Emergency Physician, Educator, Researcher, interested in the microbiome, evolution, and medicine
Zhang and colleagues recently published an important study in Science suggesting that fat has an important immune function and prevents invasion by pathogens, entitled Dermal adipocytes protect against invasive Staphylococcus aureus skin infection. From the abstract: “Adipocytes have been suggested to be immunologically active, but their role in host defense […]
Rob Knight on microbiota and human diseases: “…just over the last five years, it went from being crazy to think the microbes were involved to now being crazy to think the microbes aren’t involved…” Read the whole interview here.
The Roman Celsus in the 1st century A.D. identified four classical signs of inflammation: Calor, dolor, rubor, and tumor; these are heat, pain, redness, and swelling. Some of the most annoying symptoms of a cold involve vascular congestion of mucous membranes, from increased blood flow leading to tissue swelling (tumor), […]
But which half? Ryan Radecki summarizes a recent JAMA article on this topic. Room for thought: Can evolutionary principles help identify which results are will be overturned and which will stand the test of time?
On a Reddit Q&A, the space entrepreneur Elon Musk was asked, “Do you have any advice on learning? How are you so good at it?” His response: “One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental […]
A study by Gower and Goss was just published in the journal Nutrition examining the role of dietary fat in insulin resistance: RCT: A lower-carbohydrate, higher-fat diet reduces abdominal and intermuscular fat and increases insulin sensitivity in adults at risk of type 2 diabetes. From the abstract: (AA is African […]
In today’s New York Times, Carl Zimmer has a nice description of a dangerous gene interaction with the modern environment, resulting in obesity. Update: Zimmer includes extra material about the FTO gene here.
As a supplement to the recent post on fat and microbiota, I am posting a summary of what is known about various fats’ effects on the composition of gut microbiota and on intestinal barrier function. High fat diet causes dysbiosis and impaired intestinal barrier function Cani et al 2007 Metabolic […]
Listen to this great podcast that covers much of the same terrain we have explored on the evolutionmedicine blog, for example this discussion about what is normal in emergency patients. Chris Nickson gave a great talk at SMACC on the dangers of normality in medicine, it is a “must listen”, […]
In our 2012 paper on nutrient signaling, Franklin, Kuzawa and I wrote that humans and other mammals use nutrients as an early warning system, to alert the body to changes in the microbiota. For instance it is widely assumed that some diets cause the microbiome to be unhealthy, a condition […]
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