So I am now mildly annoyed.  This advertisement for Nuvigil (a stimulant that has legitimate uses for narcolepsy indicates that if you have a patient that is overworked (go to the site there are other examples where the answer to the condition is for the employers of said individuals to let them lead normal lives) don't tell them to rest and listen to their bodies, give them Nuvigil! 

I get very nervous when I see things like this.  I've been fortunate enough in my career to only work on important problems: cancer, cancer adjuvant therapy, inflammatory disease, severe neuropathic pain, and degenerative neurologic disorders.  I would be very unhappy if my labor were being used to drug overworked  people into ignoring their circadian rhythms. 

Our society is broken.  Now we are beginning to turn to drugs to (I guess people have always self medicated with alcohol) deal with societal problems that should be dealt with at societal level. I personally am against the Affordable Healthcare act.  Not because of what it does, because of what it does not.  We are at a point in the development of our civilization where we should care enough about our fellows that we do not allow someone to die if we can do something about it.  It is something that is too important to be left to private industry.  Drug discovery is something too important to be left to government.  We should have a national health care like every other developed nation. 

 I love the pharmaceutical industry.  It has given me an interesting life where I could work on interesting problems.  I love it so much that I think there should be many more companies.  Lets do an AT&T like break up on the big pharmaceutical companies and return to the state of the 1980's when Merck was respected and innovative and GSK was Glaxo, Smith-Kilne and Beecham. 

Here endeth the lesson.

Journal papers get retracted all the time.  It's not always a case of scientific fraud.  Sometimes it is.  Sometimes massive fights erupt in the literature.  Then, on the other hand, every once-in-awhile something really weird happens.  Now gentle readers I present to you a file from files of Retraction Watch and the Twilight Zone. 

There has been controversy about this 1994 paper which I had been completely unaware of, but now it turns into a cloak and dagger story where one of the principal authors was caught breaking into a lab freezer and tampering with one of the samples of the students tasked with reproducing the results. By a hidden camera. Really.  I'm speachless. 

Should any of you, dear readers, be seeking employment.  This article has a list of international pharma companies that are actively hiring. 

Robert Lustig was talking at the Aspen Ideas Conference last week. He has been on a crusade against fructose for some time.  He is one of the leading proponents that all calories are not created equal. He claims that sugar is one of the most toxic substances we can consume and wants it regulated like alcohol.  I tend to react poorly to alarmist phraseology.  I do not believe that  sugar causes cancer any more than I think that police cause highway accidents.  The is a clear confusion of correlation (some cancer cells selectively metabolize sugars, you always see a police car at an accident scene) with cause.  

However there is a significant amount of truth that humans were opportunistic omnivores.  We ate meat, vegetables, nuts, berries, but no significant amounts of grain.  we got fructose in our diet from fruit, but it wasn't constant and it was most likely an episodic binge.  When we learned agriculture, our life spans, cranial capacities and overall measures of health decreased. The source of this information is the very fascinating book: "Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture (Bioarchaeological Interpretations of the Human Past: Local, Regional, and Global)" it's recommended reading. 

Clearly we didn't evolve to eat so much grain. A more reasoned approach to the problem can be found in the work of Dr. Peter Attia, who was an obese and pre-diabetic surgeon turned nutrition researcher who, I think quite rightly shows that people confuse acute with chronic toxicity.  He explains the issue quite well here. 

Personally I was a vegan (for moral, not health reasons) and was very obese.  I have lost 65 pounds consuming more calories than I ate before on a slow carb diet.  I'm still losing, but now I'm just fat, not obese. I resumed eating meat (grass fed, organic and also game meat.  (tip: wild boar makes a great burger)) and all of my blood markers are better than they were whilst vegan.  You can chalk that up to anecdotal evidence.  But I do believe all calories are not equal. 

Stay healthy out there. Take what I say with a grain of salt, but do look into the concept of caloric difference.