In this post I’m going to let my readers in on one of my “secret” snack recipes. While I never eat the sugar laden chocolate bars found at the regular grocery store, I consume plenty of dark chocolate made from quality ingredients at home. A lot of people seem to believe that a healthy, nutrient-rich […]
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Carbohydrate consumption is probably the most debated topic in the nutrition and health community. In my latest guest post at BretContreras.com I tried to approach the issue by using evolution and science as a guide, and the article received a lot of positive feedback. If you haven’t already checked it out, do it now. It’s […]
How to Make Kefir
Kefir is a fermented milk product that originated in the north Caucasus Mountains around 3,000 BC. History has it that goat-herding people placed milk and kefir grains in skin bags to keep their milk from spoiling. I’ve previously highlighted the benefits of eating fermented food, and kefir is a great place to begin, as it’s […]
Do Carbohydrates Make You Fat?
“To learn about health, one must study health” – Albert Einstein There are few topics in the health and fitness community that are as controversial as carbohydrate consumption. While low-carb dieters sometimes claim that a high carbohydrate intake drives insulin resistance, weight gain and obesity, dietitians and proponents of low-fat diets on the other end […]
The Trillions of Microbes in and on Our Body Are the Key to Understanding Human Health
When I first started getting interested in the human microbiome about 6 years ago, relatively little scientific data on the subject was available. However, during the next couple of years, microbiome research exploded, and I soon became convinced that bacteria are essential to our health and well-being. This belief has only strengthened over time, and […]
Food Reward: Highly-palatable, Processed Food Drives the Obesity Epidemic
This last week I’ve been immersed in the scientific literature on homeostatic regulation of body fat. As I’ve previously mentioned multiple times on the blog, hunter-gatherers and non-westernized populations are lean and healthy even when they have access to an abundance of food and engage in a minimal amount of physical activity. This suggests that […]
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Microbiome research is as hot as ever, and new findings are unveiled almost daily. At the moment, most of the articles and studies focus on the microbiome in different organs (e.g., skin, mouth, gut), but I think it’s also important to have a broader view of the human body as a complex superorganism that lives […]
Our Body the Ecosystem: We’re Connected to the Environment Through the Trillions of Microbes That Live in and on Us
I got to thinking about the expanding view of self and how recent discoveries about the complex microbial ecosystems that dominate life on earth, have changed my view on life. Rather than an organism separated from the rest of the world, the human body is actually a superorganism that interacts with the microbial ecosystems in […]
Is the Obesity Epidemic in the U.S. Partly Driven by Chronic Exposures to Low-Residue Antibiotics in the Food Chain?
I’ve previously written about how dysbiosis can lead to insulin resistance, weight gain, and obesity. While I’ve focused on the detrimental effects of the increased use of antibiotics in humans, the fact is that around 80% of the antibiotics consumed in the U.S. goes to farm animals (1). Drugs aren’t only given to livestock to […]
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Although this site has a couple of hundred e-mail subscribers and a fair amount of regular readers that contact me through e-mail with questions and feedback, I really haven’t paid much attention to marketing the site until now. I do however want to share my writing with as many people as possible and have therefore […]