Latitude and cancer rates in US states: Aaron Blaisdell’s intuition confirmed

In the comments section of my previous post on cancer rates in the US states ( ) my friend Aaron Blaisdell noted that: …comparing states t...

Trip to South Korea: Hidden reasons for the leanness of its people

In September last year (2012) I went to South Korea to speak about nonlinear data analysis with WarpPLS ( ), initially for business and eng...

Drs. Francisco Cervantes and Marivic Torregosa, and the 2013 Ancestral Health Symposium

Last year I traveled to South Korea to give presentations on nonlinear structural equation modeling and WarpPLS ( ). These are an advanced...

The 2013 PLoS ONE sugar and diabetes study: Sugar from fruits is harmless

A new study linking sugar consumption with diabetes prevalence has gained significant media attention recently. The study was published in ...

The man who ate 25 eggs per day: What does this case really tell us?

Many readers of this blog have probably heard about the case of the man who ate approximately 25 eggs (20 to 30) per day for over 15 years (...

The steep obesity increase in the USA in the 1980s: In a sense, it reflects a major success story

Obesity rates have increased in the USA over the years, but the steep increase starting around the 1980s is unusual. Wang and Beydoun do a g...

The “pork paradox”? National pork consumption and obesity

In my previous post ( ) I discussed some country data linking pork consumption and health, analyzed with WarpPLS ( ). One of the datasets us...

Does pork consumption cause cirrhosis? Perhaps, if people become obese from eating pork

The idea that pork consumption may cause cirrhosis has been around for a while. A fairly widely cited 1985 study by Nanji and French ( ) pro...

Kleiber's law and its possible implications for obesity

Kleiber's law ( ) is one of those “laws” of nature that is both derived from, and seems to fit quite well with, empirical data. It appli...

Men who are skinny-fat: There are quite a few of them

The graph below (from Wikipedia) plots body fat percentage (BF) against body mass index (BMI) for men. The data is a bit old: 1994. The top-...

The China Study II: Carbohydrates, fat, calories, insulin, and obesity

The “great blogosphere debate” rages on regarding the effects of carbohydrates and insulin on health. A lot of action has been happening rec...

How lean should one be?

Loss of muscle mass is associated with aging. It is also associated with the metabolic syndrome, together with excessive body fat gain. It i...