Vaccines and cancer: The myth that won’t die

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Two recent studies reported rising cancer rates among younger adults in the U.S. and worldwide. This prompted some online anti-vaccine accounts to link the studies’ findings to COVID-19 vaccines. 

But, as with other myths, the data tells a very different story. 

What you need to know 

  • Baseless claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer have persisted online for several years and gained traction in late 2023.
  • Two recent reports finding rising cancer rates among younger adults are based on pre-pandemic cancer incidence data. Cancer rates in the U.S. have been on the rise since the 1990s.
  • There is no evidence of a link between COVID-19 vaccination and increased cancer risk.

False claims about COVID-19 vaccines began circulating months before the vaccines were available. Chief among these claims was misinformed speculation that vaccine mRNA could alter or integrate into vaccine recipients’ DNA. 

It does not. But that didn’t prevent some on social media from spinning that claim into a persistent myth alleging that mRNA vaccines can cause or accelerate cancer growth. Anti-vaccine groups even coined the term “turbo cancer” to describe a fake phenomenon of abnormally aggressive cancers allegedly linked to COVID-19 vaccines. 

They used the American Cancer Society’s 2024 cancer projection—based on incidence data through 2020—and a study of global cancer trends between 1999 and 2019 to bolster the false claims. This exposed the dishonesty at the heart of the anti-vaccine messaging, as data that predated the pandemic by decades was carelessly linked to COVID-19 vaccines in viral social media posts.

Some on social media cherry-pick data and use unfounded evidence because the claims that COVID-19 vaccines cause cancer are not true. According to the National Cancer Institute and American Cancer Society, there is no evidence of any link between COVID-19 vaccines and an increase in cancer diagnosis, progression, or remission. 

Why does the vaccine cancer myth endure?

At the root of false cancer claims about COVID-19 vaccines is a long history of anti-vaccine figures falsely linking vaccines to cancer. Polio and HPV vaccines have both been the target of disproven cancer myths. 

Not only do HPV vaccines not cause cancer, they are one of only two vaccines that prevent cancer.

In the case of polio vaccines, some early batches were contaminated with simian virus 40 (SV40), a virus that is known to cause cancer in some mammals but not humans. The contaminated batches were discovered, and no other vaccine has had SV40 contamination in over 60 years

Follow-up studies found no increase in cancer rates in people who received the SV40-contaminated polio vaccine. Yet, vaccine opponents have for decades claimed that polio vaccines cause cancer.

Recycling of the SV40 myth

The SV40 myth resurfaced in 2023 when vaccine opponents claimed that COVID-19 vaccines contain the virus. In reality, a small, nonfunctional piece of the SV40 virus is used in the production of some COVID-19 vaccines. This DNA fragment, called the promoter, is commonly used in biomedical research and vaccine development and doesn’t remain in the finished product. 

Crucially, the SV40 promoter used to produce COVID-19 vaccines doesn’t contain the part of the virus that enters the cell nucleus and is associated with cancer-causing properties in some animals. The promoter also lacks the ability to survive on its own inside the cell or interact with DNA. In other words, it poses no risk to humans.

Over 5.6 billion people worldwide have received COVID-19 vaccines since December 2020. At that scale, even the tiniest increase in cancer rates in vaccinated populations would equal hundreds of thousands of excess cancer diagnoses and deaths. The evidence for alleged vaccine-linked cancer would be observed in real incidence, treatment, and mortality data, not social media anecdotes or unverifiable reports. 

This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • The Brain-Gut Highway: A Two-Way Street

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    The Brain-Gut Two-Way Highway

    This is Dr. Emeran Mayer. He has the rather niche dual specialty of being a gastroenterologist and a neurologist. He has published over 353 peer reviewed scientific articles, and he’s a professor in the Departments of Medicine, Physiology, and Psychiatry at UCLA. Much of his work has been pioneering medical research into gut-brain interactions.

    We know the brain and gut are connected. What else does he want us to know?

    First, that it is a two-way interaction. It’s about 90% “gut tells the brain things”, but it’s also 10% “brain tells the gut things”, and that 10% can make more like a 20% difference, if for example we look at the swing between “brain using that 10% communication to tell gut to do things worse” or “brain using that 10% communication to tell gut to do things better”, vs the midpoint null hypothesis of “what the gut would be doing with no direction from the brain”.

