Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D.

Dean Karnazes is an ultramarathoner whose most recent exploit was to run 50 marathons in 50 consecutive states in 50 consecutive days.  Not a bad feat.  His endurance seems almost superhuman, and, based on what I’ve read about him, I suspect it is.  A recent article in the magazine Wired explained how he got started running 14 years ago.

DEAN KARNAZES WAS SLOBBERING DRUNK. IT WAS HIS 30TH BIRTHDAY, and he’d started with beer and moved on to tequila shots at a bar near his home in San Francisco. Now, after midnight, an attractive young woman – not his wife – was hitting on him. This was not the life he’d imagined for himself. He was a corporate hack desperately running the rat race. The company had just bought him a new Lexus. He wanted to vomit. Karnazes resisted the urge and, instead, slipped out the bar’s back door and walked the few blocks to his house. On the back porch, he found an old pair of sneakers. He stripped down to his T-shirt and underwear, laced up the shoes, and started running. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

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A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post showing how the press fails to mention low-carb diets in weight loss stories, focusing instead on exercise or some other facet of an individual’s quest to lose weight and improve health. Today we’ll look at how the press, in an effort to minimize the untoward effects of carbohydrates on health, sometimes simply misrepresents the true outcome of studies.

A week or so ago a Swedish study (click here for a pdf) was released looking at the short term effects on the liver of a diet high in fast food. ABC News reported the study. Let’s first look at what the study was all about and what the data showed, then we’ll see how ABC reported it. By looking carefully at what ABC did to misrepresent the study, we can arm ourselves with the knowledge to identify this kind of press bias in future reporting.

First the study.

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I’ve learned from Tom Naughton that his new movie is titled Fat Head and carries the tagline You’ve been fed a load of bologna. Tom has also graciously agreed to answer all your questions about the movie so fire away. Submit any questions you might have as comments, and Tom will answer them in a blog post within a few days.

I’m putting up the rest of the clips from the movie on today’s post.

The sequence of these clips as they will appear in the movie is as follows: Read more »

A little over a year ago I wrote about how MD and I had been interviewed on camera for a documentary being made to respond to Morgan Spurlock’s popular movie Super Size Me. Tom Naughton, the producer of the anti-Super Size Me film, spent a few hours with us and even contributed to this blog with his answers to the many of the questions my readers had for him. Today I received word from Tom that the film is pretty much finished.

He sent me a few YouTubes of short segments of the movie so that readers could get a taste of what’s coming. I’ll post these over the next couple of days.

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