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  • Plant-Based Hospital Menus | NutritionFacts.org

    The American Medical Association passed a resolution encouraging hospitals to offer healthy plant-based food options.

    “Globally, 11 million deaths annually are attributable to dietary factors, placing poor diet ahead of any other risk factor for death in the world.” Given that diet is our leading killer, you’d think that nutrition education would be emphasized during medical school and training, but there is a deficiency. A systematic review found that, “despite the centrality of nutrition to a healthy lifestyle, graduating medical students are not supported through their education to provide high-quality, effective nutrition care to patients…”

    It could start in undergrad. What’s more important? Learning about humanity’s leading killer or organic chemistry?

    In medical school, students may average only 19 hours of nutrition out of thousands of hours of instruction, and they aren’t even being taught what’s most useful. How many cases of scurvy and beriberi, diseases of dietary deficiency, will they encounter in clinical practice? In contrast, how many of their future patients will be suffering from dietary excesses—obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease? Those are probably a little more common than scurvy or beriberi. “Nevertheless, fully 95% of cardiologists [surveyed] believe that their role includes personally providing patients with at least basic nutrition information,” yet not even one in ten feels they have an “expert” grasp on the subject.

    If you look at the clinical guidelines for what we should do for our patients with regard to our number one killer, atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, all treatment begins with a healthy lifestyle, as shown below and at 1:50 in my video Hospitals with 100-Percent Plant-Based Menus.

    “Yet, how can clinicians put these guidelines into practice without adequate training in nutrition?”

    Less than half of medical schools report teaching any nutrition in clinical practice. In fact, they may be effectively teaching anti-nutrition, as “students typically begin medical school with a greater appreciation for the role of nutrition in health than when they leave.” Below and at 2:36 in my video is a figure entitled “Percentage of Medical Students Indicating that Nutrition is Important to Their Careers.” Upon entry to different medical schools, about three-quarters on average felt that nutrition is important to their careers. Smart bunch. Then, after two years of instruction, they were asked the same question, and the numbers plummeted. In fact, at most schools, it fell to 0%. Instead of being educated, they got de-educated. They had the notion that nutrition is important washed right out of their brains. “Thus, preclinical teaching”— the first two years of medical school—“engenders a loss of a sense of the relevance of the applied discipline of nutrition.”

    Following medical school, during residency, nutrition education is “minimal or, more typically, absent.” “Major updates” were released in 2018 for residency and fellowship training requirements, and there were zero requirements for nutrition. “So you could have an internal medicine graduate who comes out of a terrific program and has learned nothing—literally nothing—about nutrition.”

    “Why is diet not routinely addressed in both medical education and practice already, and what should be done about that?” One of the “reasons for the medical silence in nutrition” is that, “sadly…nutrition takes a back seat…because there are few financial incentives to support it.” What can we do about that? The Food Law and Policy Clinic at Harvard Law School identified a dozen different policy levers at all stages of medical education and the kinds of policy recommendations there could be for the decision-makers, as you can see here and at 3:48 in my video.

    For instance, the government could require doctors working for Veterans Affairs (VA) to get at least some courses in nutrition, or we could put questions about nutrition on the board exams so schools would be pressured to teach it. As we are now, even patients who have just had a heart attack aren’t changing their diet. Doctors may not be telling them to do so, and hospitals may be actively undermining their future with the food they serve.

    The good news is that the American Medical Association (AMA) has passed a resolution encouraging hospitals to offer healthy food options. What a concept! “Our AMA hereby calls on [U.S.] Health Care Facilities to improve the health of patients, staff, and visitors by: (a) providing a variety of healthy food, including plant-based meals, and meals that are low in saturated and trans fat, sodium, and added sugars; (b) eliminating processed meats from menus; and (c) providing and promoting healthy beverages.” Nice!

    “Similarly, in 2018, the State of California mandated the availability of plant-based meals for hospital patients,” and there are hospitals in Gainesville (FL), the Bronx, Manhattan, Denver, and Tampa (FL) that “all provide 100% plant-based meals to their patients on a separate menu and provide educational materials to inpatients to improve education on the role of diet, especially plant-based diets, in chronic illness.”

    Let’s check out some of their menu offerings: How about some lentil Bolognese? Or a cauliflower scramble with baked hash browns for breakfast, mushroom ragu for lunch, and, for supper, white bean stew, salad, and fruit for dessert. (This is the first time a hospital menu has ever made me hungry!)

    The key to these transformations was “having a physician advocate and increasing education of staff and patients on the benefits of eating more plant-based foods.” A single clinician can spark change in a whole system, because science is on their side. “Doctors have a unique position in society” to influence policy at all levels; it’s about time we used it.

    For more on the ingrained ignorance of basic clinical nutrition in medicine, see the related posts below.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • The Harvard Endowment’s Biggest Public Investment is Now Bitcoin

    According to a new SEC filing, the Harvard University endowment’s largest publicly-traded investment is now in the iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT), which is a spot bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) operated by Blackrock. The filing indicates the endowment increased its holdings of IBIT from 1,906,000 shares to 6,813,612 shares since its previous such report. 

    At current prices, the value of those IBIT holdings sits at around $364 million. This is already down rather heavily from the roughly $443 million valuation included in the filing, as bitcoin’s price has recently been struggling and now appears stuck under the $100,000 mark. As pointed out by MacroScope on X, another notable, and perhaps related, aspect of this recent filing is the 99% increase in gold ETF SPDR Gold Shares as well.

    In addition to their notable bitcoin and gold holdings, the Harvard University endowment also reported large investments in tech giants like Microsoft, Nvidia, and Alphabet (Google’s parent company).

    Again, it should be noted that this SEC filing only covers the endowment’s holdings in the public markets. According to a recent report by Reuters, the total size of the Harvard University endowment sits at roughly $57 billion, with only 14% of that being held in public equities. That valuation would indicate the endowment’s holdings in IBIT represent less than 1% of its overall portfolio. However, it’s definitely possible that the endowment also has bitcoin exposure in some of its privately-held investments.

    According to Forbes, Harvard has the largest endowment among all universities.
    Growing Trust in Bitcoin as a Store of Value

    Of course, Harvard is not going out on a limb on their own in terms of their bitcoin holdings. In terms of university endowments with bitcoin exposure, there have been reports pointing to fellow Ivy leaguers Brown and Yale, in addition to many others.

    These endowment funds tend to be focused on long-term, fundamental value rather than short-term trades based around temporary hype. And interest in bitcoin from these sorts of funds focused on longer timeframes more generally has continued to develop over time. In addition to university endowments, various state pension funds everywhere from Michigan to Florida also have exposure to bitcoin via spot ETFs or bitcoin treasury company Strategy. Bitcoin exposure can also be found in the sovereign wealth funds of Abu Dhabi, Norway, and other nations.

    Nation-states, Fortune 500 companies, central banks, and other large entities are also increasingly viewing bitcoin as a reserve asset in place of U.S. treasuries, gold, or other alternatives. Just this past week, the Czech National Bank announced its first bitcoin purchase for the purpose of evaluating the potential addition of the crypto asset to their international reserves, despite objections from European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde.

    Of course, the establishment of a strategic bitcoin reserve was also a campaign promise made by now President Donald Trump, but such a reserve has yet to materialize.

    While those more aligned with Bitcoin’s original cypherpunk ethos are becoming increasingly worried about the extremely prevalent use of third-party bitcoin custodians by the vast majority of these large institutions, this type of adoption does at least still enable the intended removal of trust in terms of the crypto asset’s underlying, unwavering monetary policy. However, there still seems to be plenty of work to be done when it comes to other cypherpunk values, such as the decentralization of payments and financial privacy, as illustrated by the crypto industry’s heavy embrace of stablecoins.

    Kyle Torpey

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  • 6-year-old steps up after axolotl lab lost funds:

    When a Harvard team lost its research funding into the axolotl, a 6-year-old girl came to their rescue, inspiring the researchers with her actions. Steve Hartman has the story “On the Road.”

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  • James Watson, Nobel Prize winner and DNA pioneer, dies

    On a chilly February afternoon in 1953, a gangly American and a fast-talking Brit walked into the Eagle pub in Cambridge, England, and announced to the assembled imbibers that they had discovered the “secret of life.”

    Even by the grandiose standards of bar talk, it was a provocative statement. Except, it was also pretty close to the truth. That morning, James Watson, the American whiz kid who had not yet turned 25, and his British colleague, Francis Crick, had finally worked out the structure of DNA.

    Everything that followed, unlocking the human genome, learning to edit and move genetic information to cure disease and create new forms of life, the revolution in criminal justice with DNA fingerprinting, and many other things besides, grew out of the discovery of the double-helix shape of DNA.

