The major precursor of vitamin D is cholesterol. Without cholesterol, we cannot make it. Some people may find this shocking because vitamin D is highly praised, while cholesterol is demonized. Since vitamin D and cholesterol are so closely related, they have an interesting interplay. Statin drugs, which lower cholesterol, also take part in the interplay. The enzyme statins block is active at step two, so we would expect less production of all molecules in the cholesterol pathway, like CoQ10. Statins should block vitamin D production, but they don’t. Statins are supposed to lower your risk of heart disease. But by how much? You may be surprised by the answer. This post will cover the synthesis of cholesterol, vitamin D, and Co Q10 and discuss how statins alter the pathways.
Read MoreThis week, I needed more time researching and writing a new post. I never found it because I was mentoring a prospective dental student, which I thoroughly enjoyed doing. Additionally, my family and I stayed in New York City, Skated at Bryant park, saw the tree, and ate at the famous Pete's Tavern. Pete's does a great job of decking their halls for the holidays because it is where O. Henry wrote the beloved Christmas tale, The Gift of the Magi. In the story, the husband sells his watch to buy his wife expensive combs for her exquisite hair, which, sadly, she had cut and sold to buy a watch chain. Although useless, the gifts are a sacrificial gesture of love, similar to the gifts the three wise men gave to Jesus. Rather than skip this week, I decided to do a non-health-related post. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you enjoy the holidays.
Read MorePoor sleep is often caused by poor breathing, which, in turn, is often caused by poor jaw development. In 2016, the American Heart Association released a "scientific statement" on the connection between poor sleep and heart disease; you can find it here. The American Academy of Sleep Medicine states that severe sleep apnea doubles one's chance of dying from heart disease. I have spoken at length about the connection between facial development and obstructive sleep apnea before. In my post today, I am going to focus on the pressure changes to the body that sleep apnea causes and their consequences.
Read MorePeople with properly developed faces will always have straight teeth, room for wisdom teeth, and superior beauty. Sadly, most of us have some level of crowding and lack of jaw space for wisdom teeth today, meaning almost all of us to have deficient jaws. Since most of us have underdeveloped faces, this epidemic has gone primarily unnoticed by us, including most physicians and dentists. This needs to change because it is one of the major contributing factors to many, if not most, of our modern health problems; most of which originate in poor breathing from small airways.
I am writing this post as I fly back home from an amazing conference called Airway Palooza. I want to share some pearls of wisdom that can help you recognize if you have an airway problem and ways it can be addressed.
Read MoreI found a recent Italian study that is in preprint. The paper uses Italian statistics on the infection rate, hospitalizations, ICU admissions, and deaths from the different strains of the SARS-CoV-2 Virus. The authors used what appears to be reliable, high-quality data and analyses. The authors noted that hospitalization, admission to intensive care, and death from infection with the Omicron variant phase are at least 20 to 40 times less than the initial acute phase. I will break down the major details of the study in today’s post.
Read MoreJared Diamond wrote a famous essay in 1999 called The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. He was referring to the mistake of our transition to agriculture and the production of grain flour. By 1941, the Committee on Food and Nutrition recommended that flour be fortified with nutrients to help combat widespread malnutrition in areas where the American population relied on flour-rich foods. This led to white bread and flour, pasta, and rice being enriched with thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, and iron. Then, in the 1970s, the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs made grains the basis of our diets. This post tells the story about our tragic switch to grains when agriculture was invented, the health costs, the realization of their poor quality in the 1930s, and, strangely, their illogical placement in the food pyramid as the basis of most of the calories in the American diet.
Read MoreReplacement of lost teeth with dental implants has been around for many years. Believe it or not, dental implants have been found that are 4000 years old! These were made of bamboo. The first metal implant was found in a two-thousand-year-old Egyptian King. Experiments with different materials continued until the 1950s, when Dr. Brånemark discovered that titanium implants could let bone fuse to it, causing it to be strong and durable. As a result, most dental implants are made of titanium today, and they are just as durable as natural teeth. Zirconia implants are now in use, but their popularity is limited. Local surgeons who place them are more difficult to find. This post will discuss implants and the difference between titanium and zirconia.
Read MoreYou may have heard of people with tongue ties before. Many of them are never diagnosed, and patients can suffer from many problems related to the tie. Short and tight frena cause tongue ties. We have several frena in the mouth that can cause other problems. This post will cover what frena are, the problems they can cause, and what to do about them.
Read MoreI have been on the carnivore diet for almost three years. From the start, raw eggs have been a big part of my diet. My go-to recipe is one dozen yolks mixed with bone broth. It fits in a tall glass that I drink down each morning. Another way I consume my raw egg yolks is to mix them with water and honey. If this sounds strange, this post will clarify why I consider it an important part of my diet.
Read MoreIn the early 1900s, Swedish physician Henrik Sjögren (SHOW-gren) first described a group of women whose chronic arthritis was accompanied by dry eyes and mouth. Sjögren syndrome, also called Sjogren's syndrome, is a chronic autoimmune condition mainly affecting the salivary and tear glands. An autoimmune condition is when the body attacks parts of itself, like arthritis (joints) and type I diabetes (pancreas). Because Sjogren's syndrome causes mouth dryness, which leads to tooth decay, gum disease, difficulty swallowing, and pain, dentists are trained to recognize it. This post will cover what it is, who is susceptible to it, how it is diagnosed, and how to treat it.
