The latest of many systematic reviews and meta-analyses of herbal supplements for weight loss plainly makes the case that there is no justification for their sale.

They. Don’t. Work.

None of them.

None. Of. Them.

So why does Health Canada license and allow the sale of 1,128 natural products whose listed purported use is for weight management? Or of the 671 products that purport they’ll improve sexual enhancement? Or of pretty much any of them?

Maybe the answer lies somewhere in the taxation of the $1.8 billion annual Canadian sales of vitamins and supplements?

Maybe it lies in well-intentioned hope?

Maybe it lies is political contributions and lobbying?

But the one place where it doesn’t lie is in science. Shouldn’t that be the only place that matters?

       

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Ethan Weiss, in STAT, with a personal essay about his daughter, albinism, CRISPR and ethics.

Jonathan Freedland, in The Guardian, with the last desperate warnings of Auschwitz’ few remaining survivors.

Olga Khazan, in The Atlantic, on what abortion will look like if it once again becomes illegal.

       

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He waited as long as he could, too long in the opinion of many.

He was obviously hoping that peaceful negotiation could bring down the rail barricades, in the best Canadian tradition.

But at last Justin Trudeau’s patience was exhausted.The negotiations were going nowhere, because there were none.

“We can’t have dialogue when only one party is coming to the table. For this reason, we have no choice but to stop making the same overtures.”

And for that the blame must go to these old men, the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs.

Like Montreal Simon, I could not believe how lackadaisical and disrespectful the hereditary chiefs were being in refusing to respond to Trudeau’s obvious respect.
They didn’t seem to realize that the time to make progress was NOW, this week, when they had Canada’s attention and a great deal of support across the country. 
What they cannot do is keep raising the ante.
While the story earlier this week was that the Wet’suwet’en had worked out a deal for RCMP to move back to Houston BC, the story today was that they wanted both the RCMP AND the pipeline company to leave, and then “nation-to-nation discussions with Canada and BC” should start.
And the tactic of leisurely visiting Mohawk reserves in Eastern Canada and holding news conferences instead of talking to the prime minister doesn’t make any sense.

“We are waiting for Indigenous leadership to show that it understands,” [Trudeau] said in a news conference. “The onus is on them.”

Injunctions to clear tracks must be obeyed and the law must be upheld, he said, adding that it is pointless to continue making overtures to Indigenous leaders if they aren’t accepted.

“Let us be clear: all Canadians are paying the price. Some people can’t get to work, others have lost their jobs,” Trudeau said. “Essential goods … cannot get where they need to go.”

The situation “is unacceptable and untenable,” he said.

Canadian support has started to evaporate when the chiefs could not seem to articulate what they wanted to achieve – no pipeline at all? a pipeline but on a different route? more negotiations for the existing route?  — and when thousands of Canadians were being increasingly affected, losing jobs and fearing for their heating oil supplies. 

On Twitter, the usual suspects were berating Trudeau for not acting first and thinking later. But Trudeau tried to resolve the blockades with dialogue instead of immediately turning the dispute into a dick-measuring contest like Scheer and McKay wanted.
At least the Mohawks are clear about what they want — the Mohawks have an agreement with Indigenous Services minister Marc Miller that the Ontario trains will run as soon as RCMP have withdrawn to Houston from Wet’suwet’en territory. 
As Manitoba Premier Palliser said today, no individual or group has an absolute veto on natural resource projects.

“Public opinion matters on these things,” he said. “This federal Liberal government has said that reconciliation is a priority. But if you want real reconciliation, then you have to do the real work of achieving it. And you have to establish some parameters. You have to put a fence around the discussion to some degree. And you don’t do that if you don’t make it clear that everyone does not have a veto.”

New images from Antarctica’s record heat wave show the rapid greening of an island’s ice cap.

The presidential candidate called the non-disclosure agreements “consensual” at the debate earlier this week.

WHAT THE F_CK WERE YO_ THINKING?

Of course now they’re MAGA caps. Can we all agree to just leave birds alone?

Canada’s prime minister has called on Indigenous leaders including the Wet’suwet’en Nation to not stand in the way of reconciliation with Canada.

Read time: 8 mins

Wellness company Rae’s product is effectively marketed—even if it might not actually be effective.

The judge told them to keep at it.

Experts tell Motherboard that no, rubber stamping the whims of AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast did not result in untold riches for American consumers.

Gabriel Zucman was reportedly refused tenure partly because of the “arguments he was making in the political arena.”

Not having much romantic experience in your late 20s can lead you to wonder if that’s normal. So… is it?

