Ever wondered why an astronaut needs to sit in a wheelchair when they come home? They lose significant amounts of muscle. But they also lose bone, and at the hip they lose it roughly 10 times faster than a post-menopausal woman does on Earth [1][2]. NASA tried for years to stop this loss, and they kept failing. But every failure added an important piece to their understanding, and finally they…
On the 31st of July, a drug company found out it had just lost about thirty billion dollars in a single day. Novo Nordisk's stock-market value fell from $229.2 billion to $198.5 billion — a drop of $30.7 billion, on a share price fall of roughly 9 to 10 percent [1]. But their drug worked perfectly to lower inflammation, and inflammation is a key driver of heart disease. Doesn't make sense, right?…
You cut back on food. You're hungry all day. But the belly fat still won't budge. Or maybe you eat well — you've even lost some weight — and that belly looks exactly the same. Here's the part nobody tells you: eating less is part of why it won't shift. This is not a willpower problem. Instead, I want to work with your body's own pathways to get rid of that deep belly fat — the visceral fat that…
In August 1990, a chemist named Duane Burnett walked into John Clader's office in New Jersey to discuss the results of their failed experiment. Together, they had spent months building molecules to block a specific enzyme — the one everyone was certain was the key to lowering cholesterol. Now, cholesterol itself isn't the villain. Almost every cell in your body can make it, and you would die…
In 1989, a Croatian researcher called Predrag Sikirić had, after more than a decade of trying, finally isolated a molecule he called BPC-157 — one that, in his experiments, seemed to heal and protect almost every tissue in the body. Fast-forward to today, and BPC-157 is embroiled in controversy. There are plenty of examples of people saying that it works — including a widely shared Joe Rogan clip…
Jeremy Clarkson recently went public about surviving prostate cancer, and he offered some blunt advice: if your doctor won't test you, lie to get the test. That clip kicked a hornet's nest. I'm genuinely stoked that Jeremy is fine. But his point about lying to your doctor doesn't only apply to prostate cancer — it applies to all cancer screening. And the conclusion I've reached is probably going…
Two people walked into a clinic this month with almost exactly the same blood-pressure reading. And for one of them it was good news. For the other, it was the reason she's in a cast. The first is a man in his mid-forties. His monitor says 118 over 76 — and he's frightened. His dad had a heart attack at fifty, he's been reading online that anything creeping toward 120 is a warning sign, and he's…
There's a type of fat sitting in direct contact with your heart. Because there's no barrier between it and the heart, it pumps inflammatory molecules — things like interleukin-6 and TNF-alpha — straight onto the heart muscle and the coronary arteries. That local inflammation is part of how this fat drives heart disease [1]. The fat I'm talking about is called epicardial fat. In one large study…
Gout treatment has recently changed, and I'm tired of seeing it mishandled in the clinic. It came into sharp focus for me again last week, when a patient's whole gout treatment plan was just completely wrong. So here's how to actually treat gout and prevent it — without the pain, and without following a restrictive diet. Table of Contents What Actually Happens in Gout What Raises Uric Acid The Old…
Earlier this month, one of the most rigorous trials ever run on a vitamin was stopped early — because the people getting the vitamin were dying faster than the people getting nothing [1]. It was vitamin C. High-dose, into the vein, in patients with severe burns. The idea sounded right: burns flood the body with damage, vitamin C mops up that damage, so give plenty. It proved the opposite. Deaths…
A year ago, I made a video about vitamin K2. I called the heart evidence intriguing — but unproven. I said we needed a bigger, cleaner trial before anyone should get excited. Well, that trial just landed. And it did exactly what was hoped: the vitamin K2 group built up less calcium in their arteries than the placebo group [1]. So you'd think I'd be telling you it's a win. I'm not. Reading it…
There's a man in Wales who earns millions of dollars by reading other people's research. He sits down with papers that have already passed peer review, already been printed in the biggest journals in the world, and he goes looking for the mistakes everyone else missed [1]. He's good at it. Last December, a major cancer institute in Boston paid out fifteen million dollars to settle a case built on…
Walk into a pharmacy in Europe, or Japan, or Australia, and you’ll find a sunscreen ingredient that protects your skin from the signs of aging better than anything sold in the United States — and it doesn’t have the absorption safety questions that hang over other sunscreen ingredients. It’s been on shelves overseas since the 1990s. Americans have flown home from holidays with suitcases full of…
In 2004, a baby was born in Germany who was, by any normal measure, impossible. He was a few days old, and he already had visible muscles — his thighs and upper arms looked like a tiny bodybuilder. Doctors checked him for every disease that could explain it, and found nothing wrong. He wasn't sick. He was just extraordinarily, effortlessly strong. [1] When they looked at his genes, they found the…
This is one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. A room full of cancer doctors, on their feet, applauding the full results of a new cancer trial [1][2] — one with the potential to open a new treatment strategy for as many as 20% of all cancers. The trial involved a novel treatment for pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest cancers there is. It’s the only major cancer where fewer than one in…