Read MoreNo one human trait can stand alone as a benchmark of health and esthetics, but many fields of science have concluded that quickly identifying healthy perspective mates has an evolutionary basis. Indeed, most of us can assess attractiveness only after a few seconds. Age, symmetry, strength, and skin tone imply good genes and a lack of disease. Both sexes prefer physically attractive mates and have preferences for the level of attractiveness sought in a potential partner. Teeth Loom large in our sexual appraisals of each other. In a recent study by the Invisalign company, 94% of respondents noticed the other person's smile upon meeting them for the first time. In addition, 84% thought that an attractive smile is important for considering marriage. Additionally, one-third would not consider matching their friends with someone with crooked teeth. This post will discuss what constitutes a sexually attractive smile, the different preferences between males and females, how to have a naturally sexy smile, and what to do if you don’t think yours is good enough.
Read MoreOur teeth are constantly losing and gaining minerals. Hopefully, the process equals out. If we lose more minerals in our teeth than we gain, the teeth erode. This post will discuss tooth erosion: what it is, what it looks like, how to prevent it, and what to do about it. It is quite common, but many dentists don’t know how to diagnose and treat it correctly.
Read MoreIn a recent post, I wrote about some potential reasons for the increasing death rate among younger people, causing a higher death rate in 2021 than in the pandemic year of 2020. However, I have researched the subject much more and found some distressing correlations.
Read MoreWelcome to The Incredible Human Part 4. We usually consider animals' diets carnivorous, herbivorous, or omnivorous. However, within the distinction of herbivores, we see further specializations. For example, frugivores eat fruits primarily, granivores eat grains and seeds, and folivores eat leaves. Humans are omnivores. But there is more to our dietary story. Just as herbivores can specialize as frugivores, granivores, folivores, or a combination, omnivores also specialize. And we have the most specialized diets in the animal kingdom. This post will discuss why our diets are so special.
Read MoreI wrote about the increasing number of people dying in 2021 in August. The trend started around 2009. Interestingly, CDC death rates increased from 2020 to 2021, except for persons aged 75 and over. In other words, the increase in death was due to younger people dying, representing the ages least likely to die from Covid-19. As I had mentioned in the August 15 post, life insurance death claims for the five largest companies were up an average of 30% for people ages 18 to 64, corroborating the CDC findings. We were extremely worried about the rising death toll in 2020, but not in 2021, when more people died than in the pandemic year. I was distressed that nobody seemed interested in why this would be. I was on vacation then and said I would look into it to find out what was happening, and I have. I will discuss the CDC’s statistics from 2021 and a few other things I found out.
Read MoreOn September 7, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) published a study with troubling data. The study is a large observational study that looks at 887,193 children aged 5 to 11 years in North Carolina, of whom 273,157 (30.8%) received at least one dose of the Pfizer vaccine between November 1, 2021, and June 3, 2022. The study includes 193,346 children who had Covid-19 infections reported between March 11, 2020, and June 3, 2022. The researchers compared the effectiveness of the vaccines to the effectiveness of previous Covid-19 infections. They also compared the effectiveness of the vaccines when given to children that have had Covid-19. The results showed that infection from Covid-19 promotes better immunity in children than the vaccines. It also found that the immunity from the vaccines wanes quickly. Most disturbing, the vaccines appear to negate the immunity gained from infection even into negative territory. In other words, the vaccines sometimes promote Covid-19 infections. This is alarming. Read on for more information.
Read MoreIn 1990, Bruce Ames, Margie Profet, and Lois Swirsky Gold found that Americans consume an average of 1.5 grams of natural pesticides produced by plants themselves daily. They noted that 52 of them had been analyzed in animal cancer tests, in which rodents are fed exorbitantly high doses to see if they developed tumors. 27 were found to be carcinogens! To repeat, I am speaking exclusively about the natural chemicals plants produce to avoid being eaten, not sprayed-on synthetic pesticides. Should we be concerned?
Read MoreA few weeks ago, I was interviewed on The Carnivore Cast, which is a podcast focused on the carnivore diet and lifestyle with practical advice from successful carnivores, citizen scientists, and top researchers answering your burning questions and meaty topics. The episode is now out. On it, we talk about my previous health problems, how I got into Paleo, functional medicine and dentistry, and finally, the carnivore diet. I also talk about why we don’t really need toothpaste and why we all have crooked teeth.
The site is the brainchild of Scott Myslinski, a really cool guy promoting optimal health through proper movement and, of course, the carnivore diet. He has tons of really good podcast guests, so check them out. Enjoy!
Read MoreOn August 19th, I was fortunate to participate in an expert panel discussing how the modern world is distorting our faces, breathing, and metabolism. The panel was moderated by the incomparable author and speaker James Nestor who wrote the New York Times best seller Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. We were allowed a few minutes to present our area of expertise. First up was Siobhán Cooke, followed by Kevin Boyd, me, Robert Lustig, then Mike Mew. We discussed some of the causes, then discussed some fixes. Here is the presentation. Please like and share it so we can help stop our faces from distorting and improve our breathing and metabolism.
Read MoreToday we will discuss some of the environmental changes that have led to our shrinking faces, especially our jaws. Here are my slides for Why the Long Face? How the Modern World Changed Our Faces, Metabolism, and Breathing-and How to Fix it, so you can follow along and perhaps help you formulate questions for us.
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