food and nutrition

“So just to get started, we know that an overall healthy dietary pattern has the potential to lower cancer risk by 10% to 20%, which seems like a lot to me.”

Those were the introductory words of Gabrielle Emanuel, Senior reporter at WBUR and the moderator of Harvard’s TH Chan School of Public Health discussion of “Reducing Cancer Risk Through Nutrition.”

Ms. Emmanuel went on to ask questions of the three panel members, Edward Giovannucci: Professor of Nutrition and Epidemiology and Timothy Rebbeck: Vincent L. Gregory, Jr. Professor of Cancer Prevention, both of T.H. Chan, and Eliza Leone: Registered Dietitian and Instructor in...

Part 1 discussed some of the advances already in existence.  Here are my guesses about some medical breakthroughs that are imminent. 

New antibiotics to treat antibiotic-resistant infections

Antibiotics have been with us for more than a century, but the miracles of the modern antibiotic era are usually considered to date from the availability of highly purified penicillin in the 1940s. Microorganisms are crafty, however, and they have developed many mechanisms to defeat the drugs designed to kill them. That means they can continue to grow and damage their host. Resistant infections can be difficult, and sometimes...

The pharmacokinetics of ethanol and THC differ quite a bit. From a metabolic point of view, despite how some feel the “morning after,” ethanol has a short half-life of 1 to 2 hours. THC, whether smoked or swallowed, hangs around far longer, one to two days. While both ethanol and THC undergo metabolism in the liver, ethanol is primarily metabolized by alcohol dehydrogenase, forming water and CO₂. By contrast, THC undergoes hepatic metabolism to form various metabolites, including the psychoactive 11-hydroxy-THC. Furthermore, THC, being a lipophilic (fat-loving) chemical, is stored in body fat, where it is slowly released.

Two problems arise:

• We can equate a given blood level of alcohol with impairment, but that is not the case for THC because of its...

Ed Koch, one of my favorite NYC mayors, always asked, “How am I doing?” This is a good question, and the answer partly depends on what we measure. Econ training suggests we begin with GDP, but are there alternatives?

From EconLife, How Should We Measure Our Well-Being?

“Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world’s largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand,...