A pair of epaulettes that would have been worn as part of the dress uniform of a British Royal Navy officer. These were discovered in officers’ quarters inside the wreck of HMS Erebus and may have belonged to 3rd Lieutenant James Walter Fairholme. (Photo: Parks Canada Agency)

An accordion. A wooden hairbrush with many of its bristles still intact. A stick of sealing wax bearing the thumbprint of the last person who used it. A pair of Royal Navy epaulettes, carefully stored in a box. 

Preserved for over 170 years by the frigid waters of the Arctic Ocean, these and hundreds of other artifacts retrieved from the wreck of HMS Erebus and revealed to the public for the first time this week paint an intriguing picture of life aboard the doomed ship — and may ultimately hold clues to the fate of Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition. 

The CHIME telescope, located in British Columbia’s southern Okanagan. (Photo: Andre Renard, Dunlap Institute)

In a spiral galaxy far, far away — 500 million light years away, to be exact — a mysterious repeating radio signal is making history with its patterned bursts. 

For the very first time, Canadian researchers working with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope in British Columbia’s southern Okanagan have discovered a fast radio burst (FRB) that is repeating in regular 16-day intervals. 

Read time: 9 mins

Michelle Good’s new novel ‘Five Little Indians’ explores what happens when survivors leave residential schools. (Cover image: HarperCollins Canada)

Canadians are becoming more and more familiar with the story of what went on inside residential schools, but little attention is paid to what happens to residential school survivors after they’ve left those locations.

Michelle Good’s new novel Five Little Indians aims to change that. The story follows five residential school survivors as they struggle to find safety in Vancouver after they are finally released. Alone and without any skills, support or family, the characters cling to each other as they each attempt to find their place in the world.

An artist’s rendering of how Thanatotheristes might have looked when it ruled the Alberta wilderness 79 million years ago. (Illustration: Julius Csotonyi)

Paleontologists at the University of Calgary and the Royal Tyrrell Museum have discovered a new species of predatory dinosaur in Alberta. 

Called Thanatotheristes, which means “reaper of death,” the 79-million-year-old fossil is the oldest known tyrannosaur from North America and the first tyrannosaur species identified in Canada in 50 years. 

The earliest instances of disease mapping can be traced back to 1691, when Fillippo Ariette mapped quarantine zones in Bari, Italy. (Controlling the Geographical Spread of Infectious Disease: Plague in Italy, 1347-1851)

Tom Koch has several job titles, but he’s notably an adjunct professor of medical geography at the University of British Columbia and author of Cartographies of Disease: Maps, Mapping and Medicine. As an expert in disease mapping, Canadian Geographic spoke with him about the practice and what we can learn from past pandemics as the world grapples with how to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, Covid-19. 

On his introduction to disease mapping and medical geography

Short post to say that watching people aggressively argue about their preferred diets of choice, and seeing reputable people willing to prop up the most shameless of medical hucksters if they happen to share a nutritional belief, and the endless debates about physiology, and meal timing, and breakfast, and fasting, and macronutrients, and lipids, and anti-science shilling, and multi-level marketing, and so much more, is so very tiresome.

As a clinician I know that what actually matters is how to help the person sitting in front of me, remembering that science, meal patterns, macronutrients, and physiology, may not always matter the way some study says they could or should in the face of an individual’s life and personal preferences. Ultimately, and regardless of what I think is “right” on paper or right for me, my job is to help patients make sustainable changes that in turn lead them towards the healthiest life that they can actually enjoy.

Similarly, as a public health advocate, I know that if there were any amount of education, or a brilliantly crafted public health message, that in turn would effectively drive societal behaviour change we’d have all already changed all of our behaviours. I can also tell you that energies spent on initiatives relegated to personal responsibility, including but not restricted to those promoting one person’s diet tribe, pale in importance to energies spent on initiatives relevant to changing the food environment. And there’s no shortage of targets that span all dietary dogmas – from advertising to kids, front-of-package health claim reforms, junk food fundraising, the provision of free cooking skills to kids and adults, national school food programs and improvements, tax incentives and disincentives, and more.

All this to say, it’s my opinion that these two flawed foci, that there’s one best or right way and that personal responsibility will be our salvation, are the two main reasons why we can’t have nice things in nutrition and nutrition related public health.

        

James Hamblin, in The Atlantic, on the bizarre and unfounded man-boob based backlash to plant-based meat.

Hannah Ellis-Petersen, in The Guardian, on how formula makers target the mothers who can least afford it.

Sarah Zhang, in The Atlantic, on DNA testing and shattered identities.

       

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In 2013, an outbreak of sea star wasting disease on the west coast of North America coincided with the appearance of an area of warmer-than-normal water in the Pacific Ocean that scientists dubbed “The Blob.”

2019 was the warmest year on record for the global ocean, continuing a trend that has scientists worried about the health of marine ecosystems worldwide. 

