Dr. Chet’s Health Memos
If it’s in the health news today, I’ll be writing about it as soon as I read the research, both old and new. With my email Health Memos, you’ll know more about making lifestyle choices that will help you get and keep good health. These free, concise updates on health are emailed to subscribers twice a week. Subscribe today and get a free MP3, in English or Spanish, of Dr. Chet’s Top Ten Tips—Small Changes for a Healthier Life.
Is Taurine Safe?
The title said, “Could your energy drink be fueling cancer?” “Now what?!” was my first thought. Researchers reported in a press release that the amino acid taurine may help cancerous cells make energy to fuel their growth. Because taurine is found in energy drinks and protein supplements, I wanted to check whether this is something […]
Protect Your Brain—Eat More Magnesium
In the last Memo, we were left with the researchers’ question: if magnesium intake and BP were not related to a neuroprotective effect, what was? The researchers had some idea based on prior research: inflammation. Let’s take a look at what they found on the follow-up to their original study. The methodology and subject pool […]
How Magnesium Affects Your Brain
If there’s one thing we can usually agree on, it’s that we want to retain as many of our important memories as we can along with the ability to learn new things. That’s why a couple of recent studies on the mineral magnesium caught my attention. Both were published in the past two years by […]
I’m Alive V2.56
When I woke up this morning, I knew I had another year to do what I do but with more urgency. If you want to know the story, read last year’s Memo to understand. Why more urgency? Simple: I’m not any younger and while I try to age with a vengeance, the clock keeps ticking […]
Finding the Cause of Death
Last week, I left you with a question about a hypothetical situation: What if my grandmother’s bedsores had become infected to the degree that it spread throughout her body; she still had congestive heart failure but didn’t have pulmonary effusion at that time. What would be the primary cause of death? With so many health […]
Why My Grandmother Died
You may be wondering why the TAP-IT study created that stop-in-my-tracks moment. In the mid-1980s, my grandmother Frances was 80 years old and was always my biggest fan. She had congestive heart failure, so doctors tried the needle procedure, which drained close to 20 lbs. of fluid from around her lungs; you can imagine the […]
TAP-IT to Stop It
Have you ever had a moment where you were reading something, listening to an audio, or watching a video where you just had a moment of realization and absolutely stopped in your tracks? The reason is that you got hit with a discovery of some fact that you didn’t know. More than that, you realized […]
The Bottom Line on Red Yeast Rice
If you remember the last Memo, I said that the active ingredient in red yeast rice (RYR) was monacolin K, which is chemically identical to a current statin medication: lovastatin. The problem with RYR in supplements is that the amounts of monacolin K varied depending on the exact type of Monascus mold used—it could be […]
It’s Back: Red Yeast Rice
I still get questions about using red yeast rice (RYR) instead of a statin to lower cholesterol. About 15 years ago, I looked up the data, wrote about it, and tucked it away. The answer was yes—but. What does that mean? Time to review it again in case you’ve been thinking about it. Red yeast […]
Specificity of Training
The concept of training to attain specific performance is called specificity of training. The simplest example is that if you want to run a marathon, you run long distances for training, not 10-yard sprints. I think it’s more than that: the objective is to train the body to use physical activity, food, and rest in […]
