
Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More
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What Doesn’t Lycopene Do?
Lycopene is an antioxidant carotenoid famously found in tomatoes; it actually appears in even higher levels in watermelon, though. If you are going to get it from tomato, know that cooking improves the lycopene content rather than removing it (watermelon, on the other hand, can be enjoyed as-is and already has the higher lycopene content).
Antioxidant properties
Let’s reiterate the obvious first, for the sake of being methodical and adding a source. Lycopene is a potent antioxidant with multiple health benefits:
Lycopene: A Potent Antioxidant with Multiple Health Benefits
…and as such, it does all the things you might reasonably expect and antioxidant to do. For example…
Anti-inflammatory properties
In particular, it regulates macrophage activity, reducing inflammation while improving immune response:
Lycopene Regulates Macrophage Immune Response through the Autophagy Pathway Mediated by RIPK1
As can be expected of most antioxidants and anti-inflammatory agents, it also has…
Anticancer properties
Scientific papers tend to be “per cancer type”, so we’re just going to give one example, but there’s pretty much evidence for its utility against most if not all types of cancer. We’re picking prostate cancer though, as it’s one that’s been studied the most in the context of lycopene intake—in this study, for example, it was found that men who enjoyed at least two servings of lycopene-rich tomato sauce per week were 30% less likely to develop prostate cancer than those who didn’t:
Dietary lycopene intake and risk of prostate cancer defined by ERG protein expression
If you’d like to see something more general, however, then check out:
Potential Use of Tomato Peel, a Rich Source of Lycopene, for Cancer Treatment
It also fights Candida albicans
Ok, this is not (usually) so life-and-death as cancer, but reducing our C. albicans content (specifically: in our gut) has a lot of knock-on effects for other aspects of our health, so this isn’t one to overlook:
The title does not make this clear, but yes: this does mean it has an antifungal effect. We mention this because often cellular apoptosis is good for an overall organism, but in this case, it simply kills the Candida.
It’s good for the heart
A lot of studies focus just on triglyceride markers (which lycopene improves), but more tellingly, here’s a 10-year observational study in which diets rich in lycopene were associated to a 17–26% lower risk of heart disease:
Relationship of lycopene intake and consumption of tomato products to incident CVD
…and a 39% overall reduced mortality in, well, we’ll let the study title tell it:
…which means also:
It’s good for the brain
As a general rule of thumb, what’s good for the heart is good for the brain (because the brain needs healthy blood flow to stay healthy, and is especially vulnerable when it doesn’t get that), and in this case that rule of thumb is also borne out by the post hoc evidence, specifically yielding a 31% decreased incidence of stroke:
Dietary and circulating lycopene and stroke risk: a meta-analysis of prospective studies
Is it safe?
As a common food product, it is considered very safe.
If you drink nothing but tomato juice all day for a long time, your skin will take on a reddish hue, which will go away if you stop getting all your daily water intake in tomato juice.
In all likelihood, even if you went to extremes, you would get sick from the excess of vitamin A (generally present in the same foods) sooner than you’d get sick from the excess of lycopene.
Want to try some?
We don’t sell it, and also we recommend simply enjoying tomatoes, watermelons, etc, but if you do want a supplement, here’s an example product on Amazon
Enjoy!
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The Beautiful Cure – by Dr. Daniel Davis
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This one is not just a book about the history of immunology and a primer on how the immune system works. It is those things too, but it’s more:
Dr. Daniel Davis, a professor of immunology and celebrated researcher in his own right, bids us look at not just what we can do, but also what else we might.
This is not to say that the book is speculative; Dr. Davis deals in data rather than imaginings. He also cautions us against falling prey to sensationalization of the “beautiful cures” that the field of immunology is working towards. What, then, are these “beautiful cures”?
Just like our immune systems (in the plural; by Dr. Davis’ count, primarily talking about our innate and adaptive immune systems) can in principle deal with any biological threat, but in practice don’t always get it right, the same goes for our medicine.