According to a recent study published in the journal Advances in Atmospheric Science, the past five years have been the top five warmest in the ocean since 1955.

The findings indicate that unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced globally, ocean temperatures will continue to rise, with significant consequences for marine life.

Madelaine Bourdages inspects seal stomach contents under a microscope. (Photo: Jennifer Provencher)

A good news story about microplastics? 

Researcher Madelaine Bourdages was surprised, too, when her research project involving seals from the eastern Canadian Arctic revealed no traces of microplastics in the seals’ stomachs.

Recent studies have found plastics in the digestive systems of turtles, albatross and other marine animals. Bourdages had the opportunity to find out how eastern Canadian Arctic seals were faring in these days of marine plastic pollution.

Here’s some tweets I enjoyed this week.
And doesn’t it always seem that January DRAGGGGS while February goes so FAST?

TAKE. NO. CRAP. 💅🏻

pic.twitter.com/iBVE1fuQNC

— Jay Arnold 🏳️‍🌈 (@JadedCreative) February 11, 2020

Expectation vs Reality. pic.twitter.com/0PDhoroVe8

— Darwin Award 🔞 (@AwardsDarwin) February 5, 2020

I’m not sure he totally qualifies as a Good Boi™ with that food theft at the end – 🤣🤣🤣 – but he’s definitely both adorable and hilarious! https://t.co/1qpw17TXTm

— Julie Ritt (@faeryfancier) February 2, 2020

When you’re trying to end an argument, but your bird won’t let you. 🔊
(🎥: Imgur user MrPuckett) pic.twitter.com/KXYTv3Olq3

— Clare Logan (@withchillies) January 19, 2020

Good joke…

Interviewer asks Michael Bloomberg what he thinks about a possible situation where two billionaires are running against each other for the presidency

Bloomberg says ” Who’s the other one ? “

— John Cleese (@JohnCleese) February 5, 2020

If we’re being honest about these democratic candidates not only would any of them be better than this president but any of their personal assistants would be better. So let’s get the primaries over with, try not to be too mean to each other & get this guy the hell out of office.

— Mike Birbiglia (@birbigs) February 10, 2020

Hooooly shit.

An audience member asks Warren if she ever wonders, “Who is going to be my Mike Pence? Who is going to look at me with adoring eyes?”@ewarren: “I already have a dog.”pic.twitter.com/svyS5dkCRw

— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) February 10, 2020

Read time: 15 mins

Read time: 5 mins

Last week I posted about a 5:2 intermittent fasting study that demonstrated terrible adherence with a 58% 5:2 drop out rate by the end of year one and where the average loss was 11lbs.

In response, Erik Arnesen shared another year long 5:2 intermittent fasting vs. continuous energy restriction study where the drop out rate at the end of year one was just 7% and the average loss was 20lbs! (and actually I blogged about this one in the past – tl;dr no difference in outcomes but 5:2 participants were hungrier)

If the diets were identical, why the tremendous difference in adherence and weight loss at a year?

Sure, could be different patient populations, but I’m guessing the much larger factor was the service provision. Because at the end of the day that’s a huge part of what’s being measured in any organized diet study. Not just in terms of how many visits or touch-points a particular program has, or what collateral materials and support they provide their participants, but also the rapport development, motivational ability, and teaching skills of the service providers themselves.

Having led an inter-professional team for 16 years, I can tell you that who you’ve got helping your patients/participants has a tremendous impact on their outcomes even within the same program’s delivery.

So the next time you consider the outcomes of any study’s diet arm, a question worth pondering is how much of those outcomes are consequent to the prescribed diet itself, and how much are consequent to the health care professionals administering it?

       

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• Should Statistically Significant But Clinically Meaningless Outcomes Still Be Reported As Significant?

 

Read time: 3 mins

Read time: 10 mins

Read time: 7 mins

Sirin Kale, in The Guardian, on how harassment in the gym stops women from working out.

Olga Khazan, in The Atlantic, on the repulsive rise of toddler milk.

Michael Eisenstein, in Nature, on the hunt for what even constitutes a healthy microbiome

       

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Read time: 28 mins

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Read time: 6 mins

I have been away from the blogger writing for quite a time. I have been busy working to get well and after two years without being able to walk I am finally making progress. I was encouraged during the past couple of years to receive many contacts from…

Leach’s storm-petrel populations have experienced significant fluctuations over the last two millennia. Canadian researchers are looking at what this can tell us about long-term environmental shifts and human-influenced climate change. (Photo: iStock/Pete Morris)

“I was never expecting to see such big changes — it complicates the story,” says John Smol, a leading environmental change expert and paleolimnologist, of a recent study of storm-petrel populations off southeast Newfoundland’s coast.