Toggle light / dark theme

Study identifies multi-organ response to seven days without food

New findings reveal that the body undergoes significant, systematic changes across multiple organs during prolonged periods of fasting. The results demonstrate evidence of health benefits beyond weight loss, but also show that any potentially health-altering changes appear to occur only after three days without food.

The study, published in Nature Metabolism, advances our understanding of what’s happening across the body after prolonged periods without food.

By identifying the potential health benefits from fasting and their underlying molecular basis, researchers from Queen Mary University of London’s Precision Healthcare University Research Institute (PHURI) and the Norwegian School of Sports Sciences provide a road map for future research that could lead to therapeutic interventions—including for people that may benefit from fasting but cannot undergo prolonged fasting or fasting-mimicking diets, such as ketogenic diets.

A safer treatment path for high-risk children to overcome food allergies

New research from the University of British Columbia reveals a safe path to overcoming food allergies for older children and others who can’t risk consuming allergens orally to build up their resistance.

It’s called (SLIT), and it involves placing smaller amounts of food allergens under the tongue.

A study conducted by UBC clinical professor and pediatric allergist Dr. Edmond Chan and his team at BC Children’s Hospital Research Institute found SLIT to be as safe and effective for high-risk and adolescents as oral is for preschoolers.

Trials show asthma drug helps reduce allergic reactions to certain foods

There’s some relief for people with food severe allergies. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine reports the drug Xolair allows people with allergies to tolerate higher doses of allergenic foods before developing a reaction after accidental exposure. Geoff Bennett discussed more with the study’s principal investigator, Dr. Robert Wood of the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.

Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.

Healthy eating and activity reverse aging marker in kids with obesity, Stanford Medicine-led study finds

A genetic marker linked to premature aging was reversed in children with obesity during a six-month diet and exercise program, according to a recent study led by the Stanford School of Medicine.

Children’s telomeres — protective molecular “caps” on the chromosomes — were longer during the weight management program, then were shorter again in the year after the program ended, the study found. The research was published last month in Pediatric Obesity.

Like the solid segment at the end of a shoelace, telomeres protect the ends of chromosomes from fraying. In all people, telomeres gradually shorten with aging. Various conditions, including obesity, cause premature shortening of the telomeres.

We Need a Far Better Plan for Dealing With Existential Threat

Here’s my latest Opinion piece just out for Newsweek. Check it out! Lifeboat Foundation mentioned.


We need to remember that universal distress we all had when the world started to shut down in March 2020: when not enough ventilators and hospital beds could be found; when food shelves and supplies were scarce; when no COVID-19 vaccines existed. We need to remember because COVID is just one of many different existential risks that can appear out of nowhere, and halt our lives as we know it.

Naturally, I’m glad that the world has carried on with its head high after the pandemic, but I’m also worried that more people didn’t take to heart a longer-term philosophical view that human and earthly life is highly tentative. The best, most practical way to protect ourselves from more existential risks is to try to protect ourselves ahead of time.

That means creating vaccines for diseases even when no dire need is imminent. That means trying to continue to denuclearize the military regardless of social conflicts. That means granting astronomers billions of dollars to scan the skies for planet-killer asteroids. That means spending time to build safeguards into AI, and keeping it far from military munitions.

If we don’t take these steps now, either via government or private action, it could be far too late when a global threat emerges. We must treat existential risk as the threat it is: a human species and planet killer—the potential end of everything we know.

Tracking the Trajectory of Late Blight Disease: A Text Mining Study from 1840s to Modern Times

Dr. Jean Ristaino: “We searched those descriptions by keywords, and by doing that we were able to recreate the original outbreak maps using location coordinates mentioned in the documents. We were also trying to learn what people were thinking about the disease at the time and where it came from.”


Can plant diseases be tracked through analyzing past reports? This is what a recent study published in Scientific Reports hopes to address as a team of researchers at North Carolina State University (NCSU) attempted to ascertain the causes behind blight disease on plants, known as Phytophthora infestans, that resulted in the Irish potato famine during the 1840s. This study holds the potential to help scientists and farmers not only better understand the causes of blight disease in plants, but also how they might be able to predict them in the future.

Image of a blight lesion on a potato leaf. (Credit: Jean Ristaino, NC State University)

For the study, the researchers analyzed United States farm reports from 1,843 to 1,845 by searching for keywords, including “evil”, “murrain”, “rot”, “black spots”, and “decay”, just to name a few, within the scanned documents using the computer programming language, Python. In the end, the researchers discovered a notable increase in the usage of the keywords, “disease”, “blight”, and “rot” within the reports between 1,843 and 1,845, with the researchers noting the usage of these keywords began occurring in 1,844, indicating the disease began in 1843.

Common plant could help reduce food insecurity, researchers find

An often-overlooked water plant that can double its biomass in two days, capture nitrogen from the air—making it a valuable green fertilizer—and be fed to poultry and livestock could serve as life-saving food for humans in the event of a catastrophe or disaster, a new study led by Penn State researchers suggests.

Native to the eastern U.S., the plant, azolla caroliniana Willd—commonly known as Carolina azolla—also could ease in the near future, according to findings recently published in Food Science & Nutrition. The researchers found that the Carolina strain of azolla is more digestible and nutritious for humans than azolla varieties that grow in the wild and also are cultivated in Asia and Africa for livestock feed.

The study, which was led by Daniel Winstead, a research assistant in the labs of Michael Jacobson, professor of ecosystem science and management, and Francesco Di Gioia, assistant professor of vegetable crop science, is part of a larger interdisciplinary research project called Food Resilience in the Face of Catastrophic Global Events conducted in the College of Agricultural Sciences.