Category Archives: Uncategorized

Bird’s Nest Collagen

[Patron link]

it’s a thing. Really. Did anyone know about this? A bird’s nest made entirely out of spit from male swiftlet birds. And a delicacy known as the “Caviar of the East.” It looks like this,

and is prepared as a soup, an extremely expensive soup

“Premium Bird’s Nest” on Amazon. It’s used topically for alleged anti-aging effects, but most importantly, there are some studies supporting the use of collagen as a supplement (with your regular protein intake, not instead of it)! If you prefer it in a jelly-forming or thickening powder, I suspect gelatin will serve a similar purpose.

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. 16% off for annual subscriptions! It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 🙂

For personalized health consulting services: drlagakos@gmail.com.

Affiliate links: Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 

These pork rinds are the bomb. Seriously! And if you like spicy…

Get some dark chocolate, too 

calories proper

what could they possibly have in common?

[Patron link]

STORY TIME

One source of eye boogers is mites that live in hair follicles and nearby sebaceous glands on your eyelids. Pretty much everyone has ’em, and their abundance increases with age.

scary close-up:

they’re nowhere near that big in real life – closer to 1 mm, not really visible to the naked eye, but they’re there

here’s another rendition:

They feed on sebum and proteins, and besides age, they’re also more abundant in type 2 diabetes and correlate with HbA1c. Interestingly, that correlation doesn’t exist for body weight.

Tea tree oil…

The life cycle goes something like this. Kinda funny, but it’s true…

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks ?

For personalized health consulting services: drlagakos@gmail.com.

Affiliate links: Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 

These pork rinds are the bomb. Seriously! And if you like spicy…

Get some dark chocolate, too 

calories proper

Two weeks of early time-restricted feeding improves skeletal muscle insulin and anabolic sensitivity in healthy men (Jones et al., 2020)
because that’s what #eTRF does.

[Patron link]

a little background

-this group of researchers do a lot of diet/exercise work and published a bunch of papers showing intermittent fasting is #nothingsauce. Then they came to the realization that it wasn’t IF per se, but rather breakfast skipping. Thus, they jumped on the bandwagon of the plethora of new research showing the beneficial effects of species-appropriate circadian meal timing lol 🙂

a little more background

Recall the studies of Jacobs and Hirsh. They famously tested one-meal-a-day (OMAD), breakfast-only vs. dinner-only. The breakfast-only group lost weight. Upon reviewing food logs, they discovered the breakfast-only group spontaneously ate less in this ad lib setting.

Step 2: they repeated the study but provided the subjects with same meals, isocaloric. Breakfast-only group still lost more weight!

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 🙂

For personalized health consulting services: drlagakos@gmail.com.

Affiliate links: Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 

These pork rinds are the bomb. Seriously! And if you like spicy…

Get some dark chocolate, too 

calories proper

Circadian alterations in patients with neurodegenerative diseases: neuropathological basis of underlying network mechanisms (Fifel and Videnovic, 2020)

[Patron link]

Spoiler alert: sunlight and good sleep are primo here. Sure, exercise and maintaining a healthy body weight are important, but the links between circadian arrhythmia and neurodegenerative diseases are very compelling.

Evidence is multi-fold: assessing cortisol & melatonin rhythms in patients and their 1st degree relatives, cell culture studies on patient’s cells, post-mortem analysis of brain tissue, sleep/actigraphy studies, etc., etc.

Very consistent findings: neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s exhibit clear patterns of circadian arrhythmia.

I know what you’re thinking: cancer, heart disease, diabetes, asthma, and now this?!

Tl;dr:

Diet tip: circadian meal timing #eTRF

Non-diet tips: 1) sunrise; 2) wear blue blockers. Every. Night; 3) good sleep.

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 

For personalized health consulting services: drlagakos@gmail.com.

Affiliate links: Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 

These pork rinds are the bomb. Seriously! And if you like spicy…

Get some dark chocolate, too 

calories proper

Circadian rhythms have been around longer than sleep. BOOM! (Krueger, 2020)

[Patron link]

That was perhaps one of the best comments in a recent review article. Because the earth and sun were around long before any animals and it’s unlikely the earliest life forms “slept.”

I don’t know the purpose of sleep, but there are lot of interesting contenders. Matthew Walker’s “Why We Sleep” is loaded with them (for more of the how than why, “Circadian Medicine” is good).

Whatever it’s purpose, it’d better be damn important! Because you’re basically unprotected and vulnerable to easy attack. A lucky animal’s free lunch or get assassinated by a neighboring tribe.

Indeed, the unresponsiveness of sleep must be a big deal.

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 

For personalized health consulting services: drlagakos@gmail.com.

Affiliate links: Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 

These pork rinds are the bomb. Seriously! And if you like spicy…

Get some dark chocolate, too 

calories proper

This. Paper.

