![]() We’ve all heard why eating non-organic animal products is a bad idea: the animals may be raised in poor conditions, industrial agriculture produces large amounts of air and water pollution, it’s a leading cause of deforestation in the U.S., and the animals may be fed antibiotics.
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![]() In my last blog entry, I highlighted how the high fat/low carb Inuit diet could counter-intuitively be healthy for its adherents. One of my students read the article and asked me if I knew anything about the (also) high-fat, low-carb ketogenic diet. Sometimes used as a treatment for pediatric epilepsy, the diet has also become increasingly popular not just for weight loss, but to change body composition - that is, to increase muscle mass and decrease body fat percentage. The student asked me if the ketogenic diet could do that in a safe way for a young person like him.
![]() It’s hard to go too long in today’s 24-hour news cycle without seeing headlines announcing the “latest scientific report” on weight loss, fad diets, or why the health trend of the moment is the best thing you never knew about. And as exciting as many of these news reports seem at first, these research headlines are often a sugar-coated version of the real story. And the outcomes of these studies may not even be the most important part.
![]() A lot of publicity has accompanied a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine about how FTO, the most common “obesity gene,” works. What does it mean for obesity prevention and treatment?
![]() by John Paul Livingstone, BA As a Research Assistant with Project Viva, a longitudinal birth cohort now in its 16th year, I traveled all over the country this summer to conduct study visits with participants who moved out of state. On more than one occasion, I found myself sitting in a hotel room because there was nowhere I could go easily on foot, something that I often take for granted living in Boston. One hotel desk clerk even advised that I take a cab instead of walking to the closest pharmacy — which was less than a quarter mile away — due to concerns about crossing the street.
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