    It took Watson decades to feel worthy of a breakthrough some consider the equal of Einstein’s famous E=MC2 formula. But he got there. “Did Francis and I deserve the double helix?” Watson asked rhetorically, 40 years later. “Yeah, we did.”

    James Dewey Watson, Nobel Prize winner and “semi-professional loose cannon” whose racist views made him a scientific pariah late in life, died Thursday in hospice care after a brief illness, his son told the Associated Press. He was 97.

    Born April 6, 1928, in Chicago, he was the son of a bill collector for a mail-order school who had written a small book about birds in northern Illinois. The younger Watson originally hoped to follow his father’s passion and become an ornithologist. “My greatest ambition had been to find out why birds migrate,” he once said. “It would have been a lost career. They still don’t know.”

    At 12, the brainy boy who read the World Almanac for pleasure appeared on the popular radio show “Quiz Kids.” As is often the case for the gifted, his teen years were trying. “I never even tried to be an adolescent,” Watson said. “I never went to teenage parties. I didn’t fit in. I didn’t want to fit in. I basically passed from being a child to an adult.”

    He was admitted to the University of Chicago at 15, under a program designed to give bright youngsters a head start in life. It was there he learned the Socratic method of inquiry by oral combat that would underlie both his remarkable achievements and the harsh judgments that would precipitate his fall from grace.

    Reading Erwin Schrodinger’s book, “What Is Life?” in his sophomore year set the aspiring ornithologist on a new course. Schrodinger suggested that a substance he called an “aperiodic crystal,” which might be a molecule, was the substance that passed on hereditary information. Watson was inspired by the idea that if such a molecule existed, he might be able to find it.

    “Goodbye bird migration,” he said, “and on to the gene.”

    Coincidentally, Oswald Avery had only the year before shown that a relatively simple compound — deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA — must play a role in transferring genetic information. He injected DNA from one type of bacterium into another, then watched as the two became the same.

    Most scientists didn’t believe the results. DNA, which is coiled up in every cell in the body, was nothing special, just sugars, phosphates and bases. They couldn’t believe this simple compound could be responsible for the myriad characteristics that make up an animal, much less a human being.

    Watson, meanwhile, had graduated and moved on to Indiana University, where he joined a cluster of scientists known as the “phage group,” whose research with viruses infecting bacteria helped launch the field of molecular biology. He often said he came “along at the right time” to solve the DNA problem, but there was more to it. “The major credit I think Jim and I deserve is for selecting the right problem and sticking to it,” Crick said many years later. “It’s true that by blundering about we stumbled on gold, but the fact remains that we were looking for gold.”

    The search began inauspiciously enough, when Watson arrived at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University in late 1951, supposedly to study proteins. Crick was 12 years older, working on his PhD. When they met, the two found an instant camaraderie. “I’m sure Francis and I talked about guessing the structure of DNA within the first half-hour of our meeting,” Watson recalled.

    Their working method was mostly just conversation, but conversation conducted at a breakneck pace, and at high volume. So high, they were exiled to an office in a shabby shack called the Hut, where their debates would not disturb others.

    In January 1953, the brilliant American chemist Linus Pauling stole a march on them when he announced he had the answer: DNA was a triple helix, with the bases sticking out, like charms on a bracelet.

    Watson and Crick were devastated, until they realized Pauling’s scheme would not work. After seeing an X-ray image of DNA taken by crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, they built a 6-foot-tall metal model of a double helix, shaped like a spiral staircase, with the rungs made of the bases adenine and thymine, guanine and cytosine. When they finished, it was immediately apparent how DNA copies itself, by unzipping down the middle, allowing each chain to find a new partner. In Watson’s words, the final product was “too pretty” not to be true.

    American biology professor James Dewey Watson from Cambridge, Nobel laureate in medicine in 1962, explains the possibilities of future cancer treatments at a Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau on July 4, 1967. Watson had received the Nobel Prize together with the two British scientists Crick and Wilkins for their research on the molecular structure of nucleic acids (DNA).

    (Gerhard Rauchwetter / picture alliance via Getty Images)

    It was true, and in 1962, Watson, Crick and another researcher, Maurice Wilkins, were awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Franklin, whose expert X-ray images solidified Watson’s conviction that DNA was a double helix, had died four years earlier of ovarian cancer. Had she lived, it’s unclear what would have happened, since Nobel rules allow only three people to share a single prize.

    In the coming years, Watson’s attitude toward Franklin became a matter of controversy, which he did little to soothe by his unchivalrous treatment of her in his 1968 book, “The Double Helix.” “By choice, she did not emphasize her feminine qualities,” he wrote, adding that she was secretive and quarrelsome.

    To his admirers, this was just “Honest Jim,” as some referred to him, being himself, a refreshing antidote to the increasingly politically correct world of science and society. But as the years passed, more controversies erupted around his “truth-telling” — he said he would not hire an overweight person because they were not ambitious, and that exposure to the sun in equatorial regions increases sexual urges — culminating with remarks in 2007 that he could not escape. He said he was “inherently gloomy” about Africa’s prospects because policies in the West were based on assumptions that the intelligence of Black people is the same as Europeans, when “all the testing says, not really.”

    He apologized “unreservedly,” but was still forced to retire as chancellor of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the Long Island, N.Y., institution he had rescued from the brink of insolvency decades earlier. Afterward, he complained about being reduced to a “non-person,” but rekindled public outrage seven years later by insisting in a documentary that his views had not changed. This time, citing his “unsubstantiated and reckless personal opinions,” the laboratory rescinded the honorary titles it had bestowed, chancellor emeritus and honorary trustee.

    Mark Mannucci, director of the documentary “American Masters: Decoding Watson,” compared him to King Lear, a man “at the height of his powers and, through his own character flaws, was brought down.” Those sympathetic to Watson said the problem was he didn’t know any of his Black colleagues. If he had, they argued, he would have immediately renounced his prejudices.

    Following his DNA triumph, Watson spent two years at Caltech before joining the faculty at Harvard University. During this period, he worked to understand the role ribonucleic acid (RNA) plays in the synthesis of proteins that make bodily structures. If the double-stranded DNA contains the body’s master plan, the single-stranded RNA is the messenger, telling the cell’s protein factories how to build the three-dimensional shapes that make the whole. Watson’s 1965 textbook, “Molecular Biology of the Gene,” became a foundation stone of modern biology.

    As great as was his obsession with DNA, Watson’s pursuit of, and failure to obtain, female companionship was a matter of only marginally less critical mass. At Harvard, he recruited Radcliffe coeds to work in his lab, reasoning that “if you have pretty girls in the lab, you don’t have to go out.” He started attending Radcliffe parties known as jolly-ups. “Here comes this 35-year-old and he wants to come to jolly-ups,” said a biographer, Victor McElheny. “He was constantly swinging and missing.”

    His batting average improved when he met Elizabeth Vickery Lewis, a 19-year-old Radcliffe sophomore working in the Harvard lab. He married her in 1968, realizing by only days his goal of marrying before 40. On his honeymoon, he sent a postcard back to Harvard: “She’s 19; she’s beautiful; and she’s all mine.” The couple had two sons, Rufus, who developed schizophrenia in his teens, and Duncan.

    The same year, Watson finished writing “The Double Helix.” When he showed it to Crick and Wilkins, both objected to the way he characterized them and persuaded Harvard not to publish it. Watson soon found another publisher.

    It was certainly true his book could be unkind and gossipy, but that was why the public, which likely had trouble sorting out the details of crystallography and hydrogen bonds, loved it. “The Double Helix” became an international bestseller that remained in stock for many years. Eventually, Watson and Crick made up and by the time the Englishman died in 2004, they were again the boon pals they’d been 50 years earlier.

    After their discovery of DNA’s structure, the two men took divergent paths. Crick hoped to find the biological roots of consciousness, while Watson devoted himself to discovering a cure for cancer.

    After serving on a voluntary basis, Watson became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island in 1976. It had once been a whaling village, and the humble buildings retained a rustic charm, though when Watson arrived the rustic quality was on a steep descent toward ruination. Its endowment was virtually nonexistent and money was so tight a former director mowed the lawn himself.

    As skilled at raising money as he was at solving difficult scientific problems, Watson turned the institution into a major research center that helped reveal the role of genetics in cancer. By 2019, the endowment had grown to $670 million, and the research staff had tripled. From an annual budget of $1 million, it had grown to $190 million.

    “You have to like people who have money,” Watson said in explanation of his success at resurrecting Cold Spring Harbor. “I really like rich people.” His growing eccentricity, which included untied shoelaces and hair that spiked out in all directions, completed the stock image of a distracted scientist. Acquaintances swore they saw him untie his shoelaces before meeting with a potential donor.