    For example, if we are experiencing unmanaged chronic stress, that is going to tell our gut to do things that had an evolutionary advantage 20,000–200,000 years ago. Those things will not help us now. We do not need cortisol highs and adrenal dumping because we ate a piece of bread while stressed.

    Read more (by Dr. Mayer): The Stress That Evolution Has Not Prepared Us For

    With this in mind, if we want to look after our gut, then we can start before we even put anything in our mouths. Dr. Mayer recommends managing stress, anxiety, and depression from the head downwards as well as from the gut upwards.

    Here’s what we at 10almonds have written previously on how to manage those things:

    Do eat for gut health! Yes, even if…

    Unsurprisingly, Dr. Mayer advocates for a gut-friendly, anti-inflammatory diet. We’ve written about these things before:

    …but there’s just one problem:

    For some people, such as with IBS, Crohn’s, and colitis, the Mediterranean diet that we (10almonds and Dr. Mayer) generally advocate for, is inaccessible. If you (if you have those conditions) eat as we describe, a combination of the fiber in many vegetables and the FODMAPs* in many fruits, will give you a very bad time indeed.

    *Fermentable Oligo-, Di-, Monosaccharides And Polyols

    Dr. Mayer has the answer to this riddle, and he’s not just guessing; he and his team did science to it. In a study with hundreds of participants, he measured what happened with adherence (or not) to the Mediterranean diet (or modified Mediterranean diet) (or not), in participants with IBS (or not).

    The results and conclusions from that study included:

    ❝Among IBS participants, a higher consumption of fruits, vegetables, sugar, and butter was associated with a greater severity of IBS symptoms. Multivariate analysis identified several Mediterranean Diet foods to be associated with increased IBS symptoms.

    A higher adherence to symptom-modified Mediterranean Diet was associated with a lower abundance of potentially harmful Faecalitalea, Streptococcus, and Intestinibacter, and higher abundance of potentially beneficial Holdemanella from the Firmicutes phylum.

    A standard Mediterranean Diet was not associated with IBS symptom severity, although certain Mediterranean Diet foods were associated with increased IBS symptoms. Our study suggests that standard Mediterranean Diet may not be suitable for all patients with IBS and likely needs to be personalized in those with increased symptoms.❞

    In graphical form:

    And if you’d like to read more about this (along with more details on which specific foods to include or exclude to get these results), you can do so…

    Want to know more?

    Dr. Mayer offers many resources, including a blog, books, recipes, podcasts, and even a YouTube channel:

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  • Flossing Without Flossing?

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Flossing Without Flossing?

    You almost certainly brush your teeth. You might use mouthwash. A lot of people floss for three weeks at a time, often in January.

    There are a lot of options for oral hygiene; variations of the above, and many alternatives too. This is a big topic, so rather than try to squeeze it all in one, this will be a several-part series.

    The first part was: Toothpastes & Mouthwashes: Which Help And Which Harm?

    How important is flossing?

    Interdental cleaning is indeed pretty important, even though it may not have the heart health benefits that have been widely advertised:

    Periodontal Disease and Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease: Does the Evidence Support an Independent Association?

    However! The health of our gums is very important in and of itself, especially as we get older:

    Flossing Is Associated with Improved Oral Health in Older Adults

    But! It helps to avoid periodontal (e.g. gum) disease, not dental caries:

    Flossing for the management of periodontal diseases and dental caries in adults

    And! Most certainly it can help avoid a stack of other diseases:

    Interdental Cleaning Is Associated with Decreased Oral Disease Prevalence

    …so in short, if you’d like to have happy healthy teeth and gums, flossing is an important adjunct, and/but not a one-stop panacea.

    Is it better to floss before or after brushing?

    As you prefer. A team of scientists led by Dr. Claudia Silva studied this, and found that there was “no statistical difference between brush-floss and floss-brush”:

    Does flossing before or after brushing influence the reduction in the plaque index? A systematic review and meta-analysis

    Flossing is tedious. How do we floss without flossing?

    This is (mostly) about water-flossing! Which does for old-style floss what sonic toothbrushes to for old-style manual toothbrushes.

    If you’re unfamiliar, it means using a device that basically power-washes your teeth, but with a very narrow high-pressure jet of water.

