not including diet because there are so many dietary factors that researchers couldn’t fit them into their […]

In my video, Does Meditation Affect Cellular Aging?, I discussed how stress reduction through meditation might be able to lengthen telomeres, the protective caps at the tips of our chromosomes that tend to deplete as we age. What about exercise? We can’t always change our situation in life, but we can always go out for […]

Until only a few years ago, almost the whole of the scientific world maintained that the wheat protein gluten would provoke negative effects only in people with rare conditions such as celiac disease or wheat allergies. But by the early part of 2013, it was largely becoming accepted that some non-celiac patients could suffer from […]

The Washington State Fruit Commission, our largest cherry producer, can fund reviews that cherry-pick studies on the anti-inflammatory effects of cherries in a petri dish and animal models. But what we’ve needed are human studies. For example, if we stuff the human equivalent of up to a thousand cups of cherries down the throats of […]

I previously discussed the power of fruits and vegetables to help prevent and treat asthma and allergies. If adding a few more servings of fruits and vegetables may help asthma, what about a diet centered around plants? Twenty patients with allergic eczema were placed on a vegetarian diet.  At the end of two months, their […]

It was Adolf Hitler who coined a propaganda technique he called, “The Big Lie,” arguing that people may be more likely to believe colossal untruths, because they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously, so in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility. […]