    In 1988, he became the first director of the $3-billion Human Genome Project, whose goal was to identify and map every human gene. He resigned four years later, after a public falling-out with the director of the National Institutes of Health. “I completely failed the test,” he said of his experience as a bureaucrat.

    Among his passions were tennis and charity work. In 2014, the year of the documentary that sealed his fate as an exile, Watson put his Nobel gold medal up for auction. He gave away virtually all the $4.1 million it fetched. The buyer, Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov, returned it a year later, saying he felt bad the scientist had to sell possessions to support worthy causes.

    A complex, beguiling, maddening man who defied easy, or any, categorization, Watson followed his own star to the end of his life, insisting in 2016, when he was nearly 90, that he didn’t want to die until a cure for cancer was found. At the time, he was still playing tennis three times a week, with partners decades younger.

    Besides the Nobel Prize, Watson was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Eli Lilly Award in Biochemistry and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and was made an honorary Knight of the British Empire. Among his literary works were both scientific and popular books, from “Recombinant DNA” to “Genes, Girls, and Gamow,” a typically cheeky book recounting his twin obsessions, scientific glory and the opposite sex.

    Johnson is a former Times staff writer.

    John Johnson

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  • 2 Massachusetts men arrested in explosion on Harvard University medical campus

    Two men were arrested in connection with an explosion on Harvard University’s Longwood Medical Campus, federal officials said Tuesday. The explosion happened Saturday just before 3 a.m. on the fourth floor of Harvard’s Goldenson Building, which is on the university’s medical campus.Special agents and officers with the FBI Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task force and Harvard University Police Department arrested the Massachusetts men, who were not identified. A news conference is planned for 1 p.m.There was no structural damage to the building in the aftermath, and all labs and equipment remained fully operational. “It’s a shame that people do things like that,” said Boston police commissioner Michael Cox. “I’m pretty confident we will hold people accountable for that.”University police released photos of two suspects in the explosion, saying that the two were seen running from the building when police arrived at the scene.Cleaning crews were at the site of the explosion on Sunday, ensuring everything was cleared and fully operational. A sweep of the building was done, and no additional devices were found.”I haven’t heard anything like that going on here, so to hear that is wild,” said student Therese Lipscombe. “Big-name people are going to listen. So whatever their motive was, I’m sure they thought people were going to hear about it.””I do feel like this is a safe area. There’s a hospital nearby and a school, and just a lot of people in general,” said Lindsey Birmingham, who works nearby. “So I usually feel safe. I think I do still feel safe, but it definitely raises a lot of questions and alarms.”A person who lives nearby says they heard two explosions about five minutes apart.No one was injured in the incident.There will be an increased police presence at Harvard’s Longwood campus as officials continue to investigate. There is no threat to the public.

    BOSTON —

    Two men were arrested in connection with an explosion on Harvard University’s Longwood Medical Campus, federal officials said Tuesday.

    The explosion happened Saturday just before 3 a.m. on the fourth floor of Harvard’s Goldenson Building, which is on the university’s medical campus.

    Special agents and officers with the FBI Boston’s Joint Terrorism Task force and Harvard University Police Department arrested the Massachusetts men, who were not identified.

    A news conference is planned for 1 p.m.

    There was no structural damage to the building in the aftermath, and all labs and equipment remained fully operational.

    “It’s a shame that people do things like that,” said Boston police commissioner Michael Cox. “I’m pretty confident we will hold people accountable for that.”

    University police released photos of two suspects in the explosion, saying that the two were seen running from the building when police arrived at the scene.

    Hearst OwnedHarvard University

    Cleaning crews were at the site of the explosion on Sunday, ensuring everything was cleared and fully operational. A sweep of the building was done, and no additional devices were found.

    “I haven’t heard anything like that going on here, so to hear that is wild,” said student Therese Lipscombe. “Big-name people are going to listen. So whatever their motive was, I’m sure they thought people were going to hear about it.”

    “I do feel like this is a safe area. There’s a hospital nearby and a school, and just a lot of people in general,” said Lindsey Birmingham, who works nearby. “So I usually feel safe. I think I do still feel safe, but it definitely raises a lot of questions and alarms.”

    A person who lives nearby says they heard two explosions about five minutes apart.

    No one was injured in the incident.

    There will be an increased police presence at Harvard’s Longwood campus as officials continue to investigate. There is no threat to the public.

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  • Treat the Cause | NutritionFacts.org

    Treat the underlying cause of chronic lifestyle diseases.

    It’s been said that more than 2,000 years ago, Hippocrates declared, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” In actuality, it appears that he never actually said those words, but there’s “no doubt about the relevance of food…and its role in health and disease states” in his writings. Regardless, 2,000 years ago, disease was thought to arise from a bad sense of “humors,” as you can see here and at 0:32 in my video Lifestyle and Disease Prevention: Your DNA Is Not Your Destiny.

    Now, we have science, and there is “an overwhelming body of clinical and epidemiological evidence illustrating the dramatic impact of a healthy lifestyle on reducing all-cause mortality”—meaning death from all causes put together—“and preventing chronic diseases such as coronary heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer.” But don’t those diseases just run in our family? What if we just have bad genes?

    According to the esteemed former chair of nutrition at Harvard, for most of the diseases that have contributed “importantly” to mortality in Western peoples, we’ve long known that non-genetic factors often account for at least 80% to 90% of risk. We know this because rates of the leading killers, like major cancers and cardiovascular diseases, vary up to 100-fold around the world, and, “when groups migrate from low- to high-risk countries, their disease rates almost always change to those of the new environment.” Modifiable behavioral factors have been identified, “including specific aspects of diet, overweight, inactivity, and smoking that account for over 70% of stroke and colon cancer, over 80% of coronary heart disease, and over 90% of adult-onset [type 2] diabetes”—diseases that can largely be prevented by our own actions.

    If most of the power is in our own hands, why do we allocate massively more resources to treatment than prevention? And speaking of prevention, “even preventive strategies are heavily biased towards pharmacology rather than supporting improvements in diet and lifestyle that could be more cost-effective. For example, treatment of [high] serum cholesterol with statins alone could cost approximately 30 billion dollars per year in the United States and would have only a modest impact on coronary heart disease incidence. The inherent problem is that most pharmacologic strategies don’t address the underlying causes of ill health in Western countries, which are not drug deficiencies.”

    Ironically, the chronic diseases that are most amenable to lifestyle treatment are the same ones most profitably treated by drugs. Why? If you don’t change your diet, you have to pop the pills every day for the rest of your life. So, the cash-cow drugs are the very drugs we need the least. “Even though the most widely accepted, well-established chronic disease practice guidelines uniformly call for lifestyle change as the first line of therapy, physicians often do not follow these recommendations.” “By ignoring the root causes of disease and neglecting to prioritize lifestyle measures for prevention, the medical community is placing people at harm.”

    “Traditional medical care relies primarily on the application of pharmacologic and surgical interventions after the development of illness,” whereas lifestyle medicine relies primarily on “the use of optimal nutrition (a whole foods, plant-based diet) and exercise in the prevention, arrest, and reversal of chronic conditions leading to premature disability and death. It looks in a holistic way at the underlying causes of illness.”

    Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman, director of PharmedOut, a wonderful organization I’m proud to support, wrote a great editorial entitled “Doctors Must Not Be Lapdogs to Drug Firms.” “The illusion that the relationship between medicine and the drug industry is collegial, professional, and personal is carefully maintained by the drug industry, which actually views all transactions with physicians in finely calculated financial terms…The drug industry is happy to play the generous and genial uncle until physicians want to discuss subjects that are off limits, such as the benefits of diet or exercise, or the relationship between medicine and pharmaceutical companies…Let us not be a lapdog to Big Pharma. Rather than sitting contentedly in our master’s lap, let us turn around and bite something tender.”

    Doctor’s Note

    The organization I mentioned, PharmedOut, is a project of Georgetown University Medical Center.

    For more on Lifestyle Medicine, see related videos below.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Judge rules Trump administration’s funding freeze against Harvard was unlawful

    Washington — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the Trump administration violated Harvard University’s First Amendment rights and federal law when it froze nearly $2 billion in federal grants because of the Ivy League school’s handling of antisemitism on campus.

    In a victory for Harvard, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs blocked Trump administration officials from implementing or instituting orders freezing the grant funding to Harvard and letters terminating research grants awarded by a slew of federal agencies.

    Burroughs wrote in her 84-page decision that Harvard has been “plagued” by antisemitism in recent years and should have done more to deal with the issue. But she found that there is “little connection between the research affected by the grant terminations and antisemitism.”

    “In fact, a review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities, and did so in a way that runs afoul of the APA, the First Amendment and Title VI,” Burroughs wrote. “Further, their actions have jeopardized decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research, as well as reflect a disregard for the rights protected by the Constitution and federal statutes.”

