Your empowerment through information is the underlying principle of our site. Our mission is not only to provide information that relates to specific medical issues, but even more importantly, information that reveals the keys to maintaining health and preventing disease. Welcome!
By: The Dr. Perlmutter Team
Time-restricted eating is likely a familiar concept to those of you who participated in our Summer Fasting Challenge. Time-restricted eating, often termed time-restricted feeding (TRF) in scientific literature, is a form of intermittent fasting that restricts consumption of foods and beverages—“energy intake”—to a specific window of time. For example, as we did together in the Summer Fasting Challenge, 18:6 TRF signifies a 6-hour eating window and 18 hours of fasting.
As we discussed during the Summer Fasting Challenge, and as I have written about in recent blogs, it’s clear that there are health benefits to time-restricting our food consumption. In the realm of scientific literature that supports this notion, a study published in the journal Nutrition Reviews is no exception. This study offered a summary of evidence on the effects of time-restricted feeding on both body weight and markers of metabolic disease risk. The authors of this review looked at 11 human studies and 12 animal studies. Both categories of studies included various TRF eating window durations, ranging from 3-4 hours to 12 hours. Continue reading
Over the past several months I have been writing and broadcasting about the potential role of vitamin D as it relates to COVID-19. Understanding the multiple roles that vitamin D plays in regulating immunity really supports the level of interest that we are seeing in the scientific community at a time when so many ideas are being vetted.
By and large, effectiveness of any intervention is looked at in terms of either prevention of a problem or its actual treatment. And while there is a fairly robust body of literature accumulating that clearly shows higher risk for the disease as well as worse outcome associated with low levels of vitamin D, actually using vitamin D as a treatment for existing disease hasn’t really been extensively studied. Continue reading
Over the past several decades efforts have been made to try to convince us that, as it pertains to sugar, fructose is our best choice. One of the reasons often cited for this messaging was the misguided notion that somehow choosing fructose would help reduce risk for diabetes because “fructose doesn’t elevate insulin.” More on that idea later, so for now let’s focus on the relationship between fructose consumption and risk for type 2 diabetes. Continue reading
Over the past decade we have been vigorously promoting the concept of Alzheimer’s prevention. Alzheimer’s disease is devastating, not just for the patient, but for families and loved ones as well. And let me be candid: watching my father succumb to Alzheimer’s was the most emotionally challenging experience of my life. Not only that, it also served to strengthen my resolve to do whatever I can to continue to raise awareness of the science that supports the notion that our lifestyle choices do indeed play an important role in determining our risk for this disease – a disease for which there is no meaningful treatment whatsoever. Continue reading
Lately, in an apparent attempt to push back from the negativity surrounding high fructose corn syrup, there seems to be an increase in the number of articles published touting the advantages of fructose as a “safer sugar.” The main point that is so often emphasized is that unlike glucose, fructose does not seem to increase insulin. Increasing insulin, which is how our bodies cope with increased glucose levels, may, when it’s constantly challenged, lead to a state in which we tend to lose our sensitivity to insulin. This means that with time, on a diet that constantly raises our glucose levels, insulin becomes less effective. Losing insulin sensitivity or becoming “insulin resistant” is not only associated with elevated blood sugar and subsequent diabetes, but also a fairly extensive list of chronic degenerative conditions that we want to do our best to avoid like coronary artery disease and Alzheimer’s. Continue reading
A central theme of our outreach messaging over the past decade centers on the role of our everyday lifestyle decisions in influencing the health destiny of our brains. As many of you know, we recently produced a docuseries Alzheimer’s – The Science of Prevention that reveals how our most well-respected scientific journals are making it very clear that each of us is truly the architect of our cognitive health destiny. We reveal exactly what we need to be doing day to day to meaningfully increase our chances of a life without Alzheimer’s disease.
And to bring everyone right up to date on the science, I’d like to discuss a study just published in the prestigious journal Neurology. Continue reading
Today on The Empowering Neurologist, I spend some time with Dr. Catherine Shanahan, author of the new book The Fatburn Fix. In her new book, Dr. Shanahan makes it very clear that we need to reassess our notions of fearing dietary fat and embrace the idea that making good decisions as it relates to the type of fats we consume will help ensure our health. Continue reading
Loading More