    Do they work? Yes:

    Effects of interdental cleaning devices in preventing dental caries and periodontal diseases: a scoping review

    As for how it stacks up against traditional flossing, Liang et al. found:

    ❝In our previous single-outcome analysis, we concluded that interdental brushes and water jet devices rank highest for reducing gingival inflammation while toothpick and flossing rank last.

    In this multioutcome Bayesian network meta-analysis with equal weight on gingival inflammation and bleeding-on-probing, the surface under the cumulative ranking curve was 0.87 for water jet devices and 0.85 for interdental brushes.

    Water jet devices and interdental brushes remained the two best devices across different sets of weightings for the gingival inflammation and bleeding-on-probing.

    ~ Journal of Evidence-Based Dental Practice

    You may be wondering how safe it is if you have had dental work done, and, it appears to be quite safe, for example:

    BDJ | Water-jet flossing: effect on composites

    Want to try water-flossing?

    Here are some examples on Amazon:

    Bonus: if you haven’t tried interdental brushes, here’s an example for that

    Enjoy!

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  • The Powerful Constraints on Medical Care in Catholic Hospitals Across America

    10almonds is reader-supported. We may, at no cost to you, receive a portion of sales if you purchase a product through a link in this article.

    Nurse midwife Beverly Maldonado recalls a pregnant woman arriving at Ascension Saint Agnes Hospital in Maryland after her water broke. It was weeks before the baby would have any chance of survival, and the patient’s wishes were clear, she recalled: “Why am I staying pregnant then? What’s the point?” the patient pleaded.

    But the doctors couldn’t intervene, she said. The fetus still had a heartbeat and it was a Catholic hospital, subject to the “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” that prohibit or limit procedures like abortion that the church deems “immoral” or “intrinsically evil,” according to its interpretation of the Bible.

    “I remember asking the doctors. And they were like, ‘Well, the baby still has a heartbeat. We can’t do anything,’” said Maldonado, now working as a nurse midwife in California, who asked them: “What do you mean we can’t do anything? This baby’s not going to survive.”

    The woman was hospitalized for days before going into labor, Maldonado said, and the baby died.

    Ascension declined to comment for this article.

    The Catholic Church’s directives are often at odds with accepted medical standards, especially in areas of reproductive health, according to physicians and other medical practitioners.

    The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ clinical guidelines for managing pre-labor rupture of membranes, in which a patient’s water breaks before labor begins, state that women should be offered options, including ending the pregnancy.

    Maldonado felt her patient made her wishes clear.

    “Under the ideal medical practice, that patient should be helped to obtain an appropriate method of terminating the pregnancy,” said Christian Pettker, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology, and reproductive sciences at the Yale School of Medicine, who helped author the guidelines.

    He said, “It would be perfectly medically appropriate to do a termination of pregnancy before the cessation of cardiac activity, to avoid the health risks to the pregnant person.”

    “Patients are being turned away from necessary care,” said Jennifer Chin, an OB-GYN at UW Medicine in Seattle, because of the “emphasis on these ethical and religious directives.”

    They can be a powerful constraint on the care that patients receive at Catholic hospitals, whether emergency treatment when a woman’s health is at risk, or access to birth control and abortions.

    More and more women are running into barriers to obtaining care as Catholic health systems have aggressively acquired secular hospitals in much of the country. Four of the 10 largest U.S. hospital chains by number of beds are Catholic, according to federal data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. There are just over 600 Catholic general hospitals nationally and roughly 100 more managed by Catholic chains that place some religious limits on care, a KFF Health News investigation reveals.

    Maldonado’s experience in Maryland came just months before the Supreme Court’s ruling in 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade, a decision that compounded the impact of Catholic health care restrictions. In its wake, roughly a third of states have banned or severely limited access to abortion, creating a one-two punch for women seeking to prevent pregnancy or to end one. Ironically, some states where Catholic hospitals dominate — such as Washington, Oregon, and Colorado — are now considered medical havens for women in nearby states that have banned abortion.

    KFF Health News analyzed state-level birth data to discover that more than half a million babies are born each year in the U.S. in Catholic-run hospitals, including those owned by CommonSpirit Health, Ascension, Trinity Health, and Providence St. Joseph Health. That’s 16% of all hospital births each year, with rates in 10 states exceeding 30%. In Washington, half of all babies are born at such hospitals, the highest share in the country.

