The blood type on your chart was recorded for transfusion safety. It has since been used in diet books and a steady stream of wellness content suggesting your ABO group predicts how well you will age. A review published in July in Mechanisms of Ageing and Development went back through the evidence, and the authors' conclusion is far more modest than any of that. What the researchers found Balistreri and colleagues at the University of Palermo ran a structured search of the ma

People with diabetes have had a monitor checking their glucose every few minutes for years now. Ketones never got the same treatment. Checking them has meant a urine strip or a finger-stick meter, which only happens when somebody thinks to check, and the moments when nobody thinks to check are exactly when trouble builds. A new device changes that. On August 25, the FDA authorized Abbott's Libre Duo 10 Day, the first wearable device in the United States to continuously monito

Plenty of people leave a colonoscopy with a result that sounds like good news and does not feel like it. You have diverticulosis, meaning small pouches in the wall of the colon. There is no inflammation, no bleeding, and nothing that requires surgery. The cramping keeps coming back anyway. The mismatch between what the camera sees and what a person feels has a name, symptomatic uncomplicated diverticular disease, or SUDD, and a study published in Scientific Reports in August

Someone takes iron faithfully for three months. Her ferritin barely moves. She concludes she did something wrong, or that her body is simply broken. Usually that isn't true. Iron is one of the hardest minerals in the human diet to absorb, and what surrounds it on the plate changes how much of it ever reaches the bloodstream. A meta-analysis published this year in BMJ Nutrition, Prevention & Health looked at that problem through an unexpected food: guava juice. What the pooled

Fiber may be the most ignored advice in all of nutrition. Everyone has heard it. Very few people change anything because of it, and I understand why. "Eat more fiber" sounds like a slogan off a cereal box rather than a recommendation with consequences. Two studies published this year out of Princeton give that advice a specific mechanism, and the mechanism is harder to dismiss. What the Princeton team found A team at the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at Princeton publi

Curcumin and Boswellia are both on my shelf. So when a well-run trial tests them together in knee osteoarthritis and finds no benefit over placebo, I don't get to skip past it. I also don't get to stop at the headline, because a combination product failing is a different finding from either herb failing. What the ATLAS trial found The ATLAS trial ran in Australia from July 2024 to April 2025 [1]. Twelve weeks, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled. Eighty-four adults a

"Thirty plants a week" has become one of those numbers that circulates without anybody checking where it came from. I get asked about it constantly, usually by someone who has already bought a powder. A trial published this summer in the British Journal of Nutrition actually tested a version of the idea, and reading it carefully is more useful than the headline it produced. What the BIOME trial tested and found The BIOME study randomly assigned 399 adults aged 35 to 65 into t

Creatine is filed in most people's heads under gym supplement, somewhere between whey protein and pre-workout. It has also been showing up in psychiatric trials since at least 2012. A pilot study from that literature is a useful one to read closely, because what it shows is narrower than the headline. What the eight-week creatine trial found An eight-week pilot trial published in European Neuropsychopharmacology randomly assigned 100 adults with depression to receive either c

A patient asked me last month whether she should be setting an alarm to eat breakfast. She'd seen a headline. Her first meal had been drifting later for about a year, and she'd started feeling guilty about it. The headline came from a study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and the details of that study changed how I answered her. What the meal-timing study found Researchers followed 31,044 US adults aged 40 and older from the National Health and Nutrition Examin

Nearly every patient I see has an app graveyard on their phone. Sleep trackers, meditation timers, mood loggers, symptom diaries. The story is usually the same: two good weeks, and then the notifications become one more thing to swipe away. So when a well-being app turns up in NEJM AI with a randomized controlled trial attached, I want to know what it changed. What the Flourish trial found A team from Flourish Science, Stanford, Chapman University, the University of Washingto

Minnesota now gets air quality alerts from fires burning a thousand miles away. Smoke from the Canadian boreal forest is carried south by weather systems, and a summer week in Minnetonka can carry the same haze as a week in Alberta. This is a newer feature of living here than most people expect, and my patients ask about it constantly. The source that prompted this piece is a podcast conversation between two environmental medicine clinicians rather than a study, so I want to

A headline about weed killer and premature birth is a hard thing to read while you're pregnant. The study behind that headline is careful work, and what it measured is narrower than the headline suggests. Both of those things can be true, so let's go through it properly. What the study measured Researchers at NYU followed 1,450 pregnancies in New York City between 2016 and 2019. Each participant gave a urine sample early on, between 4 and 18 weeks, and a second one in the mid

The advice comes around every fall. Wear socks to bed and you'll fall asleep faster. It usually arrives attached to a study, which is more than most sleep tips can offer, and that study was published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2018. It also had six people in it, all of them men in their early twenties. What the study did Researchers at Seoul National University had six young men sleep through two sessions each, once wearing bed socks and once without, in random order, in a

Most of the women who tell me their mood has flattened out in their fifties don't call it depression. They call it running on less. Less patience, less interest in things that used to come easily, and a night of sleep that doesn't refill anything. A trial published this June in Frontiers in Nutrition was designed around exactly that group. The main result was positive, and several of the secondary results were not. What the trial tested Eighty-six women aged 50 to 70 enrolled

If you spend any time in wellness corners of the internet, you have seen peptides sold with more confidence than the research supports. BPC-157 for a stubborn tendon. Epitalon for aging. Semax for focus. In late July the FDA's Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee spent two days examining seven of these substances, and the outcome has been reported as FDA approval. The committee approved nothing, and the vote still marks a change in how these substances could be handled. Wh

Shatavari (Asparagus racemosus) has been used in Ayurvedic practice for women's reproductive health for a very long time, which is exactly the kind of pedigree that makes a modern trial both necessary and interesting to read closely. A new randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study tested a standardized shatavari root extract in women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). The coverage says it showed improvement. The trial's own primary outcome was more complicated. T

Knee osteoarthritis is one of those conditions where the standard advice is hard to follow. Exercise works. Exercise also hurts, takes time, and requires showing up week after week for something that is uncomfortable by design. So when a trial reports that a spoonful of fiber stirred into breakfast reduced knee pain about as well as a physiotherapy program did, the appeal is obvious. The trial was published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the result is interesting. The size o

A 39 percent lower risk of dementia is the kind of number that stops you scrolling, especially when the thing producing it is listening to music. That figure comes from a published study with almost eleven thousand participants, in a respectable journal. Whether it means what most of the coverage implies is a separate question. What the study measured Researchers at Monash University drew on data from the ASPREE trial and its ALSOP sub-study, following 10,893 community-dwelli

Natto is a Japanese breakfast food made from fermented soybeans. It is stringy, pungent, and divisive even among people who grew up eating it. The enzyme that fermentation produces, nattokinase, has spent the last decade migrating off the breakfast table and into supplement capsules sold for heart health. A study claiming it shrinks arterial plaque in over a thousand people is circulating again, and the claim deserves closer attention than the headline gives it. What the rese

Somewhere between "cell phones are perfectly safe" and "sleep with your phone in another room or risk a brain tumor" is a complicated body of research that most of us have never actually read. The World Health Organization commissioned a systematic review to settle, as much as the evidence allows, what radiofrequency exposure from phones, cell towers, and workplace equipment actually does to cancer risk. The results are reassuring on the whole, except for one caveat. What the