    The decision, which is likely to be appealed, is a significant win for Harvard, which has been targeted by the Trump administration in recent months. The administration has sought to punish Harvard over what it says is its failure to condemn antisemitism and protect Jewish students on campus. But it has also criticized the school’s hiring and admissions practices.

    The Trump administration sent a letter to Harvard leaders in April that contained a list of demands, and after the university rejected the terms, administration officials announced it had frozen more than $2.2 billion in grants and contracts to Harvard. The school later received letters from nine federal agencies canceling research grants.

    The Trump administration’s cuts to federal funding to Harvard have continued, and Mr. Trump has also threatened to revoke the school’s tax-exempt status.

    Harvard sued the Trump administration over the funding freeze in April, claiming the move was part of a “pressure campaign” by the White House to “force Harvard to submit to the government’s control over its academic programs,” and views on anti-Israel speech on its campus. Both Harvard and the Justice Department asked Burroughs to go straight to a decision on the merits of the suit without a trial. 

    In her ruling, Burroughs called the Trump administration’s actions part of a “government-initiated onslaught” against the school that was “much more about promoting a governmental orthodoxy in violation of the First Amendment than about anything else, including fighting antisemitism.”

    “Harvard is currently, even if belatedly, taking steps it needs to take to combat antisemitism and seems willing to do even more if need be,” Burroughs wrote. “Now it is the job of the courts to similarly step up, to act to safeguard academic freedom and freedom of speech as required by the Constitution, and to ensure that important research is not improperly subjected to arbitrary and procedurally infirm grant terminations, even if doing so risks the wrath of a government committed to its agenda no matter the cost.”

    Burroughs said that the Trump administration was right to investigate antisemitic behavior on Harvard’s campus, but said that focus was not the “true aim” of the funding freeze. Instead, she agreed with Harvard that the administration retaliated against it in violation of its First Amendment rights.

    “Harvard was wrong to tolerate hateful behavior for as long as it did,” Burroughs wrote. “The record here, however, does not reflect that fighting antisemitism was Defendants’ true aim in acting against Harvard and, even if it were, combatting antisemitism cannot be accomplished on the back of the First Amendment.”

    Burroughs said that none of the letters the Trump administration sent to Harvard “identified any specific instance of antisemitism on Harvard’s campus, specified how Harvard failed to respond to any such acts of antisemitism in a way that violated Title VI, or reflected any effort to follow the Title VI procedural requirements that govern the termination of federal funding.”

    In addition to targeting Harvard’s federal funding, the Trump administration has also taken aim at its ability to enroll international students. Harvard sued the government over its efforts, and in June, Burroughs blocked the Trump administration from revoking the university’s ability to enroll foreign students. The Justice Department has appealed that decision.

    The feud between the Trump administration and Harvard continued in August, after the Trump administration signaled that it could take control of the school’s patents stemming from federally funded research.

    Melissa Quinn

    Melissa Quinn is a politics reporter for CBSNews.com. She has written for outlets including the Washington Examiner, Daily Signal and Alexandria Times. Melissa covers U.S. politics, with a focus on the Supreme Court and federal courts.

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  • Judge Reverses Trump Administration’s Cuts Of Billions Of Dollars To Harvard University – KXL

    This Nov. 13, 2008 file photo shows the campus of Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. (AP Photo/Lisa Poole, File)

    BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge in Boston on Wednesday ordered the reversal of the Trump administration’s cuts to more than $2.6 billion in funding for research grants for Harvard University.

    U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs sided with the Ivy League school, ruling the cuts amounted to illegal retaliation for Harvard’s rejection of White House demands for changes to its governance and policies.

    The ruling delivers a significant victory to Harvard in its battle with the Trump administration, which also has sought to prevent the school from hosting foreign students and threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status.

    The government had tied the freezes at Harvard to delays in dealing with antisemitism on its campus, but the judge said the federally funded research had little connection to antisemitism. “A review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that Defendants used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically-motivated assault on this country’s premier universities,” Burroughs wrote.

    The ruling reverses a series of funding freezes that later became outright cuts as the Trump administration escalated its fight with the nation’s wealthiest university. If it stands, it promises to revive Harvard’s sprawling research operation and hundreds of projects that lost federal money.

    Beyond the courthouse, the Trump administration and Harvard officials have been discussing a potential agreement that would end investigations and allow the university to regain access to federal funding. President Donald Trump has said he wants Harvard to pay no less than $500 million, but no deal has materialized even as the administration has struck agreements with Columbia and Brown.

    Harvard’s lawsuit accuses the Trump administration of waging a retaliation campaign against the university after it rejected a series of demands in an April 11 letter from a federal antisemitism task force.

    The letter demanded sweeping changes related to campus protests, academics and admissions. It was meant to address government accusations that the university had become a hotbed of liberalism and tolerated anti-Jewish harassment on campus.

    Trump officials moved to freeze $2.2 billion in research grants the same day Harvard rejected the administration’s demands. Education Secretary Linda McMahon declared in May that Harvard would no longer be eligible for new grants, and weeks later the administration began canceling contracts with Harvard.

    As Harvard fought the funding freeze in court, individual agencies began sending letters announcing that the frozen research grants were being terminated under a clause allowing grants to be scrapped if they no longer align with government policies. Harvard has moved to self-fund some of its research but warned it can’t absorb the full cost of the federal cuts.

    Harvard’s motion for summary judgment asked Burroughs to overturn the cuts and prevent future ones. It said the cuts did nothing to address antisemitism.

    Harvard President Alan Garber pledged to fight antisemitism but said no government “should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

    The Trump administration denies the cuts were done in retaliation, saying the grants were under review even before the April demand letter was sent. It argues the government has wide discretion to cancel contracts for policy reasons.

    “It is the policy of the United States under the Trump Administration not to fund institutions that fail to adequately address antisemitism in their programs,” it said in court documents.

    In a separate lawsuit filed by Harvard, Burroughs previously blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to prevent the school from hosting international students. Trump has said the administration would appeal if she rules for Harvard in the fight over its federal funding.

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    Jordan Vawter

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  • Are Raw Mushrooms Safe to Eat?  | NutritionFacts.org

    Microwaving is probably the most efficient way to reduce agaritine levels in fresh mushrooms.

    There is a toxin in plain white button mushrooms called agaritine, which may be carcinogenic. Plain white button mushrooms grow to be cremini (brown) mushrooms, and cremini mushrooms grow to be portobello mushrooms. They’re all the very same mushroom, similar to how green bell peppers are just unripe red bell peppers. The amount of agaritine in these mushrooms can be reduced through cooking: Frying, microwaving, boiling, and even just freezing and thawing lower the levels. “It is therefore recommended to process/cook Button Mushroom before consumption,” something I noted in a video that’s now more than a decade old.

    However, as shown below and at 0:51 in my video Is It Safe to Eat Raw Mushrooms?, if you look at the various cooking methods, the agaritine in these mushrooms isn’t completely destroyed. Take dry baking, for example: Baking for ten minutes at about 400° Fahrenheit (“a process similar to pizza baking”) only cuts the agaritine levels by about a quarter, so 77 percent still remains.

    Boiling looks better, appearing to wipe out more than half the toxin after just five minutes, but the agaritine isn’t actually eliminated. Instead, it’s just transferred to the cooking water. So, levels within the mushrooms drop by about half at five minutes and by 90 percent after an hour, but that’s mostly because the agartine is leaching into the broth. So, if you’re making soup, for instance, five minutes of boiling is no more effective than dry baking for ten minutes, and, even after an hour, about half still remains.

    Frying for five to ten minutes eliminates a lot of agartine, but microwaving is not only a more healthful way to cook, but it works even better, as you can see here and at 1:39 in my video. Researchers found that just one minute in the microwave “reduced the agaritine content of the mushrooms by 65%,” and only 30 seconds of microwaving eliminated more than 50 percent. So, microwaving is probably the easiest way to reduce agaritine levels in fresh mushrooms. 
    My technique is to add dried mushrooms into the pasta water when I’m making spaghetti. Between the reductions of 20 percent or so from the drying and 60 percent or so from boiling for ten minutes and straining, more than 90 percent of agaritine is eliminated.

    Should we be concerned about the residual agaritine? According to a review funded by the mushroom industry, not at all. “The available evidence to date suggests that agaritine from consumption of…mushrooms poses no known toxicological risk to healthy humans.” The researchers acknowledge agartine is considered a potential carcinogen in mice, but then that data needs to be extrapolated to human health outcomes.

