We are going to continue our conversation about diet and diabetes, and hypotheses about the adaptive value of insulin resistance. Before Tuesday’s class, lets review what insulin does and what insulin resistance is. Insulin is a hormone that regulates energy storage and glucose transport in particular. Insulin activates insulin receptors […]
Here are the readings for the Journal Club presentations. I want everybody to read every article. Each group will present their assigned article on 10/9/13 The name of the game of these presentations is to present the major ideas of the article and to provide a critique. I want each […]
How important is gene-environment mismatch? What is the Paleo diet? 1) Quickly skim this recent piece in the Huffington Post 2) Next read Eaton (2006)-Ancestral human diet 2) Then read this review: Paleofantasy by Marlene Zuk Finally, read my post about nutrient signaling on the Evolution & Medicine Review. If […]
Sepsis is an important cause of mortality, causing an estimated 60,000 deaths yearly. Sepsis is also expensive to treat, and is associated with expensive medical procedures, such as life support and intensive care. Despite advances in supportive care over the last 30 years, the mortality rates have remained stubbornly high, […]
Read this entry by John Hawkes about David Attenborough’s contention that humans have stopped evolving.
“50% of what doctors learn in medical school is incorrect. The problem is, we don’t know which 50%.” This is a common saying in medical education. Do you think it is true? I suspect we can learn as much from previous mistakes as from brand new discoveries. One mistake could […]
Here is the link to the Radiolab program on hygiene and hookworm: Radiolab hookworm story Excellent NPR piece on microbiota diversity: Microbiota Here is an image from the recent Yatsunenko et al. study published in Nature this year, showing the differences between adult and infant microbiomes. Malawians take a little […]
Alicia SIlverstone got a lot of attention for the way that she fed her baby son, Bear Blu. Click here to see the video of Alicia using premastication (mouth feeding) Most of the attention was negative, and many viewers reacted with disgust and concern about transmitting disease. Where do you […]
Why do we have them? What are they all about? Why are they so common that you can’t turn on the TV without seeing an ad for Claritin? We will discuss these ideas during our next session: Hygiene Hypothesis. IMPORTANT, the writing project will be on the topic of allergy […]
This is a very nice summary of the evolution of aging which describes mutation accumulation, which is an extension of Medawar’s declining power of selection hypothesis. The link above does a nice job of explaining the concepts. Antagonistic pleiotropy is the concept that a gene for survival or a gene […]