    “We had many instances where people would have to get in their car to drive to us while they were bleeding, or patients who had had their water bags broken for up to five days or even up to a week,” said Chin, who has treated patients turned away by Catholic hospitals.

    Physicians who turned away patients like that “were going against evidence-based care and going against what they had been taught in medical school and residency,” she said, “but felt that they had to provide a certain type of care — or lack of care — just because of the strength of the ethical and religious directives.”

    Following religious mandates can be dangerous, Chin and other clinicians said.

    When a patient has chosen to end a pregnancy after the amniotic sac — or water — has broken, Pettker said, “any delay that might be added to a procedure that is inevitably going to happen places that person at risk of serious, life-threatening complications,” including sepsis and organ infection.

    Reporters analyzed American Hospital Association data as of August and used Catholic Health Association directories, news reports, government documents, and hospital websites and other materials to determine which hospitals are Catholic or part of Catholic systems, and gathered birth data from state health departments and hospital associations. They interviewed patients, medical providers, academic experts, advocacy organizations, and attorneys, and reviewed hundreds of pages of court and government records and guidance from Catholic health institutions and authorities to understand how the directives affect patient care.

    Nationally, nearly 800,000 people have only Catholic or Catholic-affiliated birth hospitals within an hour’s drive, according to KFF Health News’ analysis. For example, that’s true of 1 in 10 North Dakotans. In South Dakota, it’s 1 in 20. When care is more than an hour away, academic researchers often define the area as a hospital desert. Pregnant women who must drive farther to a delivery facility are at higher risk of harm to themselves or their fetus, research shows.

    Many Americans don’t have a choice — non-Catholic hospitals are too far to reach in an emergency or aren’t in their insurance networks. Ambulances may take patients to a Catholic facility without giving them a say. Women often don’t know that hospitals are affiliated with the Catholic Church or that they restrict reproductive care, academic research suggests.

    And, in most of the country, state laws shield at least some hospitals from lawsuits for not performing procedures they object to on religious grounds, leaving little recourse for patients who were harmed because care was withheld. Thirty-five states prevent patients from suing hospitals for not providing abortions, including 25 states where abortion remains broadly legal. About half of those laws don’t include exceptions for emergencies, ectopic pregnancies, or miscarriages. Sixteen states prohibit lawsuits against hospitals for refusing to perform sterilization procedures.

    “It’s hard for the ordinary citizen to understand, ‘Well, what difference does it make if my hospital is bought by this other big health system, as long as it stays open? That’s all I care about,’” said Erin Fuse Brown, who is the director of the Center for Law, Health & Society at Georgia State University and an expert in health care consolidation. Catholic directives also ban medical aid in dying for terminally ill patients.

    People “may not realize that they’re losing access to important services, like reproductive health [and] end-of-life care,” she said.

    ‘Our Faith-Based Health Care Ministry’

    After the Supreme Court ended the constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, Michigan resident Kalaina Sullivan wanted surgery to permanently prevent pregnancy.

    Michigan voters in November that year enshrined the right to abortion under the state constitution, but the state’s concentration of Catholic hospitals means people like Sullivan sometimes still struggle to obtain reproductive health care.

    Because her doctor worked for the Catholic chain Trinity Health, the nation’s fourth-largest hospital system, she had the surgery with a different doctor at North Ottawa Community Health System, an independent hospital near the shores of Lake Michigan.

    Less than two months later, that, too, became a Catholic hospital, newly acquired by Trinity.

    To mark the transition, Cory Mitchell, who at the time was the mission leader of Trinity Health Muskegon, stood before his new colleagues and offered a blessing.

    “The work of your hands is what makes our faith-based health care ministry possible,” he said, according to a video of the ceremony Trinity Health provided to KFF Health News. “May these hands continue to bring compassion, compassion and healing, to all those they touch.”

    Trinity Health declined to answer detailed questions about its merger with North Ottawa Community Health System and the ethical and religious directives. “Our commitment to high-quality, compassionate care means informing our patients of all appropriate care options, and trusting and supporting our physicians to make difficult and medically necessary decisions in the best interest of their patients’ health and safety,” spokesperson Jennifer Amundson said in an emailed statement. “High-quality, safe care is critical for the women in our communities and in cases where a non-critical service is not available at our facility, the physician will transfer care as appropriate.”