    The Swiss Institute of Technology, for example, estimated that the average mushroom consumption in the country would be expected to cause about two cases of cancer per one hundred thousand people. That is similar to consumption in the United States, as seen below and at 3:00 in my video, so “one could theoretically expect about 20 cancer deaths per 1 x 106 [one million] lives from mushroom consumption.” In comparison, typically, with a new chemical, pesticide, or food additive, we’d like to see the cancer risk lower than one in a million. “By this approach, the average mushroom consumption of Switzerland is 20-fold too high to be acceptable. To remain under the limit”—and keep risk down to one in a million—“‘mushroom lovers’ would have to restrict their consumption of mushrooms to one 50-g serving every 250 days!” That’s about a half-cup serving once in just over eight months. To put that into perspective, even if you were eating a single serving every single day, the resulting additional cancer risk would only be about one in ten thousand. “Put another way, if 10,000 people consumed a mushroom meal daily for 70 years, then in addition to the 3000 cancer cases arising from other factors, one more case could be attributed to consuming mushrooms.” 
    But, again, this is all based “on the presumption that results in such mouse models are equally valid in humans.” Indeed, this is all just extrapolating from mice data. What we need is a huge prospective study to examine the association between mushroom consumption and cancer risk in humans, but there weren’t any such studies—until now.

    Researchers titled their paper: “Mushroom Consumption and Risk of Total and Site-Specific Cancer in Two Large U.S. [Harvard] Prospective Cohorts” and found “no association between mushroom consumption and total and site-specific cancers in U.S. women and men.”

    Eating raw or undercooked shiitake mushrooms can cause something else, though: shiitake mushroom flagellate dermatitis. Flagellate as in flagellation, whipping, flogging. Below and at 4:48 in my video, you can see a rash that makes it look as if you’ve been whipped.

    Here and at 4:58 in my video is another photo of the rash. It’s thought to be caused by a compound in shiitake mushrooms called lentinan, but because heat denatures it, it only seems to be a problem with raw or undercooked mushrooms.

    Now, it is rare. Only about 1 in 50 people are even susceptible, and it goes away on its own in a week or two. Interestingly, it can strike as many as ten days after eating shiitake mushrooms, which is why people may not make the connection. One unfortunate man suffered on and off for 16 years before a diagnosis. Hopefully, a lot of doctors will watch this video, and if they ever see a rash like this, they’ll tell their patients to cook their shiitakes.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Eating to Help Control Cancer Metastasis  | NutritionFacts.org

    Randomized controlled trials show that lowering saturated fat intake can lead to improved breast cancer survival.

    The leading cause of cancer-related death is metastasis. Cancer kills because cancer spreads. The five-year survival rate for women with localized breast cancer is nearly 99 percent, for example, but that falls to only 27 percent in women with metastasized cancer. Yet, “our ability to effectively treat metastatic disease has not changed significantly in the past few decades…” The desperation is evident when there are such papers as “Targeting Metastasis with Snake Toxins: Molecular Mechanisms.”

    We have built-in defenses, natural killer cells that roam the body, killing off budding tumors. But, as I’ve discussed, there’s a fat receptor called CD36 that appears to be essential for cancer cells to spread, and these cancer cells respond to dietary fat intake, but not all fat.

    CD36 is upregulated by palmitic acid, as much as a 50-fold increase within 12 hours of consumption, as shown below and at 1:13 in my video How to Help Control Cancer Metastasis with Diet.

    Palmitic acid is a saturated fat made from palm oil that can be found in junk food, but it is most concentrated in meat and dairy. This may explain why, when looking at breast cancer mortality and dietary fat, “there was no difference in risk of breast-cancer-specific death…for women in the highest versus the lowest category of total fat intake,” but there’s about a 50 percent greater likelihood of dying of breast cancer with higher intake of saturated fat. Researchers conclude: “These meta-analyses have shown that saturated fat intake negatively impacts breast cancer survival.”

    This may also explain why “intake of high-fat dairy, but not low-fat dairy, was related to a higher risk of mortality after breast cancer diagnosis.” If a protein in dairy, like casein, was the problem, skim milk might be even worse, but that wasn’t the case. It’s the saturated butterfat, perhaps because it triggered that cancer-spreading mechanism induced by CD36. Women who consumed one or more daily servings of high-fat dairy had about a 50 percent higher risk of dying from breast cancer.

    We see the same with dairy and its relationship to prostate cancer survival. Researchers found that “drinking high-fat milk increased the risk of dying from prostate cancer by as much as 600% in patients with localized prostate cancer. Low-fat milk was not associated with such an increase in risk.” So, it seems to be the animal fat, rather than the animal protein, and these findings are consistent with analyses from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study (HPFS) and the Physicians’ Health Study (PHS), conducted by Harvard researchers.

    There is even more evidence that the fat receptor CD36 is involved. The “risk of colorectal cancer for meat consumption” increased from a doubling to an octupling—that is, the odds of getting cancer multiplied eightfold for those who carry a specific type of CD36 gene. So, “Is It Time to Give Breast Cancer Patients a Prescription for a Low-Fat Diet?” A cancer diagnosis is often referred to as a ‘teachable moment’ when patients are motivated to make changes to their lifestyle, and so provision of evidence-based guidelines is essential.”

    In a randomized, prospective, multicenter clinical trial, researchers set out “to test the effect of a dietary intervention designed to reduce fat intake in women with resected, early-stage breast cancer,” meaning the women had had their breast cancer surgically removed. As shown below and at 4:02 in my video, the study participants in the dietary intervention group dropped their fat intake from about 30 percent of calories down to 20 percent, reduced their saturated fat intake by about 40 percent, and maintained it for five years. “After approximately 5 years of follow-up, women in the dietary intervention group had a 24% lower risk of relapse”—a 24-percent lower risk of the cancer coming back—“than those in the control group.” 

    That was the WINS study, the Women’s Intervention Nutrition Study. Then there was the Women’s Health Initiative study, where, again, women were randomized to lower their fat intake down to 20 percent of calories, and, again, “those randomized to a low-fat dietary pattern had increased breast cancer overall survival. Meaning: A dietary change may be able to influence breast cancer outcome.” What’s more, not only was their breast cancer survival significantly greater, but the women also experienced a reduction in heart disease and a reduction in diabetes.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • What About Saturated Fat and Vegetarians’ Stroke Risk?  | NutritionFacts.org

    What About Saturated Fat and Vegetarians’ Stroke Risk?  | NutritionFacts.org

    How can we explain the drop in stroke risk as the Japanese diet became westernized with more meat and dairy?

    As Japan westernized, the country’s stroke rate plummeted, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:15 in my video Vegetarians and Stroke Risk Factors: Saturated Fat?. 

    Stroke had been a leading cause of death in Japan, but the mortality rate decreased sharply as they moved away from their traditional diets and started eating more like those in the West. Did the consumption of all that extra meat and dairy have a protective effect? After all, their intake of animal fat and animal protein was going up at the same time their stroke rates were going down, as shown below and at 0:35 in my video. 

    Commented a noted Loma Linda cardiology professor, “Protection from stroke by eating animal foods? Surely not!…Many vegetarians, like myself, have almost come to expect the data to indicate that they have an advantage, whatever the disease that is being considered. Thus, it is disquieting to find evidence in a quite different direction for at least one subtype of stroke.” 

    Can dietary saturated fat, like that found in meat and dairy, be beneficial in preventing stroke risk? There appeared to be a protective association—but only in East Asian populations, as you can see below and at 1:11 in my video. 

    High dietary saturated fat was found to be associated with a lower risk of stroke in Japanese but not in non-Japanese. So, what was it about the traditional Japanese diet that the westernization of their eating habits made things better when it came to stroke risk? Well, at the same time, their meat and dairy intake was going up, and their salt intake was going down, as you can see below and at 1:40. 

    The traditional Japanese diet was packed with salt. They had some of the highest salt intakes in the world, about a dozen spoonsful of salt a day. Before refrigeration became widely available, they ate all sorts of salted, pickled, and fermented foods from soy sauce to salted fish. In the areas with twice the salt intake, they had twice the stroke mortality, but when the salt intake dropped, so did the stroke death rates, because when the salt consumption went down, their blood pressure went down, too. High blood pressure is perhaps “the single most important potentially modifiable risk factor for stroke,” so it’s no big mystery why the westernization of the Japanese diet led to a drop in stroke risk.  

    When they abandoned their more traditional diets, their obesity rates went up and so did their diabetes and coronary artery disease, but, as they gave up the insanely high salt intake, their insanely high stroke rates correspondingly fell. 

    Stomach cancer is closely associated with excess salt intake. When you look at their stomach cancer rates, they came down beautifully as they westernized their diets away from salt-preserved foods, as you can see in the graph below and at 2:50 in my video. 

