Dr. Chet’s Health Memos
If it’s in the health news today, I’ll be writing about it as soon as I read the research, both old and new. With my email Health Memos, you’ll know more about making lifestyle choices that will help you get and keep good health. These free, concise updates on health are emailed to subscribers twice a week. Subscribe today and get a free MP3, in English or Spanish, of Dr. Chet’s Top Ten Tips—Small Changes for a Healthier Life.
Drinking Your Phytonutrients: The Bottom Line
To finish this series, I’ll briefly cover two recent research studies on coffee and tea, and then give you the bottom line and a recipe.
Research
Green Tea and Neuronal Mitochondria
The mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cells, and that includes brain cells. When they operate at peak activity, they provide our brains with the energy for learning and memory. The downside is that they produce many free radicals in the process, and if we don’t have antioxidants to quench those free radicals, it can cause a decline in mental function. Researchers have recently . . .
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Drinking Your Phytonutrients: I Love Coffee
I’ll say it again: I love coffee. I’ve been drinking it since my mother put coffee with a little sugar in my bottle when I was a baby; I guess she wanted me to stay awake. (Yes, that’s Ma and I in the photo; Paula’s feeling creative this week.)
In my lifetime, the health news has said coffee is both bad and good for you. Today it seems to be mostly on the plus side; there’s good reason for that and it appears the benefits are due to the phytonutrients and—surprise!—the caffeine.
Caffeine . . .
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Drinking Your Phytonutrients: Tea of Any Color
Summer is here and with it, iced tea seems to be a staple drink. It gave me the idea to do a series on the phytonutrients we can get from our beverages. Getting people to eat vegetables can take some time, but everyone wants a cool drink in the summer and hot drink in the winter. This week is all about tea, coffee, and the latest research on both.
Let’s begin with tea from the leaves of Camellia sinensis. Based on world-wide statistics, black tea is consumed by 72% of the population while 36% drink green tea. Obviously . . .
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The Dark-Chocolate Study: The Problems
After Thursday’s memo, you’ve got to be wondering what could be worse with the dark-chocolate study than its misleading conclusions. I’m going to examine the process the author explained in his faux study to show how that applies to many research studies from legitimate health research.
Not enough of the right expertise
There was no input from a nutrition expert that I could find. The author used a physician to do the study and collect the data. Even though the purpose of the study was to prove that eventually something will be statistically significant . . .
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Problems with the Dark-Chocolate Study
The journalist and his colleagues who perpetrated the dark chocolate and weight loss study I talked about Tuesday were out to prove a point: typical journalists, even the ones who specialize in health, don’t really understand the fundamentals of nutrition, weight loss, and fitness. They especially don’t understand statistics and how they’re misapplied even in legitimate studies. Nothing new there.
What I think they did show was that there are many news and information sources on the web that will publish anything provocative. Dark chocolate helping weight loss certainly fit that profile.
The author explained everything he . . .
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Dark Chocolate and Weight Loss
Late last week, Paula and a couple of readers sent me links about a journalist who managed to get a study on dark chocolate and weight loss published in a scientific journal in March 2015 (1). It made headlines everywhere. Then in late May, he wrote about how he fooled the journalistic world (2). While a lot has been written about his sting and the reasons he said he did it, there are more issues here than have been written about so far, and that’s what I’ll talk about this week. Let’s begin with the study.
The . . .
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The Truth About Sunscreen!
In today’s message, I’m going to examine the science behind the article on sunscreen that started this week’s look at reposting websites. There are three primary research findings used in the article that are supposed to blow the lid off the myth of sunscreen preventing cancer. Let’s take a look.
“Avoiding the sun doubles all-cause mortality”
This research finding is taken from an epidemiological study done at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute titled the Melanoma in Southern Sweden Study or MISS (1). The data does show that over 20 years in a group of close to . . .
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The Problem with Reposting Websites
I get asked a lot of questions about articles posted on other health-related websites. Some are legit, but usually it’s something with a provocative title to get your attention: “Scientists Blow the Lid on Sunscreen & Cancer Myth” is one someone asked me to check as I was preparing Tuesday’s message on sunscreen. This is a perfect opportunity to talk about something that’s been troubling me for several months: reposting websites. I don’t know if that’s what they’re officially called, but it seems to fit what they do.
These reposting websites find the . . .
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Skin Care: A Written Invitation
Story time: My father-in-law was in the Army Air Corp in WWII. On the way to Italy to begin his deployment in the B-24 Liberator “Miss Maggie,” the crew stopped for a week in Belem, Brazil. It was summer and he and the other soldiers went swimming in the scorching sun. They spent all day at the beach, learning to body surf and having a great time. He and others were burned so badly, a few required hospitalization.
Move forward 40 years. That single exposure resulted in multiple episodes of skin cancer for Dad. Even at 92 . . .
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Do You Have Orthorexia Nervosa?
Based on the prior memos, the question has to be: Is obsession with healthy foods really such a bad thing, worthy of an actual medical term? After all, it’s really healthy eating, isn’t it?
I can’t argue with that. However, any time people transition from freedom of choice to being compelled to do something that seems beyond their control, that’s a problem. Maybe not the worst problem, but a problem nevertheless.
I’ve observed first-hand anorexia nervosa when I was a college professor; college students seem to be prone to it, especially the female students . . .
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