    Leaders in Catholic-based health systems have hammered home the importance of the church’s directives, which are issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, all men, and were first drafted in 1948. The essential view on abortion is as it was in 1948. The last revision, in 2018, added several directives addressing Catholic health institution acquisitions or mergers with non-Catholic ones, including that “whatever comes under control of the Catholic institution — whether by acquisition, governance, or management — must be operated in full accord with the moral teaching of the Catholic Church.”

    “While many of the faithful in the local church may not be aware of these requirements for Catholic health care, the local bishop certainly is,” wrote Sister Doris Gottemoeller, a former board member of the Bon Secours Mercy Health system, in a 2023 Catholic Health Association journal article. “In fact, the bishop should be briefed on a regular basis about the hospital’s activities and strategies.”

    Now, for care at a non-Catholic hospital, Sullivan would need to travel nearly 30 miles.

    “I don’t see why there’s any reason for me to have to follow the rules of their religion and have that be a part of what’s going on with my body,” she said.

    Risks Come With Religion

    Nathaniel Hibner, senior director of ethics at the Catholic Health Association, said the ethical and religious directives allow clinicians to provide medically necessary treatments in emergencies. In a pregnancy crisis when a person’s life is at risk, “I do not believe that the ERDs should restrict the physician in acting in the way that they see medically indicated.”

    “Catholic health care is committed to the health of all women and mothers who enter into our facilities,” Hibner said.

    The directives permit care to cure “a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman” even if it would “result in the death of the unborn child.” Hibner demurred when asked who defines what that means and when such care is provided, saying, “for the most part, the physician and the patients are the ones that are having a conversation and dialogue with what is supposed to be medically appropriate.”

    It is common for practitioners at any hospital to consult an ethics board about difficult cases — such as whether a teenager with cancer can decline treatment. At Catholic hospitals, providers must ask a board for permission to perform procedures restricted by the religious directives, clinicians and researchers say. For example, could an abortion be performed if a pregnancy threatened the mother’s life?

    How and when an ethics consultation occurs depends on the hospital, Hibner said. “That ethics consultation can be initiated by anyone involved in the direct care of that situation — the patient, the surrogate of that patient, the physician, the nurse, the social worker all have the ability to request a consultation,” he said. When asked whether a consultation with an ethics board can occur without a request, he said “sometimes it could.”

    How strictly directives are followed can depend on the hospital and the views of the local bishop.

    “If the hospital has made a difficult decision about a critical pregnancy or an end-of-life care situation, the bishop should be the first to know about it,” Gottemoeller wrote.

    In an interview, Gottemoeller said that even when pregnancy termination decisions are made on sound ethical grounds, not informing the bishop puts him in a bad position and hurts the church. “If there’s a possibility of it being misunderstood, or misinterpreted, or criticized,” Gottemoeller said, the bishop should understand what happened and why “before the newspapers call him and ask him for an opinion.”

    “And if he has to say, ‘Well, I think you made a mistake,’ well, all right,” she said. “But don’t let him be blindsided. I mean, we’re one church and the bishop has pastoral concern over everything in his diocese.”

    Katherine Parker Bryden, a nurse midwife in Iowa who works for MercyOne, said she regularly tells pregnant patients that the hospital cannot perform tubal sterilization surgery, to prevent future pregnancies, or refer patients to other hospitals that do. MercyOne is one of the largest health systems in Iowa. Nearly half of general hospitals in the state are Catholic or Catholic-affiliated — the highest share among all states.

    The National Catholic Bioethics Center, an ethics authority for Catholic health institutions, has said that referrals for care that go against church teaching would be “immoral.”

    “As providers, you’re put in this kind of moral dilemma,” Parker Bryden said. “Am I serving my patients or am I serving the archbishop and the pope?”

    In response to questions, MercyOne spokesperson Eve Lederhouse said in an email that its providers “offer care and services that are consistent with the guidelines of a Catholic health system.”

    Maria Rodriguez, an OB-GYN professor at Oregon Health & Science University, said that as a resident in the early 2000s at a Catholic hospital she was able to secure permission — what she calls a “pope note” — to sterilize some patients with conditions such as gestational diabetes.

