When I was in high school, I ran cross country. One fall, I mysteriously became slow. I felt like a video game character suddenly stuck on a harder setting. My coach insisted it must be mental; I tried pushing harder. Winter track season came, and nothing improved. Then, I tested positive for anemia and started taking iron supplements. By spring, I was back to running my fastest mile time yet.

Deployed correctly, vitamins can feel like magic. Their discovery is littered with stories like mine, in which these mysterious little components of food are shown to wield deep control over flesh. One of the first hints that food could contain such specific components with such specific influence over well-being came in 1816, when experimental physiologist François Magendie fed dogs a diet that was high in sugar and free of animals and plants. The dogs developed sores on their corneas and died. In the 1880s, Dutch physician Christiaan Eijkman studied a flock of chickens that had a tendency to wobble, fall over, and become unable to move; when he switched their diet from plain white rice to rice with husks (brown rice), they recovered. Lacking a modern conception of nutrition, Eijkman assumed that the white rice must somehow be toxic and that the husks were counteracting the bad stuff... [ read more ]

Robert Lustig is a paediatric endocrinologist at the University of California who specialises in the treatment of childhood obesity. A 90-minute talk he gave in 2009, titled Sugar: The Bitter Truth, has now been viewed more than six million times on YouTube. In it, Lustig argues forcefully that fructose, a form of sugar ubiquitous in modern diets, is a “poison” culpable for America’s obesity epidemic.

A year or so before the video was posted, Lustig gave a similar talk to a conference of biochemists in Adelaide, Australia. Afterwards, a scientist in the audience approached him. Surely, the man said, you’ve read Yudkin. Lustig shook his head. John Yudkin, said the scientist, was a British professor of nutrition who had sounded the alarm on sugar back in 1972, in a book called Pure, White, and Deadly.

“If only a small fraction of what we know about the effects of sugar were to be revealed in relation to any other material used as a food additive,” wrote Yudkin, “that material would promptly be banned.” The book did well, but Yudkin paid a high price for it. Prominent nutritionists combined with the food industry to destroy his reputation, and his career never recovered. He died, in 1995, a disappointed, largely forgotten man... [ read more ]

Weed Killer in $289 Million Cancer Verdict Found in Oat Cereal and Granola Bars.

Popular oat cereals, oatmeal, granola and snack bars come with a hefty dose of the weed-killing poison in Roundup, according to independent laboratory tests commissioned by EWG.

Glyphosate, an herbicide linked to cancer by California state scientists and the World Health Organization, was found in all but two of 45 samples of products made with conventionally grown oats. Almost three-fourths of those samples had glyphosate levels higher than what EWG scientists consider protective of children’s health with an adequate margin of safety. About one-third of 16 samples made with organically grown oats also had glyphosate, all at levels well below EWG’s health benchmark... [read more]

According to Moran Cerf, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University who has been studying decision-making for over a decade, the surest way to maximize happiness has nothing to do with experiences, material goods, or personal philosophy.

It's all about who you decide to spend time with. But "it's not just advice to choose your friends carefully," Cerf told Business Insider.

There are two premises that lead Cerf to believe personal company is the most important factor for long-term satisfaction.

The first is that decision-making is tiring. A great deal of research has found that humans have a limited amount of mental energy to devote to making choices. Picking our clothes, where to eat, what to eat when we get there, what music to listen to, whether it should actually be a podcast, and what to do in our free time all demand our brains to exert that energy on a daily basis... [read more]

Human cells make up only 43% of the body's total cell count. The rest are microscopic colonists.

Understanding this hidden half of ourselves - our microbiome - is rapidly transforming understanding of diseases from allergy to Parkinson's.

The field is even asking questions of what it means to be "human" and is leading to new innovative treatments as a result.

"They are essential to your health," says Prof Ruth Ley, the director of the department of microbiome science at the Max Planck Institute, "your body isn't just you".

No matter how well you wash, nearly every nook and cranny of your body is covered in microscopic creatures.

This includes bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea (organisms originally misclassified as bacteria). The greatest concentration of this microscopic life is in the dark murky depths of our oxygen-deprived bowels... [read more]

A host of potential pathogens lurks in each slobbery or scratchy lick.

When Julie McKenna arrived at the hospital in Mildura, Australia, in 2007, she could barely speak. Her arms and legs were cold and mottled, and her face was turning purple.

Doctors quickly determined that Julie was in septic shock—bacteria in her bloodstream were attacking her from within. Even after starting on antibiotics, the purple kept spreading, and her organs began to fail. Eventually, parts of her arms and legs began turning black.

She had been hospitalized for more than two weeks before doctors were able to identify the bacteria in her blood. It was Capnocytophaga canimorsus, a bug commonly found in the saliva of healthy dogs and cats.

Only then did Julie remember that she had scalded the top of her left foot in hot water a few weeks before she got sick. It wasn’t a bad burn, and she hadn’t thought much of it when her fox terrier puppy licked the wound.

Like Julie, most of us don’t really know what’s swimming around in our pets’ saliva, or how dangerous it might be. Our skin and immune systems normally stand between us and our pets’ germs—but those systems can be breached... [read more]

I used to pound down diet drinks. Low-calorie had to be good, right? It was an invitation to enjoy as much as I wanted, guilt-free. Diet soda was a source of caffeine, and a companion.

And this was all consistent with my identity as a cardiologist. I am very interested in the prevention of heart disease—for my patients for the public, and for myself. So while I never saw diet soda as a health drink, I felt it helped keep my weight under control.

New research, however, has raised the very real possibility that the non-sugar sweeteners that put the “diet” in diet drinks (and many low-calorie foods), may have been conspiring against me.

Rather than help me maintain a healthy weight, they may have been predisposing me to weight gain and metabolic abnormalities. This research is suggesting that drinks and foods using artificial sweeteners like aspartame may be doing exactly what we thought they should be preventing. At the very least, they do not seem to help people keep weight off... [read more]

The morning started the same as too many others before it: with my collie mix, Gus, trying valiantly to get me out of bed. Valiantly, but unsuccessfully — the best I could muster was a brief flutter of my eyes and a roll in the other direction. My dog may have wanted me up, but I wanted to put off the inevitable struggle of the day as long as I could.

My work as a freelance writer had been s-l-o-w. Days without much work bled into weeks, and somewhere along the way the catastrophizing, negative thoughts began to creep in. This is what failure is, I thought. I was convinced that I’d burn through my little savings in no time and end up broke, not even able to do basic things like feed the dog or pay the bills. Even though, up until that point, things had been consistent and — dare I say — even moderately prosperous for me, I was sure that any success I’d had was sheer luck, and that my luck had run out.

Thankfully, I don’t feel that way anymore. A couple of accepted pitches sparked a crucial confidence boost, and I found myself a therapist to top all therapists. Still, even though things have started to turn around, there are moments when I’m gripped with anxiety about the future of my freelancing career. It’s isolating, and lonely — and, as it turns out, a pretty common experience among people in my situation [...read more]