He argues that in principle, we categorically can cure any immune-related disease (including autoimmune diseases, and tangentially, cancer). The theoretical existence of such cures is a mathematically known truth. The practical, contingent existence of them? That’s what takes the actual work.
The style of the book is accessible pop science, with a hard science backbone from start to finish.
Bottom line: if you’d like to know more about immunology, and be inspired with hope and wonder without getting carried away, this is the book for you.
Click here to check out The Beautiful Cure, and learn about these medical marvels!
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Does Eating Shellfish Contribute To Gout?
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? We love to hear from you!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small 😎
❝I have a question about seafood as healthy, doesn’t eating shellfish contribute to gout?❞
It can do! Gout (a kind of inflammatory arthritis characterized by the depositing of uric acid crystals in joints) has many risk factors, and diet is one component, albeit certainly the most talked-about one.
First, you may be wondering: isn’t all arthritis inflammatory? Since arthritis is by definition the inflammation of joints, this is a reasonable question, but when it comes to classifying the kinds, “inflammatory” arthritis is caused by inflammation, while “non-inflammatory” arthritis (a slightly confusing name) merely has inflammation as one of its symptoms (and is caused by physical wear-and-tear). For more information, see:
- Tips For Avoiding/Managing Rheumatoid Arthritis ←inflammatory
- Tips For Avoiding/Managing Osteoarthritis ← “non-inflammatory”
As for gout specifically, top risk factors include:
- Increasing age: risk increases with age
- Being male: women do get gout, but much less often
- Hypertension: all-cause hypertension is the biggest reasonably controllable factor
There’s not a lot we can do about age (but of course, looking after our general health will tend to slow biological aging, and after all, diseases only care about the state of our body, not what the date on the calendar is).
As for sex, this risk factor is hormones, and specifically has to do with estrogen and testosterone’s very different effects on the immune system (bearing in mind that chronic inflammation is a disorder of the immune system). However, few if any men would take up feminizing hormone therapy just to lower their gout risk!
That leaves hypertension, which happily is something that we can all (barring extreme personal circumstances) do quite a bit about. Here’s a good starting point:
Hypertension: Factors Far More Relevant Than Salt
…and for further pointers:
How To Lower Your Blood Pressure (Cardiologists Explain)
As for diet specifically (and yes, shellfish):
The largest study into this (and thus, one of the top ones cited in a lot of other literature) looked at 47,150 men with no history of gout at the baseline.
So, with the caveat that their findings could have been different for women, they found:
- Eating meat in general increased gout risk
- Narrowing down specific meats: beef, pork, and lamb were the worst offenders
- Eating seafood in general increased gout risk
- Narrowing down specific seafoods: all seafoods increased gout risk within a similar range
- As a specific quirk of seafoods: the risk was increased if the man had a BMI under 25
- Eating dairy in general was not associated with an increased risk of gout
- Narrowing down specific dairy foods: low-fat dairy products such as yogurt were associated with a decreased risk of gout
- Eating purine-rich vegetables in general was not associated with an increased risk of gout
- Narrowing down to specific purine-rich vegetables: no purine-rich vegetable was associated with an increase in the risk of gout
Dairy products were included in the study, as dairy products in general and non-fermented dairy products in particular are often associated with increased inflammation. However, the association was simply not found to exist when it came to gout risk.
Purine-rich vegetables were included in the study, as animal products highest in purines have typically been found to have the worst effect on gout. However, the association was simply not found to exist when it came to plants with purines.
You can read the full study here:
Purine-Rich Foods, Dairy and Protein Intake, and the Risk of Gout in Men
So, the short answer to your question of “doesn’t eating shellfish contribute to the risk of gout” is:
Yes, it can, but occasional consumption probably won’t result in gout unless you have other risk factors going against you.
If you’re a slim male 80-year-old alcoholic smoker with hypertension, then definitely do consider skipping the lobster, but honestly, there may be bigger issues to tackle there.