In April 2024, the trial that was supposed to end heart disease at the source nearly ended in disaster. One of the initial patients to receive the world's first gene-editing infusion designed to permanently lower cholesterol was four days post-treatment when their platelets crashed and their liver enzymes spiked. They didn't have any symptoms — and within days, the lab values came back to normal.…
Madeline Clough, a grad student at the University of Michigan, stumbled upon something that would turn out to be quite embarrassing for the microplastics research field. We've been told that the amount of plastic in a credit card is roughly how much goes into our body every week [1]. But when Madeline was running a routine air sampler on the roof of a chemistry building for her microplastic…
I take 1.25mg of tirzepatide every week. Tirzepatide is the active ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound. I’m a 34-year-old GP. I don’t have type-2 diabetes. I’m not overweight. And there is no randomised trial that says I should be doing this. Every trial you’ve heard of — SELECT [1], FLOW [2], SURPASS-CVOT [3] — enrolled people with diabetes, obesity, kidney disease, or established heart disease.…
In 2024, I made a video called Your Brain on Omega-3 . I said omega-3 plus B-vitamins was one of the most defensible things you could take for your brain. Last week, a study landed that found the opposite [1]. Older adults who took omega-3 declined faster — on every cognitive test the researchers measured [1]. The authors' proposed mechanism wasn't subtle. They argued the omega-3 in commercial…
In 2023, a Stanford researcher named Pascal Geldsetzer was looking at the way Wales had rolled out the shingles vaccine a decade earlier — and he noticed something peculiar. To ration the limited supply, Welsh health authorities had drawn a line in the sand: if you were 79 on September 1, 2013, you qualified. If you'd already turned 80, you didn't [1]. Two people, born a week apart. Same town.…
This will no doubt be one of my most hated articles, but I'm here to show you the evidence, and let the evidence speak for itself. The internet is awash with videos and articles warning about the dangers of seed oils — that they're toxic, inflammatory, and terrible for our health. In this article, I'll explain where these concerns came from, including worries about heating seed oils and the…
Colon cancer rates in people under 50 have roughly doubled in twenty years. Nobody knows why. The incidence in the sigmoid colon nearly doubled from 1998 to 2022 in people aged 20–49, and 22% of all colorectal cancers are now diagnosed in people under 55 — twice the 11% figure from 1995, even as that age group has been shrinking [1]. But right now, three different research teams — on three…
In 2010, an Oxford neurologist named Peter Rothwell published a paper in The Lancet that rewrote medical guidelines around the world. After analyzing eight randomized trials and twenty-five thousand patients, he showed that taking a daily aspirin cut your long-term risk of dying from cancer by about a third [1]. By 2016, the US Preventive Services Task Force had officially recommended a daily…
Fifty-five years ago, a Japanese biochemist by the name of Akira Endo isolated a compound from a mold growing on rice in a Kyoto grain shop. It would go on to prevent more heart attacks than almost any other discovery in medicine. But in 1966, all that lay in the future. Akira Endo had just arrived in New York City. He'd grown up on a farm in northern Japan, fascinated by mushrooms and mold from…
On July 20, 1984, Jim Fixx — the man whose bestselling book on running had inspired millions of Americans to get in shape — dropped dead of a massive heart attack during his daily run on a quiet Vermont road. He was 52. He had quit smoking. He'd lost 60 pounds. He ran 10 miles a day [1]. It's the kind of story that makes all of us quietly wonder: is it possible to do everything right and still…
In the early 1990s, an endocrinologist named John Eng walked into his lab at a VA hospital in the Bronx with a vial of dried Gila monster venom. He'd ordered it from a mail-order catalog from a serpentarium in Utah [1]. His colleagues thought he was wasting his time. The idea that a poisonous desert lizard could teach us anything about human medicine seemed, to put it politely, unlikely. But Eng…
In 2006, researchers in Dallas found a woman who broke everything we thought we knew about cholesterol. She was 32 years old. A healthy aerobics instructor. Normal liver, normal kidneys, no health problems. But when they tested her blood, her LDL cholesterol came back at 14. Not 140. Fourteen. To put that in perspective, the average LDL cholesterol in a healthy adult is around 100 to 130 mg/dL.…
In 1979, a 3-year-old girl named Karen was undergoing chemotherapy for leukemia in Austin, Texas. The treatment was saving her life — but it had destroyed her immune system. Every cold hit her hard, and her doctor warned that once a cold took hold, it could last for months [1]. Her father, George Eby, was giving her zinc tablets to bring up her levels and improve her immune system's function [2].…
In 2023, the most rigorous healthy-aging testing program in the world published its most exciting result in 14 years. A supplement you can buy at any pharmacy — astaxanthin — had extended male mouse lifespan by 12% [1]. Supplement companies immediately translated that into marketing. One brand, AX3, started claiming their product could deliver a "potential human lifespan increase of up to 9…
Charles Brenner is not a scammer. He's a genuine biochemist — the man who discovered nicotinamide riboside back in 2004. He's published hundreds of papers. And when a new study came out last month showing that his supplement, NR, boosted NAD levels 2.3 times more than its main rival NMN, he was quick to share it on X. What he didn't share — and what I want to explain in this article — is something…