@mcmasteru Professor @HEI_mcmaster, and @PHRIresearch Scientist, #Nutrition Question & evaluate (Aristotle); Opinions my own
Toronto, Ontario
Joined September 2009
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Introducing the PURE Healthy Diet Score.
Lower intake of these six healthy foods contributes to CVD globally: Study of 245,000 people in 80 countries.
Article: academic.oup.com/eurheartj/a…
Editorial: academic.oup.com/eurheartj/a…
Many people seem to have a hard time distinguishing between running and too much running. They are not the same.
This is strange, because we readily understand the difference between eating and overeating, drinking water and drinking too much, working and overworking, or taking medication and taking too much medication.
Yet when it comes to running, many people seem to assume that if some is good, more must necessarily be better. The reality is that, as with most things in physiology, the relationship between dose and benefit is not necessarily linear. For instance, this has been shown with essential nutrients like sodium (i.e. a "sweet spot"). You would similarly expect that there's point beyond which additional running provides diminishing benefits, and potentially even harm.
Sodium isn't tobacco. With smoking, less is always better. With sodium, the evidence points to a sweet spot: too much may be harmful, but too little may be too. Yet we keep treating salt like cigarettes.
One of our many papers.
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
Sad story.
This young woman died literally from extreme exercise.
I know this was an extreme case, but in general, marathons put enormous tax on the body.
Regular exercise is healthy.
Extreme exercise is not.
The sudden health complication you can develop from exercise - as healthy NYC marathoner, 24, dies following race trib.al/6dIsRVl
"Experts" shut down skepticism, skipped the proof, and rushed straight to policy.
A new study shows paper straws are actually WORSE for the environment than plastic ones.
Epic fail.
Sodium isn't tobacco. With smoking, less is always better. With sodium, the evidence points to a sweet spot: too much may be harmful, but too little may be too. Yet we keep treating salt like cigarettes.
One of our many papers.
thelancet.com/journals/lance…
We need this in Canada urgently.
How Sweden set a standard for tax reform - The Globe and Mail share.google/UDXSZTyIQCbaVRM…
Andrew Mente retweeted
Incredible conference happening next month in Dallas. 🤩 Includes a focus on metabolic psychiatry. 🧠🍳
Fabulous speaker lineup, including @DominicDAgosti2 @LDLSkeptic @ToYourHealth101 @GeorgiaEdeMD @DoctorTro @davidludwigmd @weimbslab @GuidoFrank and many more.
conference.ketogenicfoundati…
Andrew Mente retweeted
Respect your biology, honour your food traditions.
academic.oup.com/af/article/…
We know less about the net climate and ecological impacts of livestock than many experts, models, and policy narratives implied for years.
Andrew Mente retweeted
Scientists put kids through 100 hours of reading, then scanned their brains. New wiring had physically grown inside the language regions. Communication between brain areas sped up by a factor of 10. Kids who didn't read showed zero change.
That was a 2009 Carnegie Mellon study. It gets wilder.
In 2013, Emory University scanned 19 students every morning for 19 straight days while they read one novel chapter each night. Mornings after reading, the brain areas responsible for understanding other people's emotions lit up with new connections. So did the region that processes physical sensation. Their brains were simulating what the characters felt, as if it were happening to them. Those changes stuck around for 5 days after they finished the book.
Now flip to scrolling. A massive review published in Psychological Bulletin last September pulled together 71 studies covering 98,299 people. Heavy short-form video use (TikTok, Reels, Shorts) showed a clear pattern: worse attention, weaker self-control, and more anxiety. Consistent across teenagers and adults, across every platform tested. Oxford didn't name "brain rot" its 2024 Word of the Year for nothing.
A 2024 brain wave study found that people hooked on short-form video had weaker activity in the front of the brain, the part that controls focus and impulse control. Separate brain scans showed the same thing: heavy scrollers had less activation in the exact regions that deep reading strengthens.
UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has been studying this for decades. Humans were never born to read. There's no gene for it. Reading is something we invented, and it hijacked neurons that were originally meant for recognizing faces. Over time, it built entirely new brain circuits connecting language, vision, and emotion. But those circuits only survive if you use them. Stop reading, and they fade. Wolf's conclusion is simple: screens built for speed produce a speed-wired brain. Books built for depth produce a depth-wired brain.
One honest caveat: most of these studies are snapshots, not long-term tracking. People who already struggle to focus might just prefer short videos. But the same pattern showing up across nearly 100,000 people is hard to shrug off.
The tweet repeats the line seven times. The research backs it up with brain scans, EEG data, and white-matter imaging across tens of thousands of people.
Eating ice-cream linked to lower diabetes risk.