And similarly, obviously skip it if you have a shellfish allergy, and if you’re vegan or vegetarian or abstain from shellfish for religious reasons, then you can certainly live very healthily without ever having any.
See also: Do We Need Animal Products, To Be Healthy?
For most people most of the time, a moderate consumption of seafood, including shellfish if you so desire, is considered healthy.
As ever, do speak with your own doctor to know for sure, as your individual case may vary.
For reference, this question was surely prompted by the article:
Lobster vs Crab – Which is Healthier?
Take care!
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Vegetarian & Vegan Diets: Good Or Bad For Brain Health?
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It’s well-established that most people should eat more plants, and generally speaking, less meat. But what about abstaining from meat completely? And what about abstaining from all animal products?
For a more general overview (rather than specifically brain health), check out: Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy?
Now, about brains…
Before Homo sapiens was a thing, our precursors such as Homo habilis developed language (thus: greatly enhanced collaborative teamwork) and cooking, resulting in Homo ergaster (who came approximately next in line, give or take taxonomical quibbles) having twice the cranial capacity, generally attributed to being able to acquire and—where appropriate—cook calorie-dense food, which included meat, and also tubers that can’t be safely eaten raw. It’s estimated (based on forensic examination of tooth wear, mineralization, microdeposits of various kinds, etc) that our consumption of animal products in that era was around 10% of our diet (fluctuating by region, of course), but it likely was an important one.
By the time we got to Homo erectus, our skulls (including our cranial cavities, and thus it is presumed, our brains) were actually larger than in Homo sapiens. You may be wondering about Homo neanderthalensis; our cousins (or in some cases, ancestors—but that is beyond the scope of today’s article) also had larger cranial cavities than us, and certainly enjoyed comparatively advanced culture, arts, religion, etc.
Fast-forward to the present day. Nothing is going to meaningfully change our skull size, as individuals. Brain size? Well, keep hydrated or it’ll shrink. Don’t overhydrate or it’ll swell. Neuroplasticity means we can increase (or lose) volume in specific areas of the brain, according to what we do most of. For example, if you were to scan this writer’s brain, you’d probably find overdevelopment in the various areas pertaining to language and memory, as that’s been “my thing” for as long as I can remember (which is a long way). See also: An Underrated Tool Against Alzheimer’s
The impact of diet in the modern day
Unlike our distant ancestors, if we want a high-calorie snack we can buy some nuts from the supermarket, and if anything, this can be a problem (as many people’s go-to high-calorie snack may be a lot less healthy than that), and in turn cause problems for the brain, because too many pizzas, cheeseburgers, tater tots, and so forth cause chronic inflammation, and thus, neuroinflammation.
See also: 6 Worst Foods That Cause Dementia
So much for “calories for the brain”. Yes, the brain definitely needs calories (it expends a very large portion of our daily calorie intake), but you can have too much of a good thing.
In any case, the brain needs more than just calories!
For example, you may remember the “6 Pillars Of Nutritional Psychiatry”, which are:
- Be whole; eat whole
- Eat the rainbow
- The greener, the better
- Tap into your body intelligence
- Consistency & balance are key
- Avoid anxiety-triggering foods
For more on all of those, see Dr. Uma Naidoo’s 6 Pillars Of Nutritional Psychiatry ← She’s a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, professional chef graduating with her culinary school’s most coveted award, and a trained nutritionist. Between those three qualifications, she knows her stuff when it comes to the niche that is nutritional psychiatry.
When it comes to any potential nutritional deficiencies of a vegetarian or vegan diet, it’s a matter of planning.
Properly planned vegetarian diets are rich in essential nutrients like carbohydrates, fiber, magnesium, potassium, folate, vitamins C and E, and an abundance of phytochemicals, which support brain health (and overall health too, but today is about brain health).
However, if not well-planned, they can indeed lack certain nutrients such as vitamin B12, iron, and omega-3 fatty acids, which are critical for brain function.
In essence, there’s a difference between a “whole foods plant-based diet” and junk food that just happens to be vegetarian or vegan.
