Gideon M-K

3 days ago | gidmk.medium.com | Gideon M-K

The very problematic science behind some recent headlines. For half of humanity, tampons are a basic necessity. Like toilet paper, they are a relatively modern solution to a problem that’s been irritating people for a very long time. They’re popular, with half of all women preferring tampons to other menstrual products, and around 80% using tampons as part of their routine. And, according to recent headlines, they are dangerous.

1 week ago | gidmk.medium.com | Gideon M-K

Why cooking classes are a terrible way to stop people from being fatYesterday, the current head of the United States Federal Drug Administration, Dr. Marty Makary, said this:“We’ve got to stop and ask ourselves, should we be focusing more on school lunch programs, not just putting every kid on Ozempic…and maybe we need to treat more diabetes with cooking classes, not just throwing insulin at people.”If you want to see the full rant which appeared on Fox news, you can click the first link there.

1 week ago | gidmk.medium.com | Gideon M-K

How endless headlines are coming from the same tired dataset. Vitamin D is probably the most written-about supplement of all time. It’s essential for all sorts of bodily systems, and decades of research have shown that having lower levels of the vitamin put you at higher risk of everything from heart disease to dementia. It’s also very safe, cheap to produce, and therefore a very promising target for intervention.

2 weeks ago | gidmk.medium.com | Gideon M-K

One of the trickiest topics in epidemiology. Joe Biden has just been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Many people are now wondering if they should also get tested for the disease, which is very treatable if you start early. You can also test for prostate cancer with a very simple blood test, so it seems like a no brainer to go and get some pathology done. Here’s why the decision is much more complicated than it might first appear.

1 month ago | gidmk.medium.com | Gideon M-K

When I was a child, we were always warned about the dangers of junk food. While there was no specific definition of what “junk” meant, we all knew the general idea — high fat, salt, and sugar foods that you were only meant to eat at birthday parties or steal very occasionally from dad’s stash. That the stash moved regularly was a sign of how inventive my brother and I became at accessing hidden places that we could not easily reach or open.