Could be TRUE:
- Dairy fat's healthy properties (milk-fat-globule membrane remaining intact in ice cream, which may have protective metabolic effects).
- Lower glycemic index (ice cream has a lower GI because its high fat and protein content slows the absorption of sugar).
Or could be FALSE:
- Reverse causation (people who are already at high risk for diabetes, e.g. those who are overweight or have high blood sugar, are often told by MDs to avoid sweets like ice cream, whereas healthy individuals continue to eat it).
- "Healthy user" bias (participants who eat ice cream in moderation might also maintain other healthy habits like regular exercise).
This study highlights significant challenges in nutritional research, often stemming from potential statistical illusions rather than direct health benefits. On the other hand, a real connection can't be ruled out.
Both genetics and lifestyle are determinents of p-tau217.
Diet is believed to play an important role, but direct clinical data specifically isolating diet's impact on this biomarker is still developing.
Predicting Alzheimer's disease up to 25 years in advance of any symptoms with the p-tau217 biomarker blood test, among 2,766 women mean age 70
jamanetwork.com/journals/jam…
Foods can easily serve as markers of broader lifestyle, socioeconomic, or health-related factors rather than being a direct cause of disease.
Other foods consumed with eggs and cooking methods are also considerations.
A 60% increased risk of diabetes from eating a single egg daily (implausible effect seemingly) strongly points to these possible alternative explanations here.
People eating more red meat (and thus more heme iron) often have other diabetes risk factors e.g. higher BMI, lower physical activity, more processed foods, fewer vegetables/fruits, smoking, etc. Notably, some studies show the meat–diabetes link weakens substantially (by ~60% in one large UK Biobank analysis) after better accounting for adiposity/BMI, suggesting obesity (not the meat/iron itself) drives much of the signal.
Eating a lot of red meat, especially processed varieties, may increase the likelihood of developing diabetes by almost half. This risk increased with each additional serving of red meat.
medicalnewstoday.com/article…
True, climate accountants only count the water going in, never the water going out.
It's like cows are single-handedly draining the Pacific Ocean.
"Beef uses 15,000 liters of water per kilogram."
Right. Yes. Staggering number. Enormous. Cannot argue with the size of it.
One question though, if you'll permit it. Just one. Very small. Easily answered.
Where does the water come from?
Not philosophically. Not as a rhetorical exercise. Literally. Physically. Where does the water in that calculation come from?
It comes from the sky.
It is rain. British rain. The thing that has been falling on Britain continuously since before anyone thought to keep records and that, if you've spent more than forty minutes in this country, you will be aware is not exactly a limited resource we need to manage carefully. It is falling on a field. As it would whether or not a cow was standing in it. As it did before the cow arrived. As it will do long after everyone who has ever shared that statistic on social media has departed this planet for whatever comes next.
Here is the question nobody asks. If you removed every cow from that field tomorrow morning, every single one, gone, lorry comes, the lot, would it rain less?
No. Of course it wouldn't. The rain does not consult agricultural policy. The rain does not know about the infographic. The rain has one job and that job is to fall, and it performs that job with tremendous consistency regardless of what is standing beneath it.
The water does not get saved. The water still falls. It just has no root system to soak into, no grazed sward to slow its movement, no hoof-churned surface to increase infiltration. It runs off the compacted, ungrazed field into the nearest river, picks up whatever topsoil hasn't been fastened down, carries it downstream, and deposits it in someone else's flood plain.
The cow is not drinking your planet.
The cow is, if you want to be pedantic about it, one of the more useful things that could happen to that rainfall.
Go outside. It's probably raining. Have a think.
The “Planetary Diet” is perfect for sustainability, as long as you ignore that half the “vegetarians” are just one smell of bacon away from a total collapse. Hard to save the planet when 1 in 3 vegans are having a "secret" steak for "medicinal purposes" at 2 AM.
Research:
In one study:
- 40% of vegetarians regularly eat meat.
- 50% of self described vegans actually eat eggs and milk.
researchgate.net/publication…
Andrew Mente retweeted
Great Food Transformation? Criticism of the EAT-Lancet Commission & its Controversial Planetary Health Diet
Could a global shift to semi-vegetarianism, imposed by bans, taxes & front-of-pack warnings, transform our food systems for a sustainable future?
aleph2020.org/asf-and-livest…
New study links popular sugar substitutes (aspartame, saccharin, etc.) to faster cognitive decline. But classic reverse causation can easily be at play: People with early metabolic issues or prediabetes (already at higher risk for brain aging) switch to sweeteners to manage blood sugar. Association ≠ causation. Correlation from underlying health, not the sweeteners themselves.
scitechdaily.com/popular-sug…