Vitamin B12 is usually supplemented by vegans, but it can also be enjoyed from nutritional yeast used in cooking (it adds a cheesy flavor to dishes for which that’d be appropriate).
Iron is a fascinating beast, because while everyone thinks of red meat (which is indeed rich in iron), not only are there good plant-based sources of iron, but there are important considerations when it comes to bioavailability differences between heme and non-heme iron. In few words, heme iron (from blood etc) is more bioavailable by 1.8x, but all iron, including non-heme iron (from beans, greens, etc) can have its bioavailability multiplied by 5x just by having it with vitamin C:
Avoiding Anemia (More Than Just “Get More Iron”)
Omega-3 fatty acids, for vegetarians that mostly means eggs. See: Eggs: All Things In Moderation?
For vegans, we must look to nuts and seeds, for the most part. Or supplement—many omega 3 supplements are vegan, made from algae, or seaweed (that in turn is composed partially or entirely of algae):
So really, it comes down to “make sure you still get these things”, and once you’re used to it, it’s easy.
For those who prefer to keep some meat in their diet
Our summary in our top-linked article (Do We Need Animal Products To Be Healthy?) concluded:
- Most of us can live healthily and happily on just plants if we so choose.
- Some people cannot, and will require varying kinds (and quantities) of animal products.
- As for red and/or processed meats, we’re not the boss of you, but from a health perspective, the science is clear: unless you have a circumstance that really necessitates it, just don’t.
- Same goes for pork, which isn’t red and may not be processed, but metabolically it’s associated with the same problems.
- The jury is out on poultry, but it strongly appears to be optional, healthwise, without making much of a difference either way
- Fish is roundly considered healthful in moderation. Enjoy it if you want, don’t if you don’t.
And the paper from which we’ve largely been working from today included such comments as:
❝ Evidence suggests that vegan and vegetarian diets, when well planned, can be rich in phytonutrients and antioxidants, which have been associated with lower levels of inflammatory markers, such as C-reactive protein (CRP) and interleukin-6 (IL-6). These findings indicate a potential role in reducing systemic inflammation and oxidative stress, both of which are linked to neurodegenerative diseases.
However, deficiencies in critical nutrients such as vitamin B12, DHA, EPA, and iron have been consistently associated with an increased risk of cognitive decline, mood disturbances, and neurodegenerative disorders.
While plant-based diets provide anti-inflammatory and antioxidant benefits, their neurological implications depend on nutrient adequacy. Proper planning, supplementation, and food preparation techniques are essential to mitigate risks and enhance cognitive health.❞
Source: Impact of Vegan and Vegetarian Diets on Neurological Health: A Critical Review ← you can see that they also cover the same nutrients that we do
One final note, not discussed above
We often say “what’s good for your heart is good for your brain”, because the former feeds the latter (with oxygen and nutrients) and assists in cleanup (of detritus that otherwise brings about cognitive decline).
So with that in mind…
What Matters Most For Your Heart? ← hint: it’s fiber. So whether you eat animal products or not, please do eat plenty of plants!
Take care!
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Sun-dried Tomatoes vs Black Olives – Which is Healthier?
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Our Verdict
When comparing sun-dried tomatoes to black olives, we picked the sun-dried tomatoes.
Why?
These common snack-salad items may seem similar in consistency, but their macros are very different: the tomatoes, being dried, have proportionally a lot more protein, carbs, and fiber. The olives, meanwhile, have more fat (and/but yes, a very healthy blend of fats). Note that these comments are true for the things themselves; be aware that sun-dried tomatoes are often sold in vegetable oil, which would obviously change the macros considerably and be much less healthy. So, for the sake of statistics, we’re assuming you got sun-dried tomatoes that aren’t soaked in oil. All in all, we’re calling this category a win for the tomatoes, but those fats from the olives are very good too.
