Why Do We Eat? A Neurobiological Perspective. Part II

In the last post, I explained that eating behavior is determined by a variety of factors, including hunger and a number of others that I'...

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 ...

New Study: Is a Calorie a Calorie?

A new study in JAMA led by Dr. Cara B. Ebbeling and colleagues purports to challenge the idea that all calories are equally fattening ( 1 )....

My TEDx Talk, "The American Diet: a Historical Perspective"

On October 21st, I spoke at the Harvard Food Law Society 's TEDx conference, Forum on Food Policy .  The conference kicked off with thre...

What Causes Insulin Resistance? Part V

Previously in this series, we've discussed the role of cellular energy excess, inflammation, brain insulin resistance, and micronutrient...

High-Fat Diets, Obesity and Brain Damage

Many of you have probably heard the news this week: High-fat diet may damage the brain Eating a high-fat diet may rapidly injure brain cells...

Seed Oils and Body Fatness-- A Problematic Revisit

Anthony Colpo recently posted a discussion of one of my older posts on seed oils and body fat gain ( 1 ), which reminded me that I need to ...

Food Reward: a Dominant Factor in Obesity, Part III

Low-Fat Diets In 2000, the International Journal of Obesity published a nice review article of low-fat diet trials.  It included data from ...

Clarifications About Carbohydrate and Insulin

My statements about carbohydrate and insulin in the previous post seem to have kicked up some dust!  Some people are even suggesting I'v...

Healthy Skeptic Podcast and Reader Questions

Chris Kresser , Danny Roddy and I just finished recording the podcast that will be released on May 24th.  It went really well, and we think ...

US Omega-6 and Omega-3 Fat Consumption over the Last Century

Omega-6 and omega-3 polyunsaturated fats (PUFA) are essential nutrients that play many important roles in the body. They are highly bioacti...

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...

Does Dietary Saturated Fat Increase Blood Cholesterol? An Informal Review of Observational Studies

The diet-heart hypothesis states three things: Dietary saturated fat increases blood cholesterol Elevated blood cholesterol increases the ri...

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...

Diet-Heart Controlled Trials: a New Literature Review

Many controlled studies have measured the cardiovascular effects of replacing animal ("saturated") fats with seed oils (predominan...

Saturated Fat, Glycemic Index and Insulin Sensitivity: More Evidence

Insulin is a hormone that drives glucose and other nutrients from the bloodstream into cells, among other things. A loss of sensitivity to ...

Tropical Plant Fats: Coconut Oil, Part II

Heart Disease: Animal Studies Although humans aren't rats, animal studies are useful because they can be tightly controlled and experime...

Can a Statin Neutralize the Cardiovascular Risk of Unhealthy Dietary Choices?

The title of this post is the exact title of a recent editorial in the American Journal of Cardiology ( 1 ). Investigators calculated the &...

Saturated Fat Consumption Still isn't Associated with Heart Attack Risk

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition just published the results of a major Japanese study on saturated fat intake and cardiovascular d...

Tropical Plant Fats: Palm Oil

A Fatal Case of Nutritionism The concept of 'nutritionism' was developed by Dr. Gyorgy Scrinis and popularized by the food writer Mi...