Studies that have looked at whether consuming a diet rich in monounsaturated fatty acids (MUFAs) leads to reduced risk of heart disease have shown mixed results. The confusion arose because it makes a difference whether the MUFAs come from plant or animal products. In the first study to separately examine types of MUFA sources in …
Author Archives: Dr. Greg Maguire, Ph.D.
True Food Kitchen – An Inflammatory Nightmare
The ever expanding True Food Kitchen (TFK) purports to be “a restaurant inspired by the philosophy that food should make you feel better, not worse.” The TFK corporation is located in Phoenix, Arizona and has about 30 locations across America, all of which are owned by the corporation and are not franchised. According to Forbes, …
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Immune Therapy for Cancer: Enabling and Engineering T-Cells
T cell therapies are revolutionizing cancer treatment by achieving long-lasting remission in cancers, such as melanoma, lung cancer, head and neck cancer, Hodgkin lymphoma, stomach cancer, and leukemia and lymphoma. An important function of the immune system is its ability to discern between normal cells in the body and those it sees as “foreign.” This …
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Why Are So Many People Leaving Texas – And Why Are Most of Them Coming to California
Texas ranked third in the United States for the number of residents moving out of state (467,338) in 2017. The most popular out-of-state relocation destination for Texans was California (40,999). Let’s put this exodus from Texas into perspective vis-a-vis California. Texas had a population in 2017 of 28.32 million. On a per capita basis then, …
NAD Supplements : More Reductionist Quackery for Profit
NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide) is a molecule that supports basic cellular function and metabolism in a number of important ways, including protecting our DNA (Sambeat et al, 2019), converting food into usable energy and regulating our sleep-wake cycles. NAD decreases as we age, and low levels of NAD are associated with increased risk of heart …
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The Origins of the Biotechnology Industry – Cetus Corp. in Berkeley, California
Contrary to a belief by many because of a false narrative often propagated by venture capitalists, the first biotech company was Cetus Corporation of Berkeley, CA, not Genentech of South San Francisco, CA. Cetus was co-founded by UC Berkeley faculty member, Dr. Donald Glaser, Ph.D., a Nobel Prize awardee. Amongst other accomplishments, Cetus developed Betaseron …
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The USA – No Democracy Means Poor Health and Poor “Healthcare”
You can think of the USA as having five principle institutions to govern us: 1. The Presidency, 2. The House, 3. The Senate, 4. The Judiciary, and 5. The Free Press. Unfortunately, none of these are democratic institutions. The least democratic of the five is the Judiciary. Judges are nominated by the President, who is …
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Previously undetected mutations in bone marrow stem cells of young donors can be passed to recipients
Physicians use bone marrow stem cells from a donor, transplanted into a recipient, to treat patients with certain cancers or blood disorders. The donors for these procedures, whose blood or bone marrow is used for the procedures, are typically young, to optimize the quality of the donor stem cells. Previous studies have found that error-corrected …
Hyping a New Drug that Treats Pancreatic Cancer
Headlines today are reading, “A study found a drug used to treat ovarian cancer doubled the lifespans of pancreatic cancer patients” (Guzman, 2020). Sounds great, right? A new drug study reports that a new drug called Lynparza from AstraZeneca, based in the UK, “nearly doubled the time patients lived without disease progression” (AstraZeneca website). Let’s …
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We Don’t Treat Disease With Our Drugs, We Treat Surrogates in the Quagmire of the Deregulated, Privatized Drug Approval Process.
Beginning in the 1980s during the Reagan administration, the approval and regulation processes for therapeutics have been deregulated and evolved into an increasingly complex and poorly working system with rampant fraud. Irrespective of the many other failures of the system, the use of surrogate measures has been encouraged and found to be of questionable value …
Stem Cells, Health, Technology 