In terms of vitamins, the sun-dried tomatoes being dried again means that the loss of water weight means the vitamin content is proportionally much higher; the tomatoes are higher in vitamins A, B1, B2, B3, B5, B6, B9, C, and K, while olives are higher only in vitamin E (but in their defence, olives have 165x more vitamin E than sun-dried tomatoes). Still, a win for sun-dried tomatoes here.
When it comes to minerals, it’s a similar story for the same reason; the loss of water weight in the sun-dried tomatoes makes them much more nutritionally dense; they are higher in calcium, copper, iron, magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, selenium, and zinc, while the olives are higher only in sodium. Note, we’re looking at black olives today; green olives would be even higher in sodium than black ones, as they are “cured” for longer.
Lastly, in terms of polyphenols, they both have a lot of great things to bring, but sun-dried tomatoes are pretty much the richest natural source of lycopene, which itself a very powerful polyphenol even my general polyphenol standards, so we’d call this one a win for the sun-dried tomatoes too.
Want to learn more?
You might like to read:
Lycopene’s Benefits For The Gut, Heart, Brain, & More
Take care!
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Overdosing on Chemo: A Common Gene Test Could Save Hundreds of Lives Each Year
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One January morning in 2021, Carol Rosen took a standard treatment for metastatic breast cancer. Three gruesome weeks later, she died in excruciating pain from the very drug meant to prolong her life.
Rosen, a 70-year-old retired schoolteacher, passed her final days in anguish, enduring severe diarrhea and nausea and terrible sores in her mouth that kept her from eating, drinking, and, eventually, speaking. Skin peeled off her body. Her kidneys and liver failed. “Your body burns from the inside out,” said Rosen’s daughter, Lindsay Murray, of Andover, Massachusetts.
Rosen was one of more than 275,000 cancer patients in the United States who are infused each year with fluorouracil, known as 5-FU, or, as in Rosen’s case, take a nearly identical drug in pill form called capecitabine. These common types of chemotherapy are no picnic for anyone, but for patients who are deficient in an enzyme that metabolizes the drugs, they can be torturous or deadly.
Those patients essentially overdose because the drugs stay in the body for hours rather than being quickly metabolized and excreted. The drugs kill an estimated 1 in 1,000 patients who take them — hundreds each year — and severely sicken or hospitalize 1 in 50. Doctors can test for the deficiency and get results within a week — and then either switch drugs or lower the dosage if patients have a genetic variant that carries risk.
Yet a recent survey found that only 3% of U.S. oncologists routinely order the tests before dosing patients with 5-FU or capecitabine. That’s because the most widely followed U.S. cancer treatment guidelines — issued by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network — don’t recommend preemptive testing.
The FDA added new warnings about the lethal risks of 5-FU to the drug’s label on March 21 following queries from KFF Health News about its policy. However, it did not require doctors to administer the test before prescribing the chemotherapy.
The agency, whose plan to expand its oversight of laboratory testing was the subject of a House hearing, also March 21, has said it could not endorse the 5-FU toxicity tests because it’s never reviewed them.
But the FDA at present does not review most diagnostic tests, said Daniel Hertz, an associate professor at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy. For years, with other doctors and pharmacists, he has petitioned the FDA to put a black box warning on the drug’s label urging prescribers to test for the deficiency.
“FDA has responsibility to assure that drugs are used safely and effectively,” he said. The failure to warn, he said, “is an abdication of their responsibility.”
The update is “a small step in the right direction, but not the sea change we need,” he said.
Europe Ahead on Safety
British and European Union drug authorities have recommended the testing since 2020. A small but growing number of U.S. hospital systems, professional groups, and health advocates, including the American Cancer Society, also endorse routine testing. Most U.S. insurers, private and public, will cover the tests, which Medicare reimburses for $175, although tests may cost more depending on how many variants they screen for.
In its latest guidelines on colon cancer, the Cancer Network panel noted that not everyone with a risky gene variant gets sick from the drug, and that lower dosing for patients carrying such a variant could rob them of a cure or remission. Many doctors on the panel, including the University of Colorado oncologist Wells Messersmith, have said they have never witnessed a 5-FU death.
