Health Nerd

The only remarkable thing about this is that the journal editors have not yet retracted every one of these papers.

Making up data - even if it is a case report - is an astonishing breach.

Seems, uh, highly implausible.

❤️❤️❤️

Nothing is more fun than deeply irritating the statistical community online.

Laugh at your peril, they will come for you with their slide rulers and pedantry.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
It was statistically significant (p<0.05)
Which means that it's true.

I am the bed of many things

"Coffee is a tea" quintessential Brit well done

Everything is either a false dichotomy or just plain wrong.

Sure, but the moon's gravity is substantially lower than Earth and there has been modelling suggesting that the impact on kidneys and muscle mass is likely similar for long-term stays. Also, travelling to Mars requires a fairly long jaunt in microgravity!

It Seems Like It Would Be Fun to Go to Mars. Well, No One Considers This Part. Elon Musk says his obsession with the red planet is cooling.

Space is very cool and also horrifyingly dangerous and could kill anyone who goes there long term.

My new piece on why I don't think we'll make it to Mars safely in my lifetime

slate.com/technology/2...

It Seems Like It Would Be Fun to Go to Mars. Well, No One Considers This Part. Elon Musk says his obsession with the red planet is cooling.

a fun one by @gidmk.bsky.social! we really do have to make things work here on Earth

slate.com/technology/2...

Shockingly, the scientific evidence still points to a zoonotic origin of SARS-CoV-2.

Having a toddler and a newborn is really improving my ability to eat meals one-handed and standing up.

There's No Such Thing As A Vitamin D Deficiency - Part 4 Why there are probably few if any people who really need to take a vitamin D pill.

My final piece in a 4-part series on vitamin D supplementation.

I think that the evidence as a whole shows quite strongly that vitamin D pills are probably a waste of time for virtually everyone.

Science!

gidmk.substack.com/p/theres-no-...

Gotta say, to me this reads less like a scientific argument and more like a personal belief. Studies being done by experienced epis and getting published in journals is not a comment on how robust the findings are!

... which also happens to be the biggest cohort of the ones studied, and is arguably the most robust piece of epi research on the topic, found no increased risk of any other cancer. Not great imo!

I didn't review that survivalist, but it seems to be to be quite a misleading presentation of the evidence. For example, he cites the AHI analysis as showing an increased risk of AML start the highest doses of glyphosate but doesn't mention that the same study...

2/24/26: Do People Even Know WHAT Foods Have Fiber?; Podcast: How Refrigeration Shaped our Food Choices; Free Vintage Food Posters; Our Favorite Condiment Is....... Because EVERYBODY Eats

Sneak peek at The GROCERY Cart Newsletter...look for mention of @gidmk.bsky.social @tpwky.bsky.social and more
open.substack.com/pub/thegroce...

It's a trick charlatans have been pushing for a long time. Glyphosate *may* cause cancer in the people who spray it, but there's never been any real debate about the minute residues you get in the food we actually eat.

The original statement - that Trump is pushing the "mass poisoning" of American food and people through "chemical warfare" is abject pseudoscience. The only real scientific discussion is about whether industrial exposures may very small increases in cancer risk, not the risk to consumers.

Do you want the flippant, brief, or detailed answer?

As I discuss in the piece, there is some very weak and inconsistent evidence that working with glyphosate may raise the risk of some cancers. But it's not demonstrated, and is certainly not the main risk that's discussed publicly.

Glyphosate Probably Isn't Giving You Cancer Why you are probably safe to eat fruit and vegetables farmed using the weedkiller glyphosate

Given the renewed interest in glyphosate, here's my piece on the chemical and how we know that it almost certainly does not cause cancer:

gidmk.substack.com/p/glyphosate...

So...good? Difficult to answer. Depends on what you are comparing it to and what you mean. Certainly it's better than most of the alternatives, as far as I've seen.

It's also cheap to manufacture and easy to use. That being said, it is not without environmental impact. It's also plausible that in the future we will discover some as yet unknown side-effect in humans, although given the evidence to date I do not think that's likely.

That's a very broad question. It's one of the least - if not literally the least - toxic herbicides that we use in farming. There are no proven long-term negative impacts to human health - except, perhaps, at very high doses over decades - and the short-term toxicity is extremely low

At the current rate of increase we'll be winning all of the medals in a few decades!

Your Headphones Aren't Poisoning You Why you don't need to worry about feminizing chemicals in your earbuds

A bunch of headlines have recently been screaming about nasty chemicals in headphones.

It's nonsense. To paraphrase my wife, the only way chemicals in your headphones would be an issue is if you ate them.

My new piece:

gidmk.substack.com/p/your-headp...

I've met the Frontiers integrity team. Lovely bunch.

Natural News once called me a pharma shill way back in 2017 when I wrote about how we know that vaccines don't cause autism.

What a time that was.