    But, of course, as they started eating more animal foods like dairy, their rates of fatal prostate cancer, for example, shot through the roof. Compared to Japan, the United States has 7 times more deaths from prostate cancer, 5 times more deadly breast cancer, 3 times more colon cancer and lymphoma mortality, and 6 to 12 times the death rate from heart disease, as you can see in the graph below and at 3:15 in my video. Yes, Japanese stroke and stomach cancer rates were higher, but they were also eating up to a quarter cup of salt a day. 

    That would seem to be the most likely explanation, rather than some protective role of animal fat. And, indeed, it was eventually acknowledged in the official Japanese guidelines for the prevention of cardiovascular disease: “Refrain from the consumption of large amounts of fatty meat, animal fat, eggs, and processed foods…”

    Now, one of the Harvard cohorts found a protective association between hemorrhagic strokes and both saturated fat and trans fat, prompting a “sigh of relief…heard throughout the cattle-producing Midwestern states,” even though the researchers concluded that, of course, we all have to cut down on animal fat and trans fat for the heart disease benefit. Looking at another major Harvard cohort, however, they found no such protective association for any kind of stroke, and when they put all the studies together, zero protection was found across the board, as you can see below and at 4:07 in my video. 

    Observational studies have found that higher LDL cholesterol seems to be associated with a lower risk of hemorrhagic stroke, raising the possibility that cholesterol may be “a double-edged sword,” by decreasing the risk of ischemic stroke but increasing the risk of hemorrhagic stroke. But low cholesterol levels in the aged “may be a surrogate for nutritional deficiencies…or a sign of debilitating diseases,” or perhaps the individuals were on a combination of cholesterol-lowering drugs and blood thinners, and that’s why we tend to see more brain bleeds in those with low cholesterol. You don’t know until you put it to the test.

    Researchers put together about two dozen randomized controlled trials and found that the lower your cholesterol, the better when it comes to overall stroke risk, with “no significant increase in hemorrhagic stroke risk with lower achieved low-density lipoprotein [LDL] cholesterol levels.”

    The genetic data appear mixed, with some suggesting a lifetime of elevated LDL would give you a higher hemorrhagic stroke risk, while other data suggest more of that double-edged sword effect. However, with lower cholesterol, “any possible excess of hemorrhagic [bleeding] stroke is greatly outweighed by the protective effect against ischaemic stroke,” the much more common clotting type of stroke, not to mention heart disease. It may be on the order of 18 fewer clotting strokes for every 1 extra bleeding stroke with cholesterol-lowering. 

    Does this explain the increased stroke risk found among vegetarians? Hemorrhagic stroke is the type of stroke that appeared higher in vegetarians, but the cholesterol levels in vegans were even lower, and, if anything, vegans trended towards a higher clotting stroke risk, so it doesn’t make sense. If there is some protective factor in animal foods, it is to be hoped that a diet can be found that still protects against the killer number one, heart disease, without increasing the risk of the killer number five, stroke. But, first, we have to figure out what that factor is, and the hunt continues. 

    Aren’t there studies suggesting that saturated fat isn’t as bad as we used to think? Check out: 

    Just like the traditional Japanese diet had a lot going for it despite having high sodium as the fatal flaw, what might be the Achilles’ heel of plant-based diets when it comes to stroke risk? 

    This is the seventh video in this stroke series. See the related posts below for the others.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • A Frightening View of Free Speech and Academic Freedom at Harvard

    A Frightening View of Free Speech and Academic Freedom at Harvard

    Professor Lawrence Bobo, Dean of Social Science and the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, has an article in the Harvard Crimson on the proper limits of faculty speech that has to be read to be believed.

    He writes:

    Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?

    Yes it is and yes it does.

    Vigorous debate is to be expected and encouraged at any University interested in promoting freedom of expression. But here is the rub: As the events of the past year evidence, sharply critical speech from faculty, prominent ones especially, can attract outside attention that directly impedes the University’s function.

    A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs. Along with freedom of expression and the protection of tenure comes a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to refrain from conscious action that would seriously harm the University and its independence.

    In support of this position, he even notes “you can’t escape sanction for shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.”

    Conor Friedersdorf has an appropriate response to Dean Bobo’s argument, tweeting: “Harvard Dean Lawrence D. Bobo’s op-ed has incited me, an external actor, to publicly lament the subset of Harvard leaders who neither understand nor support free speech. By his logic, I guess he needs to be sanctioned.”

    https://x.com/conor64/status/1802280647563661516

    One suggestion the article makes which is worth some consideration is that faculty should be sanctioned for encouraging students to engage in civil disobedience that violates university policies and puts the students at risk of sanction. I would agree that faculty who encourage that students put themselves at risk of punishment while they sit on the sidelines themselves are cowardly, but I disagree that encouraging others to engage in civil disobedience is itself civil disobedience that can or should be sanctioned.

    Regrettably, this is not the first time I have heard university administrators suggest that speech by faculty or other members of the university community should be curtailed if it might generate controversy, provoke a response, or otherwise reflect poorly on the university. (I can also say, from personal experience, that if my university had ever adopted such a position, I would have been among those in the crosshairs.) That there are university administrators—let alone prominent professors such as Dean Bobo—who do not recognize the profound threat such a position poses to academic freedom and the truth-seeking function of a university is both sobering and depressing.

    Jonathan H. Adler

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  • Children’s Cereals: Candy for Breakfast?  | NutritionFacts.org

    Children’s Cereals: Candy for Breakfast?  | NutritionFacts.org

    Plastering front-of-package nutrient claims on cereal boxes is an attempt to distract us from the incongruity of feeding our children multicolored marshmallows for breakfast.

    The American Medical Association started warning people about excess sugar consumption more than 75 years ago, based in part on our understanding that “sugar supplies nothing in nutrition but calories, and the vitamins provided by other foods are sapped by sugar to liberate these calories.” So, added sugars aren’t just empty calories, but negative nutrition. “Thus, the more added sugars one consumes, the more nutritionally depleted one may become.”

    Given the “totality of publicly available scientific evidence,” the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided to make processed food manufacturers declare “added sugars” on their nutrition labels. The National Yogurt Association was livid and said it “continues to oppose the ‘added sugars’ declaration,” since it needed “‘added sugars’ to increase palatability” of its products. The junk food association questioned the science, whereas the ice cream folks seemed to imply that consumers are too stupid to “understand or know how to use the added sugar declaration,” so it’s better just to leave it off. The world’s biggest cereal company, Kellogg’s, took a similar tact, opposing it so as not “to confuse consumers.” Should the FDA proceed with such labeling against Kellogg’s objections, the cereal giant pressed that “an added sugars declaration…should be communicated as a footnote.” It claimed that its “goal is to provide consumers with useful information so they can make informed choices.” This is from a company that describes its Froot Loops as “packed with delicious fruity taste, fruity aroma, and bright colors.” Keep in mind that Froot Loops has more sugar than a Krispy Kreme doughnut, as you can see in the graph below and at 1:46 in my video Friday Favorites: Kids’ Breakfast Cereals as Nutritional Façade. 

    Froot Loops is more than 40 percent sugar by weight! You can see the cereal box’s Nutrition Facts label below and at 1:50 in my video. 

    The tobacco industry used similar terms, such as “light,” “low,” and “mild” to make its products appear healthier—before it was barred from doing so. “Now sugar interests are fighting similar battles over whether their terminology, including ‘healthy,’ ‘natural,’ ‘naturally sweetened,’ and even ‘lightly sweetened,’ is deceptive to consumers.”

    But if you look at the side of a cereal box, as shown below and at 2:13 in my video, you can see all those vitamins and minerals that have been added. That was one of the ways the cereal companies responded to calls for banning sugary cereals. General Mills defended the likes of Franken Berry, Trix, and Lucky Charms for being fortified with essential vitamins. 

    Sir Grapefellow, I learned, was a “grape-flavored oat cereal” complete with “sweet grape star bits”—that is, marshmallows. Don’t worry. It was “vitamin charged!” You can see that cereal box below and at 2:31 in my video. 

    Sugary breakfast cereals, said Dr. Jean Mayer from Harvard, “are not a complete food even if fortified with eight or 10 vitamins.” Senator McGovern replied, “I think your point is well taken that these products may be mislabeled or more correctly called candy vitamins than cereals.” 

    Plastering nutrient claims on cereal boxes can create “a ‘nutritional façade’ around a product, acting to distract attention away” from unsavory qualities, such as excess sugar content. Researchers found that the “majority of parents misinterpreted the meaning of claims commonly used on children’s cereals,” raising significant public health concerns. Ironically, cereal boxes bearing low-calorie claims were found to have more calories on average than those without such a claim. The cereal doth protest too much. 

    Even candy bar companies are getting in on the action, bragging about protein content because of some peanuts. Like the Baby Ruth, a candy bar that has 50 grams of sugar. Froot Loops could be considered breakfast candy, as the same serving would have 40 sugar grams, as you can see below and at 3:45 in my video. 