In European hospitals, the practice is to start patients with a half- or quarter-dose of 5-FU if tests show a patient is a poor metabolizer, then raise the dose if the patient responds well to the drug. Advocates for the approach say American oncology leaders are dragging their feet unnecessarily, and harming people in the process.
“I think it’s the intransigence of people sitting on these panels, the mindset of ‘We are oncologists, drugs are our tools, we don’t want to go looking for reasons not to use our tools,’” said Gabriel Brooks, an oncologist and researcher at the Dartmouth Cancer Center.
Oncologists are accustomed to chemotherapy’s toxicity and tend to have a “no pain, no gain” attitude, he said. 5-FU has been in use since the 1950s.
Yet “anybody who’s had a patient die like this will want to test everyone,” said Robert Diasio of the Mayo Clinic, who helped carry out major studies of the genetic deficiency in 1988.
Oncologists often deploy genetic tests to match tumors in cancer patients with the expensive drugs used to shrink them. But the same can’t always be said for gene tests aimed at improving safety, said Mark Fleury, policy director at the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network.
When a test can show whether a new drug is appropriate, “there are a lot more forces aligned to ensure that testing is done,” he said. “The same stakeholders and forces are not involved” with a generic like 5-FU, first approved in 1962, and costing roughly $17 for a month’s treatment.
Oncology is not the only area in medicine in which scientific advances, many of them taxpayer-funded, lag in implementation. For instance, few cardiologists test patients before they go on Plavix, a brand name for the anti-blood-clotting agent clopidogrel, although it doesn’t prevent blood clots as it’s supposed to in a quarter of the 4 million Americans prescribed it each year. In 2021, the state of Hawaii won an $834 million judgment from drugmakers it accused of falsely advertising the drug as safe and effective for Native Hawaiians, more than half of whom lack the main enzyme to process clopidogrel.
The fluoropyrimidine enzyme deficiency numbers are smaller — and people with the deficiency aren’t at severe risk if they use topical cream forms of the drug for skin cancers. Yet even a single miserable, medically caused death was meaningful to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where Carol Rosen was among more than 1,000 patients treated with fluoropyrimidine in 2021.
Her daughter was grief-stricken and furious after Rosen’s death. “I wanted to sue the hospital. I wanted to sue the oncologist,” Murray said. “But I realized that wasn’t what my mom would want.”
Instead, she wrote Dana-Farber’s chief quality officer, Joe Jacobson, urging routine testing. He responded the same day, and the hospital quickly adopted a testing system that now covers more than 90% of prospective fluoropyrimidine patients. About 50 patients with risky variants were detected in the first 10 months, Jacobson said.
Dana-Farber uses a Mayo Clinic test that searches for eight potentially dangerous variants of the relevant gene. Veterans Affairs hospitals use a 11-variant test, while most others check for only four variants.
Different Tests May Be Needed for Different Ancestries
The more variants a test screens for, the better the chance of finding rarer gene forms in ethnically diverse populations. For example, different variants are responsible for the worst deficiencies in people of African and European ancestry, respectively. There are tests that scan for hundreds of variants that might slow metabolism of the drug, but they take longer and cost more.
These are bitter facts for Scott Kapoor, a Toronto-area emergency room physician whose brother, Anil Kapoor, died in February 2023 of 5-FU poisoning.
Anil Kapoor was a well-known urologist and surgeon, an outgoing speaker, researcher, clinician, and irreverent friend whose funeral drew hundreds. His death at age 58, only weeks after he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, stunned and infuriated his family.
In Ontario, where Kapoor was treated, the health system had just begun testing for four gene variants discovered in studies of mostly European populations. Anil Kapoor and his siblings, the Canadian-born children of Indian immigrants, carry a gene form that’s apparently associated with South Asian ancestry.
