(Courtesy Photo/Dr. Siri Chand Khalsa)

Despite paying almost double what any other country in the world pays for health care, the U.S. has declining measures on most health care attributes. We are unhealthy, are prone to heart disease and cancer, and are increasingly overweight. And an increasing number of countries, including those that spend a fraction of what we do on health care, are passing us by.

Weve dealt with these topics on earlier shows from the perspective of national health care policy. This time we ask the question, What can I personally do to live a healthier life? And, How can I make this easy and enjoyable enough that I will actually do it?

Could what we eat have anything to do with it? There is increasing evidence that it does.

Yet our physicians receive almost no training or education in the area of nutrition.

Our guests are:

We consider:

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Think Tank examines role of diet in how to live healthy life - KTAR.com

Podcaster and sports commentator Joe Rogan has been on the carnivore dietthe same diet beloved by certain members of the Bitcoin communityand it turns out he's a big fan.

According to an Instagram post over the weekend, Rogan has seen miraculous changes to this body, his mind, and overall wellbeing.

Joe-rogan-meat-diet-carnivore-bitcoin

In the post, he claims he has lost 12 pounds, has banished his aches and pains and even his vitiligoa skin condition where patches of skin lose their pigmentappears to be less severe. But what is the carnivore diet and why is the Bitcoin community so pumped about it?

The Carnivore diet is, as the name suggests, a diet composed entirely of food derived from animals. So that's no fruits or vegetables, only dairy, eggs, meat, and fish. Apparently, condiments are 'allowed'.

The Carnivore Diet stems from the controversial belief that human ancestral populations ate mostly meat and fish and that high-carb diets are to blame for todays high rates of chronic disease. Its main proponent is Shawn Baker, a former doctor who claims the diet can be used to treat depression, anxiety, arthritis, obesity, diabetes and more.

That's a good question. For the Bitcoin carnivore, there is a kind of metaphysical parallel between decentralized digital ledgers and an imagined idea of what our ancestors ate, and by extension, how they lived.

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"The 20th century was disastrous for human health and wealth, and the rise of central banking and industrial food was clearly a major reason why,"Michael Goldstein, the founder of the Satoshi Nakamoto Institute told Vice."Bitcoin is a revolt against fiat money, and an all-meat diet is a revolt against fiat food."

Saifedean Ammous, a Bitcoin carnivore and a professor of economics at the Lebanese American University, said:

The people who tell you to eat your 6-10 portions of indigestible toxic grains a day for a healthy and balanced diet are the same kind of people who tell you central banks have to determine interest rates for a modern economy to function. You can choose to listen to them and watch your wealth and health disappear, or you can think for yourself.

Members of the Bitcoin community regularly meet up to eat meat and talk Bitcoin. Jimmy Song is one of its highest profile members.

With news of Rogan's tacit endorsement, Bitcoiners have taken to Twitter to ask him if he'd invite Bitcoin carnivores on to his show to spread the good word.

If you're genuinely interested in peer-reviewed science behind high animal fat diets, Nutritionfacts.org, a not-for-profit website that only publishes peer-reviewed medical journals has a useful explainer. TL:DR It's a stupid idea.

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Joe Rogan gives the thumbs up to the Bitcoiners' meat diet - Decrypt

MIAMI Nick Bosa was holding court at his podium during the 49ers final media session on Thursday when he started talking about how important it has been for him to get his normal meals in while living on the road for a week before the biggest game of his life.

Bosa, who will be named the NFLs Rookie of the Year on Saturday, is a creature of habit, a ferocious defensive lineman who needs to keep his body properly fueled so he can go a million miles an hour on the field on Sunday.

This all got me thinking while I stood a few feet away from him on Thursday what does an athlete in peak physical condition like Bosa eat each day to keep himself in the best shape possible?

So I asked him to take me through his day of eating, which he kindly did:

I love how he has no idea what an average calorie intake should be and that he treats himself to a burger or some ice cream but only after a game.

