Vegans and Iodine Deficiency Risk 

Most plant-based milks are not fortified with iodine. “Adequate dietary iodine is required for normal thyroid function.” In fact, the two thyroid hormones are named after how many iodine atoms they contain: T3 and T4. “Given that iodine is extensively stored in the thyroid gland itself, it can safely be consumed intermittently,” so we don’t

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What About Elderberry, Echinacea, and Cranberries for Colds and the Flu? 

How effective are flu shots, elderberries, echinacea, and cranberries? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that everyone over the age of six months get a routine flu shot every year, unless you have some sort of contraindication, such as an allergy to any of the vaccine’s components. CDC recommends getting vaccinated

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Chemical Safety, Cultivated Meat, and Our Health 

More than 95 percent of human exposure to industrial pollutants like dioxins and PCBs comes from fish, other meat, and dairy. By cultivating muscle meat directly, without associated organs like intestines, the incidence of foodborne diseases “could be significantly reduced,” as could exposure to antibiotics, “pesticides, arsenic, dioxins, and hormones associated with conventional meat.” Currently,

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Antibiotic Resistance, Cultivated Meat, and Our Health 

Medically important antibiotics are being squandered by animal agriculture to compensate for typical factory farming practices. Cultivating muscle meat directly from cells instead of raising and slaughtering animals would reduce the risk of foodborne illnesses “due to fecal contamination during slaughtering and evisceration of carcasses” because there would be no feces, no slaughter, and no

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Food Safety and Cultivated Meat 

What are the direct health implications of making clean meat—that is, meat without animals? In a 1932 article in Popular Mechanics entitled “Fifty Years Hence,” Winston Churchill predicted that we would one day “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing, by growing these parts separately under

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Statins and Muscle Pain Side Effects 

Why is the incidence of side effects from statins so low in clinical trials while appearing to be so high in the real world? “There is now overwhelming evidence to support reducing LDL-C (low-density lipoprotein cholesterol)”—so-called bad cholesterol—to reduce atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (CVD),” the number one killer of men and women. So, why is adherence

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Eating to Treat Crohn’s Disease 

Switching to a plant-based diet has been shown to achieve far better outcomes than those reported on conventional treatments for both active and quiescent stages of Crohn’s disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis. Important to our understanding and the prevention of the global increase of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), we know that “dietary fiber reduces risk,

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