    Annie Iriye, a retired OB-GYN in Washington state, said that more than a decade ago she sought permission to administer medication to hasten labor for a patient experiencing a second-trimester miscarriage at a Catholic hospital. She said she was told no because the fetus had a heartbeat. The patient took 10 hours to deliver — time that would have been cut by half, Iriye said, had she been able to follow her own medical training and expertise. During that time, she said, the patient developed an infection.

    Iriye and Chin were part of an effort by reproductive rights groups and medical organizations that pushed for a state law to protect physicians if they act against Catholic hospital restrictions. The bill, which Washington enacted in 2021, was opposed by the Washington State Hospital Association, whose membership includes multiple large Catholic health systems.

    State lawmakers in Oregon in 2021 enacted legislation that beefed up powers to reject health care mergers if they would reduce access to the types of care constrained by Catholic directives. The hospital lobby has sued to block the statute. Washington state lawmakers introduced similar legislation last year, which the hospital association opposes.

    Hibner said Catholic hospitals are committed to instituting systemic changes that improve maternal and child health, including access to primary, prenatal, and postpartum care. “Those are the things that I think rural communities really need support and advocacy for,” he said.

    Maldonado, the nurse midwife, still thinks of her patient who was forced to stay pregnant with a baby who could not survive. “To feel like she was going to have to fight to have an abortion of a baby that she wanted?” Maldonado said. “It was just horrible.”

    KFF Health News data editor Holly K. Hacker contributed to this report.

    Click to open the methodology Methodology

    By Hannah Recht

    KFF Health News identified areas of the country where patients have only Catholic hospital options nearby. The “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services” — which are issued by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, all men — dictate how patients receive reproductive care at Catholic health facilities. In our analysis, we focused on hospitals where babies are born.

    We constructed a national database of hospital locations, identified which ones are Catholic or Catholic-affiliated, found how many babies are born at each, and calculated how many people live near those hospitals.

    Hospital Universe

    We identified hospitals in the 50 states and the District of Columbia using the American Hospital Association database from August 2023. We removed hospitals that had closed or were listed more than once, added hospitals that were not included, and corrected inaccurate or out-of-date information about ownership, primary service type, and location. We excluded federal hospitals, such as military and Indian Health Service facilities, because they are not open to everyone.

    Catholic Affiliation

    To identify Catholic hospitals, we used the Catholic Health Association’s member directory. We also counted as Catholic a handful of hospitals that are not part of this voluntary membership group but explicitly follow the Ethical and Religious Directives, according to their mission statements, websites, or promotional materials.

    We also tracked Catholic-affiliated hospitals: those that are owned or managed by a Catholic health system, such as CommonSpirit Health or Trinity Health, and are influenced by the religious directives but do not necessarily adhere to them in full. To identify Catholic-affiliated hospitals, we consulted health system and hospital websites, government documents, and news reports.

    We combined both Catholic and Catholic-affiliated hospitals for analysis, in line with previous research about the influence of Catholic directives on health care.

    Births

    To determine the share of births that occur at Catholic or Catholic-affiliated hospitals, we gathered the latest annual number of births by hospital from state health departments. Where recent data was not publicly available, we submitted records requests for the most recent complete year available.

    The resulting data covered births in 2022 for nine states and D.C., births in 2021 for 23 states, births in 2020 for nine states, and births in 2019 for one state. We used data from the 2021 American Hospital Association survey, the latest available at the time of analysis, for the eight remaining states that did not provide birth data in response to our requests. A small number of hospitals have recently opened or closed labor and delivery units. The vast majority of the rest record about the same number of births each year. This means that the results would not be substantially different if data from 2023 were available.

    We used this data to calculate the number of babies born in Catholic and Catholic-affiliated hospitals, as well as non-Catholic hospitals by state and nationally.

    We used hospitals’ Catholic status as of August 2023 in this analysis. In 10 cases where the hospital had already closed, we used Catholic status at the time of the closure.

    Because our analysis focuses on hospital care, we excluded births that occurred in non-hospital settings, such as homes and stand-alone birth centers, as well as federal hospitals.

    Several states suppressed data from hospitals with fewer than 10 births due to privacy restrictions. Because those numbers were so low, this suppression had a negligible effect on state-level totals.

