Emergency Physician, Educator, Researcher, interested in the microbiome, evolution, and medicine
Digestive problems with milk are common in some adult populations. However, some people have the ability to consume milk into adulthood, even though adults consumed no milk throughout most of human evolution. Please read: 1) Unkindest cup 2) Human lactase 3) Eisenstein 4) Tishkoff A second example of recent human […]
For the first lecture, we will have a special invited guest, Jon Femling MD. He will lecture on the topic of evolution of antibiotic resistance and give a report on his research on evolution-proof treatment approaches to dangerous pathogens, like Staphyllococcus aureus. Please read the following before class: Introducing evolutionary […]
Welcome students to the Fall 2013 Evolutionary Medicine course. This blog will be frequently updated with details, including the new syllabus, which will be posted this week. Course description: This course will describe how evolutionary biology provides insights into human health and disease. For most of the 20th century, the […]
image credit: Beatrice the Biologist. Clever and Funny!
A new study by Wang and colleagues in the journal Obesity describes a link between obesity and the risk of sepsis. This work is important because it provides another explanation for the increase in all-cause mortality that accompanies increases in waist circumference, and also because it points toward an explanation […]
A key sentence in Katherine Lemon et al.’s “Microbiota-Targeted Therapies: An Ecological Perspective” jumped out at me. Lemon et al. write: “The host may be indifferent to which species are present, but the community’s ability to liberate nutrients from the diet and resist pathogen invasion are vital.” They write that […]
Dariush Mozaffarian, a Harvard epidemiologist, has published a study on the health benefits of omega-3 fatty acid found in fish. Eating fish is protective against atherosclerosis and stroke. There is no discussion of microbiota in this study, but it interesting to see how human epidemiology data are in sync with […]
Older maternal age results in taller, more insulin sensitive offspring. Where life history theory meets the thrifty phenotype. Women who are older have fewer potential future offspring, and from a life history perspective would be predicted to invest more in a given reproductive effort than younger mothers. For discussion: Are […]
Another study, published in BMC Medicine, suggests that consumption of processed meat is associated with an increased risk of mortality, and an increased risk of cancer. From the abstract (Rohrmann et al 2013): Background Recently, some US cohorts have shown a moderate association between red and processed meat consumption and […]
I had an interesting conversation today with Lisa Hannam, the health editor of Glow magazine, based in Toronto Canada. I explained the nutrient signaling hypothesis, a new model for the the inflammatory effects of food. The basic idea is that foods that encourage the growth of harmful microbes are recognized […]
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