    Given that “research suggests that consumers believe front-of-package claims, perceive them to be government-endorsed, and use them to ignore the Nutrition Facts Panel,” there’s been a call from nutrition professionals to consider “an outright ban on all front-of-package claims.” The industry’s short-lived “Smart Choices” label, as you can see below and at 4:13 in my video, was met with disbelief when it was found adorning qualifying cereals like Froot Loops and Cookie Crisp. The processed food industry spent more than a billion dollars lobbying against the adoption of more informative labeling (a traffic-light approach), “opposing most aggressively the use of a red light suggesting that any food was too high in anything.” 

    I was invited to testify as an expert witness in a case against sugary cereal companies. (I donated my fee, of course.) Check out the related posts below for a video series and blogs that are a result of some of the research I did. 

    You may also be interested in videos and blogs on the food industry; see related posts below.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Is All Vegan Food Healthy?  | NutritionFacts.org

    Is All Vegan Food Healthy?  | NutritionFacts.org

    How do healthier plant-based diets compare to unhealthy plant foods and animal foods when it comes to diabetes risk? 

    In my video on flexitarians, I discuss how the benefits of eating a plant-based diet are not all-or-nothing. “Simple advice to increase the consumption of plant-derived foods with compensatory [parallel] reductions in the consumption of foods from animal sources confers a survival advantage”— a live-longer advantage. The researchers call it a “pro-vegetarian” eating pattern, one that’s moving in the direction of vegetarianism, “a more gradual and gentle approach.” 

    If you’re dealing with a serious disease, though, like diabetes, completely “avoiding some problem foods is easier than attempting to moderate their intake. Clinicians would never tell an alcoholic to try to simply cut down on alcohol. Avoiding alcohol entirely is more effective and, in fact, easier for a problem drinker…Paradoxically, asking patients to make a large change may be more effective than making a slow transition. Diet studies show that recommending more significant changes increases the chances that patients can accomplish [them]. It may help to replace the common advice, ‘all things in moderation’ with ‘big changes beget big results.’ Success breeds success. After a few days or weeks of major dietary changes, patients are likely to see improvements in weight and blood glucose [sugar] levels—improvements that reinforce the dietary changes that elicited them. Furthermore, they may enjoy other health benefits of a plant-based diet” that may give them further motivation. 

    As you can see below and at 1:43 in my video Friday Favorites: Is Vegan Food Always Healthy?, those who choose to eat plant-based for their health say it’s mostly for “general wellness or general disease prevention” or to improve their energy levels or immune function, for example. 

    They felt it gives them a sense of control over their health, helps them feel better emotionally, improves their overall health, makes them feel better, and more, as shown below and at 1:48. Most felt it was very important for maintaining their health and well-being. 

    For the minority who used it for a specific health problem, mostly high cholesterol or weight loss, followed by high blood pressure and diabetes, most reported they felt it helped a great deal, as you can see below and at 2:14. 

    Some choose plant-based diets for other reasons, such as animal welfare or global warming, and it looks like “ethical vegans” are more likely to eat sugary and fatty foods, like vegan donuts, compared to those eating plant-based because of religious or health concerns, as you can see below and at 2:26 in my video. 

    The veganest vegan could make an egg- and dairy-free cake, covered with frosting, marshmallow fluff, and chocolate syrup, topped with Oreos, and served with a side of Doritos. Or, they may want fruit for dessert, but in the form of Pop-Tarts and Krispy Kreme pies. Vegan, yes. Healthy, no. 

    “Plant-based diets have been recommended to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes (T2D). However, not all plant foods are necessarily beneficial.” In the pro-vegetarian scoring system I mentioned above, you get points for eating potato chips and French fries because they are technically plant-based, as you can see below and at 3:07 in my video, but Harvard researchers wanted to examine the association of not only an overall plant-based diet, but healthy and unhealthy versions. So, they created the same kind of pro-vegetarian scoring system, but it was weighted towards any sort of plant-based foods and against animal foods; then, they created a healthful plant-based diet index, where at least some whole plant foods took precedence and Coca-Cola and other sweetened beverages were no longer considered plants. Lastly, they created an unhealthful plant-based diet index by assigning positive scores to processed plant-based junk and negative scores for healthier plant foods and animal foods. 

    Their findings? As you can see below and at 3:51 in my video, a more plant-based diet, in general, was good for reducing diabetes risk, but eating especially healthy plant-based foods did better, nearly cutting risk in half, while those eating more unhealthy plant foods did worse, as shown in the graph below and at 4:03.

    Now, is that because they were also eating more animal foods? People often eat burgers with their fries, so the researchers separated the effects of healthy plant foods, less healthy plant foods, and animal foods on diabetes risk. And, they found that healthy plant foods were protectively associated, animal foods were detrimentally associated, and less healthy plant foods were more neutral when it came to diabetes risk. Below and at 4:32 in my video, you can see the graph that shows higher diabetes risk with more and more animal foods, no protection whatsoever with junky plant foods, and lower and lower diabetes risk associated with more and more healthy whole plant foods in the diet. So, they concluded that, yes, “plant-based diets…are associated with substantially lower risk of developing T2D.” However, it may not be enough to just lower the intake of animal foods; consumption of less healthy plant foods may need to decrease, too. 

    As a physician, labels like vegetarian and vegan just tell me what you don’t eat, but there are a lot of unhealthy vegetarian fare like French fries, potato chips, and soda pop. That’s why I prefer the term whole food and plant-based nutrition. That tells me what you do eat—a diet centered around the healthiest foods out there. 

    The video I mentioned is Do Flexitarians Live Longer?. 

    You may also be interested in some of my past popular videos and blogs on plant-based diets. Check related posts below. 

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Circadian Rhythms and Our Health and Weight  | NutritionFacts.org

    Circadian Rhythms and Our Health and Weight  | NutritionFacts.org

    Given the power of chronotherapy—how the same dose of the same drugs taken at a different time of day can have such different effects—it’s no surprise that chronoprevention approaches, like meal timing, can also make a difference.

    The 2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded for “elucidating molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock,” our internal clock. For billions of years, life on Earth evolved to a 24-hour cycle of light and dark, so it’s no surprise our bodies are finely tuned to that pattern. But, even when we’re in total darkness without any external time cues, our body continues to cycle in about a 24-hour circadian rhythm. You can even take tissue biopsies from people and show the cells continue to cycle outside the body in a petri dish. Nearly every tissue and organ in our body has its internal clock.

    An intricate system of intrinsic clocks drives not only some of our behavioral patterns, such as eating, fasting, sleeping, and wakefulness, but it also drives our internal physiology—our “body temperature, blood pressure, hormone production, digestion, and immune activity.” Most of the genes in our body “exhibit daily fluctuations in expression levels, making the circadian expression rhythms the largest known regulatory network in normal physiology,” the biggest regulatory system in our body. This cycling is thought to allow for a level of “‘predictability’ and ‘functional division of labor’” so that each of our body processes can run at the best time. At night while we’re sleeping, a whole array of internal housekeeping activities can be switched on, for example, and as dawn approaches, our body can shift back into activity mode.

    Anyone who’s ever had jet lag knows what throwing off our cycle by even just a few hours can do, but now we know our circadian rhythms can be the difference between life and death. A study of more than 14,000 self-poisonings found that those who tried committing suicide in the morning were more than twice as likely to die than those who ingested the same dose in the evening. In the same vein, properly timed chemotherapy can not only end up being five times less toxic but also twice as effective against cancer. The same drugs, at the same dose, but with different effects depending on the time they’re given. Our body absorbs, distributes, metabolizes, and eliminates what we ingest differently, depending on when it is during the 24-hour cycle, as you can see below and at 2:19 in my video Chronobiology: How Circadian Rhythms Can Control Your Health and Weight. 

    We’re just beginning to figure out the optimal timing for different medications. Randomize people suffering from hypertension into taking their blood pressure pills at bedtime instead of in the morning, and not only does the bedtime group achieve better blood pressure control and suffer fewer heart attacks and strokes, but they cut their risk of death in half. (Yet, most physicians and pharmacists tell patients to take them in the morning, potentially doubling their risk of death.) If chronotherapy—the optimal timing of drugs—can have such an impact, maybe it should come as no surprise that chronoprevention—the scheduling of lifestyle interventions like mealtimes—can also make a difference.

    In the official Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics position paper on effective treatments for obesity, importance is placed not only on the quantity but also on the timing of caloric intake. “Potentially consuming more energy [calories] earlier in the day, rather than later in the day, can assist with weight management.” Some have gone further and even characterized obesity as a “chronobiological illness.” What evidence do we have to back up these kinds of claims?

