Stephan: Here is yet another study showing the powerful role of diet affecting health. There is now so much research on this issue that it requires willful ignorance to continue eating the standard American processed foods, high red meat, low vegetable diet.
NEW YORK — Your diet may have more impact on your cancer risk than you might think, a new study has found.
An estimated 80,110 new cancer cases among adults 20 and older in the United States in 2015 were attributable simply to eating a poor diet, according to the study, published in the JNCI Cancer Spectrumon Wednesday.
“This is equivalent to about 5.2% of all invasive cancer cases newly diagnosed among US adults in 2015,” said Dr. Fang Fang Zhang, a nutrition and cancer epidemiologist at Tufts University in Boston, who was first author of the study.
“This proportion is comparable to the proportion of cancer burden attributable to alcohol,” she said.
The researchers evaluated seven dietary factors: a low intake of vegetables, fruits, whole grains and dairy products and a high intake of processed meats, red meats and sugary beverages, such as soda.
“Low whole-grain consumption was associated with the largest cancer burden in the US, followed by low dairy intake, high processed-meat intake, low vegetable and fruit intake, high red-meat intake and high intake of sugar-sweetened beverages,” Zhang […]
Stephan: Once again science opens a door to a previously unknown chapter of earth's past.
A microscopic multicellular fungus roughly one billion years old.
Fungi are so much more than a topping on your pizza. While this unassuming kingdom of organisms might not get the same love or respect as plants or animals, they play an unbelievably crucial role in the story of life on planet Earth.
That’s why scientists are so excited to announce the discovery of the world’s oldest fungi fossils. The minuscule fossils date to somewhere between 900 million and 1 billion years ago, pushing back the previously confirmed record holder for the world’s first fungus fossil by almost half a billion years.
At the grand old age of 1 billion, it looks like this discovery could also be a candidate for some of the earliest multicellular life on land.
“Fungi are one of the more diverse groups of eukaryotes known today and, despite this, their ancient fossil record is very scarce,” study author Corentin Loron from the University of Liège in Belgium told IFLScience.
Reported in the journal Nature, the Ourasphaira giraldae microfossils were found in the shale of the Arctic […]
Stephan: In all the months of the Trump administration, I don't think anything more clearly illustrates the fundamental dishonesty of this band of crooks, thieves, and incompetents.
We don't like your facts, scientists, so we will change the standards by which facts are gathered so that they come out the way we want.
Credit: Seth Anderson / Flickr
When Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its replacement for the Obama-era Clean Power Plan in August 2018, its own estimates said the reduced regulations could lead to 1,400 early deaths a year from air pollution by 2030.
Now, the EPA wants to change the way it calculates the risks posed by particulate matter pollution, using a model that would lower the death toll from the new plan, The New York Times reported Monday. Five current or former EPA officials familiar with the plan told The Times that the new method would assume there is no significant health gain by lowering air pollution levels below the legal limit. However, many public health experts say that there is no safe level of particulate matter exposure, which has long been linked to heart and lung disease.
Stephan: Day after day I read or hear on television the most egregious nonsense about immigration. Here is the reality: Every single person in the United States is either an immigrant or the descendant of an immigrant. That means you, that means me. Far from being inundated by immigrants in 2017 the last year for which I can find data the United States had a smaller share of immigrants as a percentage of its population than Canada, and both nations have amongst the lowest population densities of any countries in the world. And then there is the reality that we do not have a replacement birth rate.
One point that’s often lost in heated debate is that immigration could be vital in helping countries to have enough young workers in the economy to support their aging populations.
The bottom line: The control of borders is a serious political problem, but experts are eyeing legal immigration as one solution to a future demographics challenge. As nations age, many will be short of workers to support social programs relied on by the older population.
Robust immigration has buoyed the populations of the U.S., U.K. and other developed nations, keeping them from shrinking for now. But a number of aging countries don’t have enough immigration to replace their population as their fertility rates continue to plummet.
“Young and working-age immigrants do this directly as they integrate in a country’s society and economy, and they also contribute to population growth when they have children.”
— Irene Bloemraad, sociology professor and director of the University of California Berkeley’s Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative
The U.S. is unlikely to see any population decline over at least the next couple of decades because of […]
Stephan: The petroleum industry like the tobacco industry before it, knew years before it became an issue that what they were doing was having a negative effect on the wellbeing of humanity, and killing people. Yet, they carried on with their destructive business anyway because profit was more important to them than fostering wellbeing. Here are the facts.
Credit: shutterstock
The concentration of carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere reached an unprecedented level this month. Researchers at the fossil fuel giant Exxon saw it coming decades ago.
Measurements taken on May 3 at the world’s oldest measuring station, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, recorded “humanity’s first day ever with more than 415 parts per million [ppm] CO2 in the air,” according to the United Nation’s climate change Twitter account. As of May 12, levels have remained steady at 415 ppm.
Never before in human history has there been so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The last time scientists believe it may have been this high was 2.5 to 5 million years ago during the Pliocene epoch, when sea levels were 25 meters higher than today and global temperatures were warmer by 2-3 degrees Celsius.
CO2 CONCENTRATION IN THE ATMOSPHERE OVER THE PAST 800,000 YEARS ACCORDING TO ICE CORE DATA (PRE-1958) AND MAUNA LOA DATA (POST-1958). (CREDIT: SCRIPPS INSTITUTION OF OCEANOGRAPHY AT UC SAN DIEGO).
NEW YORK — Your diet may have more impact on your cancer risk than you might think, a new study has found.
One point that’s often lost in heated debate is that immigration could be vital in helping countries to have enough young workers in the economy to support their aging populations.
