The Daily HIT

Though the design of the study means that we should be careful about attributing causation (i.e., assuming that the tea directly causes the decreased incidence of depression), it’s certainly an interesting hypothesis. More frequent consumption of green tea is associated with a lower prevalence of depressive symptoms in the community-dwelling older population, according to the [...]

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What many people would consider moderate quantities of alcohol intake – three or four drinks a week — is strongly linked to recurrence of breast cancer.  Women drinking alcohol at these levels had a 34% greater chance of recurrence than those who abstain. From the New York Times: Researchers from Kaiser Permanente followed 1,897 women who received [...]

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Fascinating and quite encouraging. The changes are not just in behaviors and attitudes, but in the actual structure of the white matter of children’s brains. Researchers found that kids who were weak readers fared poorly on a common measure of white matter in a key region of the brain. But after 100 hours of intensive [...]

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This study confirms evidence in other recent research — concerns about soy being harmful for women with breast cancer turn out to be baseless. In fact, soy foods appear to be protective. But the authors note that this evidence should not be presumed to apply to concentrated or isolated soy supplements. Soy consumption appears to be safe, and potentially [...]

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Further evidence of the decline in enforced standards over the past few decades and particularly the past several years. An analysis of E.P.A. data shows that Safe Drinking Water Act violations have occurred in parts of every state. In the prosperous town of Ramsey, N.J., for instance, drinking water tests since 2004 have detected illegal [...]

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It doesn’t appear to be the caffeine, but something in coffee helps diminish the risk of the most severe and deadly forms of prostate cancer. In a prospective investigation, Wilson and colleagues found that men who drank the most coffee had a 60 percent lower risk of aggressive prostate cancer than men who did not [...]

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This should become an instant classic  for future meetings of my Clinical Nutrition class. Once upon a time, some brave scientists had a noble dream of ridding our food of the plague of nutrients. Today, at the start of the 21st century, the miracle of food processing has brought that dream closer to reality than [...]

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Health reform debates aside, this story about the EPA finalizing its ruling that carbon dioxide poses a threat to human health has major long-term implications. Avoiding catastrophic climate change has been identified by numerous public health researchers as the major health issue of the 21st century. This EPA ruling (and the specifics to follow) will have [...]

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Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco Medical School, who recently won a Nobel Prize for Medicine for her work on telomeres (and who is a collaborating author with Dr. Dean Ornish on his groundbreaking research on holistic approaches to prostate cancer) has some words of wisdom on the role of women in [...]

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An article in the journal Menopause reports that St. John’s wort may have value for conditions other than depression. This article by Tori Hudson, ND, gives facts and context. After 12 weeks of treatment, a non-significant difference in favor of the St. John’s wort group was observed in the daily hot flash frequency and the [...]

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