This dude will be ready to go Sunday night.

Continued here:
Nick Bosa talking about what he eats every day is oddly satisfying - For The Win

After struggling with his acne for years and trying just about every remedy out there, Brian Turner eventually found a cure that worked for him, albeit an extreme one. In a video on his YouTube channel, Brian explains how took 70 weeks of large, daily doses of Accutane to clear up his acnebut it didn't come without side effects.

Prior to starting treatment, Brian's acne was particularly serious. "I had large, nodular cysts and tonnes of blackheads covering my entire face, and tonnes of whiteheads as well."

He started out at 40 milligrams of Accutane (the popular name for the drug Isotretinoin) per day. After six weeks, he had a huge breakout, which he says is to be expected: whatever acne you have before starting treatment is going to get twice or three times as bad when the drugs begin to take effect. "It sort of ignites your acne, so it got way, way, way worse."

It took more than six months for Brian to see some positive results. It was around week 30 that his skin began to clear up: the treatment worked on the whiteheads first, then started acting on the cysts, then the blackheads, and finally the redness in his skin. He also did his own research at the same time, and from week 30 onwards began to cut meat and dairy out of his diet.

"I was trying to figure out what was going on, why my face wasn't clearing up yet when other people had started seeing success by week 30," he says, "and I found that my whey intake, my protein intake, which is made up of whey, and whey is made up of dairy, all of that is known to trigger acne. So when I took that out I started to see my acne clearing up very quickly, and then it worked in conjunction with Accutane and actually cleared up fully."

At his highest, Brian was taking 200 milligrams of Accutane every day, for about 15 weeks, then slowly began to reduce the dosage towards the end of his treatment, and ended up at around 60 milligrams per day. "I was basically taking two treatments all at once," he says.

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During the 70 weeks, Brian went through a range of side effects, from extreme skin dryness which would cause his lips and face to crack and even bleed if he smiled or yawned, to an increased sensitivity to light. He also had pain in his back and joints that he'd never had before, and began to experience a loss of strength in the gym, although he wasn't reducing his calorie intake, in fact he was eating more calories than usual. Even after treatment ended, the back and joint pain and dry skin persisted, although Brian notes that there are other, much more serious side effects from taking Accutane which aren't discussed enough, including depression and a greater risk of cancer.

The acne also came back after treatment, which Brian says can happen up to 50 percent of the time. "A lot of people think it's a 100 percent success rate and then you're clear forever, and that's not the case at all." While his skin wasn't as sensitive to artificial sweeteners or creatine as it had been, the big triggers, such as dairy, still caused huge flare-ups.

"I finished up Accutane and then I felt like I might have more freedom to eat whatever I wanted, so I started including protein bars and some dairy here and there, and every time I did, within 24 to 48 hours I'd feel a cyst begin to form, then they would stick around for 2 to 12 weeks after they fully formed," Brian tells Men's Health.

"Eventually I decided to experiment with a plant-based diet," he says. "I figured if removing dairy helped so much, then removing meat and whatnot would help too, as I felt that the hormones in the meat and dairy were having an impact on my acne. My cystic acne went away, and the more regular pimples started to go away as well. That was a bit over four years ago, and since then I've been fully vegan and it's kept my acne at bay. I still get the occasional pimple here or there but never a cyst and my pimples move along a lot quicker than they did."

He adds that this is just what worked for him, and that it is a personal choice. And as for Accutane, given the range of dangerous side effects, he says: "You should use it as an absolute last resort."

See the article here:
This Guy Cured His Cystic Acne With an Extreme Accutane Treatment and Plant-Based Diet - menshealth.com

Eating more foods containing antioxidant flavonols could reduce the risk of developing Alzheimers disease in later life, according to a study published in Neurology.

Flavonols, found in nearly all fruit and vegetables as well as tea, are a type of flavonoid chemical compounds found in plant pigments that have known health benefits.

