A new study casts doubt on the trend of avoiding blue light — Blue light is one of the many things that hits the headlines often, because it is both a symptom of the modernity and also a thing that is vaguely theorized to be potentially bad for you. We all love to hate something we invented only decades ago. One of the…

Explaining the recent news about more cancer in people under 50 — This week, there have been a swathe of scary new headlines about cancer in young people. If you’ve been paying attention to the news, rates of cancer in people under the age of 50 have been skyrocketing over the last decade, a trend that is as mysterious as it is…

We probably won’t be annihilating all solid tumors any time soon — At least once a year, we get a series of media headlines proclaiming that scientists have hit the holy grail. That we’ve found the big one. That the cure for cancer is just around the corner, or potentially already here. We’ve recently seen a perfect example of this hubbub. News…

Why the evidence doesn’t really show that misdiagnoses are a leading cause of death in the United States — As a society, we absolutely love a story where healthcare is the villain. There’s a regular parade of news where some research study seems to indicate that healthcare professionals are destroying lives. Every once in a while, the myth that medical error is the third leading cause of death rears…

A new study shows just how worthless many sports supplements are — Sports supplements occupy a weird space in the world. It’s almost impossible to go to a gym regularly and not have some sort of supplement shoved in your face with the advice that it will massively improve your fitness journey. The fitness space is absolutely filled with impossible-sounding claims that…

Explaining the confusing news about artificial sweeteners and your risk of cancer — The news about artificial sweeteners is incredibly confusing, and often scary. There was the recent story about sucralose being potentially genotoxic, and now the news that aspartame is possibly causing cancer. There’s nothing we love to hate more than a substance with the word ‘artificial’ in the name. The second…

Why you should avoid raw milk and never give it to children — Raw milk is one of those perennial topics that comes around every year or two. Sooner or later, people will forget the last time that raw milk caused an infectious disease outbreak, and everyone will listen to some sort of wellness influencer who claims that drinking the stuff will make…

Why the aspartame in artificially sweetened foods probably isn’t worth worrying about — Aspartame is an artificial sweetener that is used in a lot of products, including Diet Coke and Coke Zero. Like most artificial sweeteners, we have a wonderful love/hate relationship with it. It’s sweet but doesn’t have any calories, so it’s great for people who want to lose a bit of…

The best diet is probably the one that works for you — The world of dieting is a fascinating one. If you’re following the latest celebrity trends, what you should be eating changes almost weekly. This is always referenced back to some scientific finding, even though the evidence on dieting hasn’t shifted all that much for at least a decade, maybe more. …