    Drive-Time Analysis

    We obtained hospitals’ geographic coordinates based on addresses in the AHA dataset using HERE’s geocoder. For addresses that could not be automatically geocoded with a high degree of certainty, we verified coordinates manually using hospital websites and Google Maps.

    We calculated the areas within 30, 60, and 90 minutes of travel time from each birth hospital that was open in August 2023 using tools from HERE. We included only hospitals that had 10 or more births as a proxy for hospitals that have labor and delivery units, or where births regularly occur.

    The analysis focused on the areas with hospitals within an hour’s drive. Researchers often define hospital deserts as places where one would have to drive an hour or more for hospital care. (For example: [1] “Disparities in Access to Trauma Care in the United States: A Population-Based Analysis,” [2] “Injury-Based Geographic Access to Trauma Centers,” [3] “Trends in the Geospatial Distribution of Inpatient Adult Surgical Services Across the United States,” [4] “Access to Trauma Centers in the United States.”)

    We combined the drive-time areas to see which areas of the United States have only Catholic or Catholic-affiliated birth hospitals nearby, both Catholic and non-Catholic, non-Catholic only, or none. We then joined these areas to the 2021 census block group shapefile from IPUMS NHGIS and removed water bodies using the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Hydrography Dataset to calculate the percentage of each census block group that falls within each hospital access category. We calculated the number of people in each area using the 2021 “American Community Survey” block group population totals. For example, if half of a block group’s land area had access to only Catholic or Catholic-affiliated hospitals, then half of the population was counted in that category.

    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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  • Tuna Steak with Protein Salad

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    Yes, it’s protein on protein today, and it’s all healthy.

    You will need (per person)

    • 1 tuna steak
    • 1 400g/12oz can mixed beans, drained & rinsed
    • 1 tsp capers
    • 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
    • 1 red chili, chopped
    • 1 lime, cut into wedges
    • ½ tsp white wine vinegar
    • Extra virgin olive oil, for cooking
    • Garnish: chopped parsley

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Put the beans in a bowl, mixing in the capers, vinegar, and 1 tsp of the black pepper

    2) Gently rub a little olive oil onto each side of the tuna steak, and season with the remainder of the black pepper (as in, the other tsp, not the rest of what you have in the house).

    3) Heat a ridged grill pan until hot, and then cook the tuna for around 3 minutes on each side. Do not jiggle it! Do not slide it, and definitely do not stir it. Just gently turn it over when necessary. The edges should be cooked, and the inside should still be pink (it’s easy to forget when it comes from a can, but remember tuna is usually eaten raw)

    4) Serve, sprinkling with the chopped chili and garnishing with the parsley. The lime wedges go on the side for squeezing at the table.

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

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  • Are Supplements Worth Taking?

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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 😎

    ❝There seems to be a lot of suggestions to take supplements for every thing, from your head to your toes. I know it’s up to the individual but what are the facts or stats to support taking them versus not?❞

    Short answer:

    • supplementary vitamins and minerals are probably neither needed nor beneficial for most (more on this later) people, with the exception of vitamin D which most people over a certain age need unless they are white and getting a lot of sun.
    • other kinds of supplement can be very beneficial or useless, depending on what they are, of course, and also your own personal physiology.

    With regard to vitamins and minerals, in most cases they should be covered by a healthy balanced diet, and the bioavailability is usually better from food anyway (bearing in mind, we say vitamin such-and-such, or name an elemental mineral, but there are usually multiple, often many, forms of each—and supplements will usually use whatever is cheapest to produce and most chemically stable).

    However! It is also quite common for food to be grown in whatever way is cheapest and produces the greatest visible yield, rather than for micronutrient coverage.

    This goes for most if not all plants, and it goes extra for animals (because of the greater costs and inefficiencies involved in rearing animals).

    We wrote about this a while back in a mythbusting edition of 10almonds, covering:

    • Food is less nutritious now than it used to be: True or False?
    • Supplements aren’t absorbed properly and thus are a waste of money: True or False?
    • We can get everything we need from our diet: True or False?

    You can read the answers and explanations, and see the science that we presented, here:

    Do We Need Supplements, And Do They Work?

    You may be wondering: what was that about “most (more on this later) people”?