In this study, researchers followed the health of 921 people with an average age of 81 who did not initially have Alzheimers the most common cause of dementia.

Each year, the participants filled out a questionnaire to say how often they ate certain foods, as well as other factors such as their education level, amount of physical activity, and how often they engaged in cognitive activities such as reading and playing games. The participants were followed for an average of six years, and over the course of the study, 220 people developed Alzheimers.

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The researchers found that those who had the most flavonols in their diet were 48 per cent less likely, after adjusting for other factors, to develop Alzheimers than those who had the least amount.

Some of the top sources of flavonols included pears, olive oil, kale, beans, tea, spinach, broccoli, wine, tomatoes and apples.

More research is needed to confirm these results, but these are promising findings, said study author Dr Thomas Holland at Rush University in Chicago, US. Eating more fruits and vegetables and drinking more tea could be a fairly inexpensive and easy way for people to help stave off Alzheimers dementia.

With the elderly population increasing worldwide, any decrease in the number of people with this devastating disease, or even delaying it for a few years, could have an enormous benefit on public health.

Some 850,000 people are estimated to be living with dementia in the UK, and thats expected to rise to two million by 2050. Most of us probably know, or have known, someone with dementia.

But we may not understand the difference between dementia and, say, Alzheimers disease. Dementia describes the symptoms that someone experiences as a result of a brain disease.

Such symptoms can include memory loss, mood and behavioural changes, and difficulties with thinking, problem-solving and language.

More than 100 diseases can cause dementia, each with slightly different symptoms.The most common cause of dementia is Alzheimers.

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Diet rich in fruit, vegetables and tea linked to lower Alzheimers risk - BBC Focus Magazine

I consumed many muffins in the name of clinical research.

The morning of Oct. 17, 2019 started differently than most. I jammed a blood sugar sensor into my own arm after, of course, taking deep breaths and giving myself pep talks for 30 minutes. It only stung a little, but as someone who abhors needles, shoving a filament into my own tricep was a serious undertaking.

That morning I also filled up a test tube with spit (you'd be surprised at how long that takes and, ugh, dry mouth) and configured a flushable basket to my toilet seat so I could scoop up a sample of my own stool -- I know, yuck.

I did all of these things -- and many more over the next 11 days -- in the name of science. And I'm going to tell you why you should consider something like it, too.

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Clinical research is research that involves people who volunteer to be studied for a certain disease, diet, medication, fitness program, health condition, medical product or any combination of those things. There are two types of clinical research: clinical trials (also called interventional studies) and observational studies.

Interventional studies, the type of research I participated in that involved jamming the filament into my upper arm, evaluate some sort of change on the participants' health. In my case, the researchers used the data from my blood sugar sensor, along with a lot more data I'll describe below, to study how different foods affect my body.

Predict is, as of yet and probably for the foreseeable future, the largest nutrition intervention study of its kind, with over 2,200 participants from the UK and all 50 US states.

The distinction of study type is important, says Dr. Tim Spector, one of the scientists leading Predict and professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London, because "many nutrition studies shared with the public are typically either small intervention studies of 10-20 people that are not representative or they are larger observational studies that are prone to bias."

It all started with a massive clinical study that Dr. Spector led beginning back in 1993, in which he studied the nutritional responses of more than 14,000 sets of twins -- and found that even identical twins have different responses to the same foods.

To that end, Dr. Spector and his partners, Jonathan Wolf and George Hadjigeorgiou, founded Zoe, the nutritional science and technology company leading the Predict study. Zoe is building a machine-learning algorithm with the anonymized results from Predict, which will allow the researchers to predict -- the name makes sense now -- nutritional responses for anyone who wants them.

Thousands of participants' results from the Predict study are feeding the Zoe app, which will be able to estimate your food responses based on demographics and questionnaires. The app is currently in beta.