Scott Kapoor supports broader testing for the defect — only about half of Toronto’s inhabitants are of European descent — and argues that an antidote to fluoropyrimidine poisoning, approved by the FDA in 2015, should be on hand. However, it works only for a few days after ingestion of the drug and definitive symptoms often take longer to emerge.
Most importantly, he said, patients must be aware of the risk. “You tell them, ‘I am going to give you a drug with a 1 in 1,000 chance of killing you. You can take this test. Most patients would be, ‘I want to get that test and I’ll pay for it,’ or they’d just say, ‘Cut the dose in half.’”
Alan Venook, the University of California-San Francisco oncologist who co-chairs the panel that sets guidelines for colorectal cancers at the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, has led resistance to mandatory testing because the answers provided by the test, in his view, are often murky and could lead to undertreatment.
“If one patient is not cured, then you giveth and you taketh away,” he said. “Maybe you took it away by not giving adequate treatment.”
Instead of testing and potentially cutting a first dose of curative therapy, “I err on the latter, acknowledging they will get sick,” he said. About 25 years ago, one of his patients died of 5-FU toxicity and “I regret that dearly,” he said. “But unhelpful information may lead us in the wrong direction.”
In September, seven months after his brother’s death, Kapoor was boarding a cruise ship on the Tyrrhenian Sea near Rome when he happened to meet a woman whose husband, Atlanta municipal judge Gary Markwell, had died the year before after taking a single 5-FU dose at age 77.
“I was like … that’s exactly what happened to my brother.”
Murray senses momentum toward mandatory testing. In 2022, the Oregon Health & Science University paid $1 million to settle a suit after an overdose death.
“What’s going to break that barrier is the lawsuits, and the big institutions like Dana-Farber who are implementing programs and seeing them succeed,” she said. “I think providers are going to feel kind of bullied into a corner. They’re going to continue to hear from families and they are going to have to do something about it.”
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.
Subscribe to KFF Health News’ free Morning Briefing.
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Anti-Inflammatory Khichri & Tadka
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This is halfway between a daal and a risotto; it’s delicious and it’s full of protein, fiber, heathy fats, and flavors. And those flavors? Mostly from health-giving phytochemicals of one kind of another.
You will need
For the khichri:
- 1 oz chana dal
- 1 oz red lentils
- 1 oz brown lentils
- 1 oz quinoa
- 4 oz wholegrain basmati rice
- 1 tbsp chia seeds
- 1 tsp ground turmeric
- ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt
For the tadka:
- 2 tbsp avocado oil (or other oil suitable for high temperatures—so, not olive oil on this occasion!)
- ¼ bulb garlic, thinly sliced
- 1 fresh red chili (adjust per heat preferences)
- 1 fresh green chili (adjust per heat preferences)
- 1 tsp cumin seeds
- 6 curry leaves
- 12 twists of freshly ground black pepper
To serve:
- Optional: flatbreads or poppadoms
- Optional: lemon wedges or lime wedges
- Optional: chopped cilantro or parsley
Method
(we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)
1) Simmer the khichri ingredients in 5 cups of water, stirring occasionally if necessary, until it has a risotto-like consistency; this will probably take about 30–40 minutes. This time can be greatly reduced by using a pressure cooker, but obviously you won’t be able to check or stir, so do that only if you know what you’re doing cooking those grains and pseudograins in there, and what settings/timings to use for your specific device.
2) Make the tadka when the khichri is nearly ready, by heating the 2 tbsp of avocado oil in a skillet until very hot but not smoking, Add the rest of the ingredients from the tadka section, and cook until the garlic is nice and golden.
3) Pour the tadka over the khichri to serve, with any of the optional accompaniments we mentioned.
Enjoy!
Want to learn more?
For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:
- Capsaicin For Weight Loss And Against Inflammation
- The Many Health Benefits Of Garlic
- Black Pepper’s Impressive Anti-Cancer Arsenal (And More)
- Why Curcumin (Turmeric) Is Worth Its Weight In Gold
- If You’re Not Taking Chia, You’re Missing Out
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