Newmark's Door

Very early work. We need more of this type of research . . . stat!

Ignoring "obvious confounders" is . . . not good.

A well-done explanation of why your doctor is probably more confident than he or she should be.

Something you probably won't hear from the Environmental Working Group.

Related: "The New Dirty Dozen and Clean Fifteen Are Here — But Should You Care?"

Things we oldsters would be well advised to know.

A suggestion to eat strawberries. Lots of them.

If I were a speculator I'd buy huge quantities of this stuff. If the research pans out, it would be worth a fortune.

Interesting and sad, and offers another example of a very tough problem. Science needs to enforce standards against nonsense. There should be a very, very high threshold for believing claims of a perpetual motion machine. And for much else. (I once read that before the relatively recent proof of Fermat's Last Theorem a distinguished math professor used to regularly get "proofs" submitted to him. He got enough, in fact, that he printed some postcards and charged a grad student for sending them out. The cards read something like, "Dear Sir and/or Madam: Thank you for submitting your proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. Your first error appears on page ___, line ___." The grad student had to fill in the blanks.)

But thresholds against very unlikely things and nonsense should not develop into an awful groupthink that mindlessly claims authority where there is no good ground for claiming such authority. A theory of Alzheimer's that repeatedly failed but was stubbornly adhered at the cost of discouraging virtually all other theories is a good example.

It wouldn't work for me, but your mileage may vary. For one thing, I'm not giving up olive oil now.

(Link courtesy of Michael Greenspan.)

As I've written by now many times on this blog medicine currently ascribes almost all of the ills of old age to chronic inflammation. 

. . . researchers at 22 institutions describe how persistent and severe inflammation in the body is often a precursor for heart disease, cancer, diabetes, kidney disease, diabetes and autoimmune and neurodegenerative disorders.

The researchers point to inflammation-related conditions as the cause of roughly 50 percent of all deaths worldwide.