In other words, my data -- and the data from the 2,000-plus other participants -- will be used to create an app in which you could answer a few questions and find out how your body will respond to, say, an apple or a slice of pizza.

The study's methodology; the fact that participants remain in their usual environments and stick to their usual routines; and the utilization of user-generated data (like the food log) produces "an excellent data set that gives us real insights into how different genders, identical twins and different ethnic groups metabolize food," says Dr. Spector.

Every clinical trial is different, but I can offer you a synopsis of my experience with Predict. (Have I mentioned that I stabbed my tricep with a small needle?)

All jokes and phobias aside, participating in this study was not easy. Most of the time, it was not fun. Yes, it began with the blood sugar sensor. But that, as hard as it may be to believe after my dogging on so much, was not even the worst part.

Here's a quick list of the uncomfortable circumstances I endured in the name of science:

I had to prick my fingers as part of the trial.

The Predict study was hard. It tested my nerves, took up a lot of time (curse the act of food journaling, I should've taken my own advice), and threw off my routine.

But it was so, so worth it -- and I haven't even received my results yet.

If you actually read all of those bullet points, I'm willing to bet you're thinking something along the lines of, "Nope. Never. Not a chance. I won't give up my eggs and bacon, and no way I'm scooping poop with an ice cream sample spoon."

But even without my results, the Predict study has already helped me in a handful of ways. During this study, I learned that:

Once I get my results back, I'm sure that the poop-scooping and finger-pricking will prove to be even more worthwhile. I'm eager to see the physiological responses to my diet over those 11 days -- combined with the emotional and physical things I noticed as the study was unfolding, I'll be able to make some pretty grand conclusions about what foods my body does and doesn't like.

I'm particularly excited to see how my body responds to neon sour gummy worms (simple carbs) versus a banana (also simple carbs, but also micronutrients and some fiber).

I'd be lying if I said that I didn't hope the results were similar, because I'd really like to say, "My body responds the same way to gummies as it does to apples" just in case anyone ever judges me for the sheer number of gummy worms in my diet.

I really, really love gummy worms, so I'm hoping that my results tell me they're not as bad for me as I think.

You mean, other than the super fun things like puncturing your own skin? Am I beating a dead horse? I know I already said all jokes aside, but I'm for real this time. All jokes aside, clinical trials are the heart of medicine. Without them, science -- and thus healthcare -- would never move forward.

Clinical research is the reason we have safe medications, devices and procedures. It's the science that determines which drugs are safe as over-the-counter and which ones need a prescription. It's the driver of nutrition and fitness guidelines, such as the daily recommended intake for different vitamins and minerals and the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.

Perhaps most importantly, clinical research is the reason that doctors, surgeons and other health professionals can increasingly keep their patients safe and healthy thanks to new medical innovations.

But it's not just about the researchers and doctors -- clinical research is about the participants. People take part in clinical studies for many different reasons, such as:

This is an example of a nutritional curve, the main thing that the researchers are looking for.

Personally, I decided to take part in the Predict study because I'm a total nerd for nutrition science, and I feel like there's a lack of ways to find out how food truly affects your body. Predict offered me a way to gather important insights about my health and diet in my home environment.

I also decided to participate because the scientists, businesspeople and tech pros behind Zoe and Predict are creating a first-of-its-kind tool to help people all over the globe get those same insights without committing to a clinical study.

Dr. Spector articulates it best: "Predict is an ongoing scientific program to understand the dimensions of eating: what to eat, which foods to eat together, when to eat and when to be active around eating. We've been given generic one-size-fits-all advice around all of these dimensions for hundreds of years."

Predict's insights power Zoe to empower individuals to know how to eat for their own body. So the more people who participate in the Predict program and who use the Zoe app, the better the answers will be for everyone."

The information contained in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as health or medical advice. Always consult a physician or other qualified health provider regarding any questions you may have about a medical condition or health objectives.

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9 pricked fingers, 15 muffins and a poop sample: What it's like to be in a nutrition study - CNET