[Patron link]

-the alignment of circadian clocks between peripheral tissues and the brain is crucial to preventing and healing from disease

-if you believe anything evolution, we’ve been through two trillion 24-h light-dark cycles. Circadian rhythms, 500 million years of evolution. Think that’s long enough to leave a mark?

-misalignment of endogenous clocks with environmental inputs = disarray, will manifest in a variety of illnesses depending on your personal #context

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 

For personalized health consulting services: drlagakos@gmail.com.

Affiliate links: Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 

These pork rinds are the bomb. Seriously! And if you like spicy…

Get some dark chocolate, too 

calories proper

In nearly every population around the world, everyone has fermented dairy. Whether it’s yogurt, kefir, or any of the hundred’s listed HERE, I suspect it’s been so common because some combination of: 1) it’s really easy to make; 2) tastes good; 3) prolonged shelf life; 4) health effects downstream from the ‘biome (more on this below); etc., etc.

[Patron link]

It’s loaded with pre- and pro-biotics, and a great vessel for berries. And with the advent of some of these newer Swedish, Icelandic, and Greek varieties, they’re pretty keto-friendly with one of the lowest coming in around 5 g carbs per cup!

Yay or nay on fermented dairy or what’s your favorite kind?!

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 

For personalized health consulting services: drlagakos@gmail.com.

Affiliate links: Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 

These pork rinds are the bomb. Seriously! And if you like spicy…

Get some dark chocolate, too 

calories proper

say it ain’t so

[Patron link]

Ketogenic diets alter the gut microbiome resulting in decreased intestinal TH17 cells (Ang et al., 2020)

To be honest, it wasn’t the Th17 cells that caught my attention.

It was this:

and then this ?

A huge drop in actinobacteria and more specifically, our beloved bifidobacteria!

This is humans on a well-formulated ketogenic diet.

What went wrong?

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 

New affiliate! Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 

These pork rinds are the bomb. Seriously! And if you like spicy…

Get some dark chocolate, too 

For personalized health consulting services: drlagakos@gmail.com.

Affiliate links: Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

calories proper

pretty strongly recommended pre-reading: “independent of body weight” means independent of body weight which discusses THIS study (Luukkonen et al., 2020)

[Patron link]

In brief, they tested a 6-day ketogenic diet on liver fat. Two time points, before and after. You can’t detect a trend with two time points; it’s literally a straight time.

They really wanted to see if keto could reduce liver fat independent of weight loss… I mean, we know weight loss does it, so that’d confound the test of keto per se.

they lost weight :/

And with only two time points, we can’t even see if one thing (body weight or liver fat) started to decline before the other. Despite this, the authors stuck to their guns and implied keto was the main driver.

We have another study on this!

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 

New affiliate! Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 

These pork rinds are the bomb. Seriously! And if you like spicy…

Get some dark chocolate, too 

For personalized health consulting services: drlagakos@gmail.com.

Affiliate links: Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

calories proper

getting a lot of emails about this study; here’s my 30000-foot view. I’ll update if the final version differs from the pre-print in any meaningful way.

[Patron link]

Nutri-Twitter has a love/hate relationship with Dr. Kevin Hall’s research studies. Even I’ve been critical of some in the past. But he’s doing the work. Gotta be one of the most productive researchers in the field, attacking the diet wars from a variety of angles.

Our subjects likely did not increase intake on ABLC vs baseline because fat mass stayed roughly constant. As you know, answering your question was not the purpose of our study. See the penultimate paragraph below pic.twitter.com/UnrhG8RzM3

— Kevin Hall (@KevinH_PhD) May 11, 2020

Small sample size and short duration, but that’s the price you pay for an extremely well-designed and controlled study.

Main endpoint was ad lib food intake. Many people have criticized the short duration: 1) two weeks to study ad lib food intake. Many of those same people will champion SINGLE MEAL studies, effects of macronutrient-specific meals on food intake during subsequent meals. In that light, 2 weeks is above and beyond the status quo.

2) insulin, appetite, and ad lib food intake PLEASE DON’T SHOOT THE MESSENGER

For the rest of this article and more, head over to Patreon! Five bucks a month for access to this and all previous articles. It’s ad-free and you can cancel if it sucks 

New affiliate! Naked Nutrition makes some great products, including Naked Grass Fed Protein. Also, free shipping 🙂

These pork rinds are the bomb. Seriously! And if you like spicy…

Get some dark chocolate, too 

For personalized health consulting services: drlagakos@gmail.com.

Affiliate links: Still looking for a pair of hot blue blockers? TrueDark is offering 10% off HERE and Spectra479 is offering 15% off HERE. Use discount code LAGAKOS for a deal on CarbonShades. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, read this then this.

calories proper