A new study of alcohol consumption has gotten a lot of headlines claiming moderate drinking, net net, is harmful. In this post I’ll try to parse through some more precise claims about what the paper does and doesn’t show. The paper has hundreds of pages of appendices and lots of details you’d normally find in … Continue reading No, Moderate Drinking Won’t Give You TB

I spent six years studying the statistical mechanics of supercooled fluids and electrolyte solutions. Alas, my highbrow research was insufficient to net me a faculty position at a top university. A man by the name of Mark Tarnopolsky found a more successful route. In the study of his that caught my eye (via The New … Continue reading Exercise Is Good For Your Butt-Skin

A May 2016 paper in in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that the BMI correlated with lowest levels of all-cause mortality is approximately 27, a level traditionally defined as overweight. The simple inference that being overweight protects people from death is a prime example of confounding variables. Just two months later, a … Continue reading Optimal BMI

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health wrote a paper evaluating the accuracy of iOS app decibel meters. They found that the best ones match professional decibel meters within about 2 decibels. After doing all that evaluating, NIOSH made their own app that's also within 2 decibels of professional decibel meters and will tell … Continue reading Field Research: BART Probably Won’t Destroy Your Hearing

My second favorite how-to-115 topic after sunscreen is HEPA filters. In this post, I’ll cover speculative benefits of HEPA filters for all-cause mortality. I will not cover immediate benefits for asthma or allergies. There are no long term prospective trials of HEPA filters, which is why the overall case is speculative. However, the mechanism for … Continue reading How to Be HEPA Healthy

In this post, I’ll look into the claim that 1 calorie of sugar is less healthy than 1 calorie of other food. For today, I will not look into the unique effects of soda and juice or of adding sugar to your diet without subtracting something else. The results I summarize below are all for … Continue reading Sugar: What Is It Bad For?

Six professors of pediatrics have recently written two editorials describing the evil that is juice: "Seriously, Juice Is Not Healthy" and "People think juice is good for them. They're wrong." First, let's consider diabetes. Lots of papers about "food A causes B" are based on the Nurses' Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, … Continue reading Orange (Juice) Is the New Black (Tar)