Does "Metabolically Healthy Obesity" Exist?

Obesity is strongly associated with metabolic alterations and negative health outcomes including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and some ...

Atherosclerosis in Ancient Mummies Revisited

Many of you are already aware of the recent study that examined atherosclerosis in 137 ancient mummies from four different cultures ( 1 ).  ...

Extreme Flu Activity in the US

A friend of mine came down with a nasty flu recently.  I checked Google Flu Trends , and found that flu activity is currently at "inten...

Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI)

Some of you may have heard of an ambitious new nutrition research foundation called the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI).  In this post,...

Calories and Carbohydrate: a Natural Experiment

In the lab, we work hard to design experiments that help us understand the natural world.  But sometimes, nature sets up experiments for us,...

New Review Paper by Yours Truly: High-Fat Dairy, Obesity, Metabolic Health and Cardiovascular Disease

My colleagues Drs. Mario Kratz, Ton Baars, and I just published a paper in the European Journal of Nutrition titled " The Relationship ...

What Causes Type 2 Diabetes, and How Can it be Prevented?

In the comments of the last post, we've been discussing the relationship between body fatness and diabetes risk.  I think this is really...

Interview with Aitor Calero of Directo al Paladar

Aitor Calero writes for the popular Spanish cooking and nutrition blog, Directo al Paladar ("straight to the palate").  We did a ...

Lessons From Ötzi, the Tyrolean Ice Man. Part II

Otzi's Diet Otzi's digestive tract contains the remains of three meals.  They were composed of cooked grains (wheat bread and whea...

Lessons From Ötzi, the Tyrolean Ice Man. Part I

This is Otzi, or at least a reconstruction of what he might have looked like.  5,300 years ago, he laid down on a glacier near the border be...

Fast Food, Weight Gain and Insulin Resistance

CarbSane just posted an interesting new study that fits in nicely with what we're discussing here.  It's part of the US Coronary Ar...

Obesity and the Fluid-in, Fluid-out Therapy for Edema

I recently attended a lecture by Dr. Arya M. Sharma here at the University of Washington. Dr. Sharma is a Canadian clinician who specializ...

Safflower Oil Study

A few people have sent me a new study claiming to demonstrate that half a tablespoon of safflower oil a day improves insulin sensitivity, in...

Gluten-Free January Survey Data, Part II: Health Effects of a Gluten-Free Diet

GFJ participants chose between three diet styles: a simple gluten-free diet; a "paleo light" diet diet that eliminated sugar and i...

Flu Season is Here

I've noticed everyone around me getting sick lately (I seem to have become mostly immune to colds and the flu in the last couple of year...

Polyphenols, Hormesis and Disease: Part II

In the last post, I explained that the body treats polyphenols as potentially harmful foreign chemicals, or "xenobiotics". How ca...

The Diabetes Epidemic

The CDC just released its latest estimate of diabetes prevalence in the US ( 1 ): Diabetes affects 8.3 percent of Americans of all ages, and...

Eating Wheat Gluten Causes Symptoms in Some People Who Don't Have Celiac Disease

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a condition characterized by the frequent occurrence of abdominal pain, diarrhea, constipation, bloating a...

Dairy Fat and Diabetes

Introduction Having access to embargoed news from the Annals of Internal Medicine is really fun. I get to report on important studies at th...

Choline and Fatty Liver

I've been writing about non-alcoholic fatty liver disorder (NAFLD) since the early days of this blog, because it's an alarmingly com...