SHR

Fish and fish oils are one of the few foods that appear to be universally accepted as healthy, and a massive analysis of all published meta-analyses and systemic reviews from 1950 to 2013 found fish consumption to be one of the most protective food groups against all diet-related chronic diseases, especially cardiovascular disease (CVD). Much of the focus has, however, been on fish oils and the fatty fish that contain them in appreciable quantities. But what if there are other aspects to fish that make it beneficial? Preliminary findings have suggested, for example, that the addition of fish gelatin to a fish oil supplemented diet enhances the cardioprotective effects. To answer this question, researchers from the National Institute of Nutrition and Seafood Research, Norway, recruited 19 healthy middle-aged Caucasian men and women from the local area to participate in a crossover design RCT comparing identical diets differing only in their primary...

Over the past few days I have received emails and phone calls asking my position on the recent World Health Organization's opinion of red meat and the linkage to cancer. I reached out to the Super Human Radio Brain Trust and conferred with them. The position below is the blending of the opinons of Adel Moussa (author at the popular SuppVersity.com blog), Alex Leaf (News Director and nutritional blogger here at SHR) and myself.  There is little doubt that processed meats like sausages, chopped, flaked and formed ham and processed bacon increase your cancer risk - that's all junk and have little to do with "meat". The health difference between sausages or bacon and a piece of grass fed or even corn fed steak is greater than the difference between boiled whole potatoes and French fries. The only problem is that the headlines say "red meat" and this was to pander to a...

Recently, Lawrence Reynolds of North Dakota State University published an editorial in The Journal of Nutrition in which attention was brought to the challenges associated with feeding the world’s rapidly expanding population. Reynolds writing was a response to a viewpoint put forth late last year by Donald Kennedy of Stanford University, who correctly pointed out that only through agricultural innovation and increased efficiency of food production can we hope to feed a population that is expected to reach nine billion by 2050.

There is no shortage of observational evidence supporting the relationship between dairy intake, red meat intake, and risk of developing type-2 diabetes. In an exhaustive review of all systematic reviews and meta-analyses published from 1950 to 2013, pooling the results of 29 articles examining the link between common foods groups and risk of developing type-2 diabetes (T2D) revealed dairy to be one of the most protective food groups second only to coffee and nuts. Conversely, red and processed meats were the most detrimental after sweetened beverage intake.

Since this paper’s publication, a recent review of ten randomized controlled trials in which only dairy intake was altered found that four showed a positive effect on insulin sensitivity, five showed no effect, and one showed a negative effect. Conversely, a meta-analysis of three U.S. cohorts with 194,491 persons and 3,984,203 person-years of follow-up found only yogurt consumption to be associated with a lower risk of T2D. Interestingly, the intake of dairy fat is also associated with glucose tolerance and incident of T2D.