    Sometimes someone will have a nutrient deficiency that can’t be easily remedied with diet. Often this occurs when their body:

    1. has trouble absorbing that nutrient, or
    2. does something inconvenient with it that makes a lot of it unusable when it gets it.

    …which is why calcium, iron, vitamin B12, and vitamin D are quite common supplements to get prescribed by doctors after a certain age.

    Still, it’s best to try getting things from one’s diet first all of all, of course.

    Things we can’t (reasonably) get from food

    This is another category entirely. There are many supplements that are convenient forms of things readily found in a lot of food, such as vitamins and minerals, or phytochemicals like quercetin, fisetin, and lycopene (to name just a few of very many).

    Then there are things not readily found in food, or at least, not in food that’s readily available in supermarkets.

    For example, if you go to your local supermarket and ask where the mimosa is, they’ll try to sell you a cocktail mix instead of the roots, bark, or leaves of a tropical tree. It is also unlikely they’ll stock lion’s mane mushroom, or reishi.

    If perchance you do get the chance to acquire fresh lion’s mane mushroom, by the way, give it a try! It’s delicious shallow-fried in a little olive oil with black pepper and garlic.

    In short, this last category, the things most of us can’t reasonably get from food without going far out of our way, are the kind of thing whereby supplements actually can be helpful.

    And yet, still, not every supplement has evidence to support the claims made by its sellers, so it’s good to do your research beforehand. We do that on Mondays, with our “Research Review Monday” editions, of which you can find in our searchable research review archive ← we also review some drugs that can’t be classified as supplements, but mostly, it’s supplements.

    Take care!

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  • The Gut Bacteria That Improve Your General Decision-Making In Life

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    As one YouTube commenter said, “Trust your gut, but make sure you have a trustworthy gut first”!

    Dr. Tracey Marks, psychiatrist, explains how:

    Gut feelings and more

    As you probably know, the gut and brain communicate via the vagus nerve, making gut bacteria highly influential.

    How influential? Here are some key points from the video:

    • Healthier gut bacteria are linked to more cautious risk-taking and future-oriented decisions.
    • Gut bacteria influence serotonin (95% produced in the gut), dopamine, and neurotransmitters essential for decision-making.
    • People with good gut health prioritize fairness in decision-making.
    • The gut influences decision-making via neurotransmitter production, vagus nerve signaling, and inflammation control.

    Gut bacteria produce metabolites (beyond the neurotransmitters mentioned above!) that affect nerve circuits for emotion and executive function. These postbiotics (postbiotics = byproducts of gut bacteria fermenting prebiotics) play a crucial role in brain health. Examples of things they make include short-chain fatty acids (butyrate), enzymes, peptides, and vitamins, which between them strengthen gut lining, reduce inflammation, regulate serotonin, and support immune function. Scientists are even exploring postbiotics for treating metabolic and inflammatory diseases.

    Timeline of brain-gut axis health improvements

    • Days 4–14: gut bacterial composition starts changing (you probably won’t notice anything brainwise, but you may get gas; this is normal and temporary)
    • Weeks 2–6: mood and mental clarity improve (you’ll start feeling it here, most likely first in an abstract “life seems more beautiful” sort of way, plus less brain fog)
    • Months 2–3: long-term neural adaptations form (this is where the decision-making improvements come in, so you’ll need some patience about this, but the mood boost you’ve now had since weeks 2–6 should make the next bit even easier).

    Dr. Marks’ suggestions, to make the most of this:

    1. Diversify diet: aim for 30* different plant-based foods per week!
    2. Try fermented foods: start with small amounts of kimchi, kefir, etc.
    3. Increase fiber intake: add chia seeds or flaxseeds to meals!
    4. Limit artificial sweeteners: many of them disrupt gut bacteria.
    5. Maintain regular meal times: supports bacterial circadian rhythms.
    6. Don’t rely solely on supplements; whole foods are more effective!

    *this is not a random number out of a hat; there is science behind the number! Here’s the science.

    For more on all of this, enjoy:

    Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

    Want to learn more?

    You might also like:

    Genius Gut: 10 New Gut-Brain Hacks to Revolutionise Your Energy, Mood, and Brainpower – by Dr. Emily Leeming

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

    Did you arrive here from our newsletter? Don’t forget to return to the email to continue learning!

    Learn to Age Gracefully

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