    Well, the “timing of energy [caloric] and nutrient intake has shifted slightly over time, with a greater proportion of intake later in the day,” raising the question about a possible role in the rise of obesity. Middle-aged men and women who eat a greater share of daily calories in the morning do seem to gain less weight over time, and a study entitled “Timing of Food Intake Predicts Weight Loss Effectiveness” found that dieters eating their main meal earlier in the day seemed to steadily lose more weight than those eating their main meal later, as you can see in the graph below and at 4:12 in my video. 

    The obvious explanation for these findings would just be that those who eat later also tend to eat more. And, indeed, there does seem to be a relationship between when people eat most of their calories and how many calories they end up eating over the entire day, with those eating a greater proportion in the morning eating less overall. Maybe later eaters are overeating junk on the couch watching primetime TV? A tendency has been found for night owls to consume more fast food and soda, and fewer fruits and vegetables. In the field of social psychology, there is a controversial concept called “ego depletion,” where self-control is viewed as a limited resource, like a muscle that can become fatigued from overuse. As the day wears on, the ability to resist unhealthy food choices may decline, leaving one vulnerable to temptation. So, is it just a matter of later eating leading to greater eating?

    In the study I mentioned above where earlier eaters steadily lost more weight, to the researchers’ surprise, the early eaters ate as much as the late eaters, despite the difference in weight-loss magnitude. By the end of the 20-week study, the early eaters ended up about five pounds lighter than the late eaters, even though the two groups ate the same amount of food. There didn’t seem to be any difference in physical activity between the two groups either. Could it be that just the timing itself of caloric intake matters? Scientists decided to put it to the test, which we’ll cover next.

    Wasn’t that chemo data wild?

    If you are on blood pressure medications, please share this video with your physician and ask if your timing is optimized.

    We kicked off this chronobiology series by looking into the importance of breakfast when it comes to weight loss. In case you missed those videos, see Friday Favorites: Is Breakfast the Most Important Meal for Weight Loss, or Should It Be Skipped?.

    For more on this topic, check out the related posts below.

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin calls Harvard students

    Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin calls Harvard students


    Billionaire Ken Griffin, who has donated over $500 million to Harvard University, said he’s stopped giving money to the Ivy League college because he believes the school is “lost in the wilderness” and has veered from its “the roots of educating American children.”

    Griffin, who made the comments at a conference hosted by the Managed Funds Association in Miami on Tuesday, also aimed his criticism at students at Harvard and other elite colleges, calling them “whiny snowflakes.” Griffin, founder and CEO of hedge fund Citadel, is worth almost $37 billion, making him the 35th richest person in the world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

    Griffin’s comments come amid a furious public debate over the handling of antisemitism on college campuses since the start of the Israel-Hamas war. Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned from her post earlier this month after drawing criticism for her December congressional testimony on the university’s response to rising antisemitism on campus, as well as allegations of plagiarism in her academic work. 

    “Are we going to educate the future members of the House and Senate and the leaders of IBM? Or are we going to educate a group of young men and women who are caught up in a rhetoric of oppressor and oppressee and, ‘This is not fair,’ and just frankly whiny snowflakes?” Griffin said at the conference. “Where are we going with elite education in schools in America?”

    Key Speakers at Day Two of the Bloomberg New Economy Forum
    Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of hedge fund Citadel, during the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Singapore on Thursday, Nov. 9, 2023. 

    Lionel Ng/Bloomberg via Getty Images


    Harvard didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

    The December congressional hearing also led to the resignation of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, who testified along with Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth. The three college leaders drew fire for what critics said was their failure to clearly state whether calls for genocide against Jewish people would violate their schools’ policies.

    Griffin, who graduated from Harvard in 1989 with a degree in economics, said Tuesday he would like to restart his donations to his alma mater, but noted that it depends on whether the university returns to what he sees as its basic mission.


    3 top college leaders under fire after congressional hearing on campus antisemitism

    02:47

    “Until Harvard makes it clear they are going to resume their role of educators of young American men and women to be leaders, to be problems solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution,” he said.

    Griffin isn’t the only wealth Harvard alum to take issue with its student body and leadership. In October, billionaire hedge fund investor CEO Bill Ackman called on the school to disclose the names of students who belong to organizations that signed a statement blaming Israel for the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli citizens. Ackman said in a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), that he wants to make sure never to “inadvertently hire any of their members.”

    Aimee Picchi

    Aimee Picchi is the associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch, where she covers business and personal finance. She previously worked at Bloomberg News and has written for national news outlets including USA Today and Consumer Reports.





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  • Hedge Fund Billionaire Who Recently Donated $300 Million to Harvard Says It’s Now Full of “Whiny Snowflakes,” and His Checkbook Is Closed

    Hedge Fund Billionaire Who Recently Donated $300 Million to Harvard Says It’s Now Full of “Whiny Snowflakes,” and His Checkbook Is Closed


    Last April, as in just nine months ago, hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin donated a staggering $300 million to Harvard University, the school he graduated from in 1989. At the time, Griffin called the school a “great institution,” saying Harvard was “committed to advancing ideas that will shape humanity’s future, while providing important insight into our past.” But fast-forward nine months, and the university, according to Griffin, has gone completely off the rails; its students have become “whiny snowflakes,” he says, and he wants nothing to do with the place unless it shapes up.

    Speaking at a conference in Miami on Tuesday, Griffin, who has a net worth of $36.8 billion, said “America’s elite universities” are “lost in the wilderness of microaggressions [and] a DEI agenda that seems to have no real endgame.” He added that they are overrun with “young men and women who are just caught up in the rhetoric of oppressor and oppressee, and ‘this is not fair,’ and frankly just, like, whiny snowflakes.” When asked where he stood on giving Harvard more money, he declared: “Until Harvard makes it very clear that they’re going to resume their role [of] educating young American men and women to be leaders, to be problem solvers, to take on difficult issues, I’m not interested in supporting the institution.”

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    Griffin has given more than $500 million to the university in total, and after last year’s nine-figure gift, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences was renamed the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in his honor. Griffin has not said if he will ask for his name to be removed in protest of the school having apparently lost its way.

    Griffin is not the only Harvard donor to temporarily close his checkbook to the school in recent months. A number of other billionaires have done the same, including one who has gone scorched-earth on the place.

    Checking in with Fox Business

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    That’s absurd…but basically, yes

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    Elsewhere!

    A Second Trump Term Could End Abortion Access as We Know It

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    Bess Levin

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  • Putting the Benefits of Fasting for Weight Loss to the Test  | NutritionFacts.org

    Putting the Benefits of Fasting for Weight Loss to the Test  | NutritionFacts.org

    For more than a century, fasting has been used as a weight-loss treatment.

    I’ve talked about the benefits of caloric restriction. Well, the greatest caloric restriction is getting no calories at all. Fasting has been branded “the next big weight loss fad,” but it has a long history throughout various spiritual traditions, practiced by Moses, Jesus, Muhammed, and Buddha. In 1732, a noted physician wrote, “He that eats till he is sick must fast till he is well.” About one in seven American adults today report taking that advice, “using fasting as a means to control body weight,” as I discuss in my video Benefits of Fasting for Weight Loss Put to the Test. 
     
    Case reports of the treatment of obesity through fasting date back more than a century in the medical literature. In 1915, two Harvard doctors indelicately described “two extraordinarily fat women,” one of whom “was a veritable pork barrel.” Their success led them to conclude that “successive moderate periods of starvation constitute a perfectly safe, harmless, and effective method for reducing the weight of those suffering from obesity.” 
     
    The longest-recorded fast, published in 1973, made it into the Guinness Book of World Records. To reach his ideal body weight, a 27-year-old man fasted for 382 days straight, losing 276 pounds, and managed to keep nearly all of it off. He was given vitamin and mineral supplements so he wouldn’t die, but no calories for more than a year. In the researchers’ acknowledgments, they thanked him “for his cheerful co-operation and steadfast application to the task of achieving a normal physique.” 
     
    In a U.S. Air Force study, more than 20 individuals at least 100 pounds overweight and most “unable to lose weight on previous diets” were fasted for as long as 84 days. Nine dropped out of the study, but the 16 who remained “were unequivocally successful” at losing 40 to 100 pounds. In the first four days, the subjects were noted as losing as much as four pounds a day, which “probably represents mostly fluid,” mostly water weight as the body starts to adapt. But, after a few weeks, they were steadily losing about a pound a day of mostly straight fat. The investigator described the starvation program as “a dramatic and exciting treatment for obesity.” 
     
    Of course, the single most successful diet for weight loss—namely no diet at all—is also the single least sustainable. What other diet can cure morbid obesity in a matter of months but practically be guaranteed to kill you within a year if you stick with it? The reason diets don’t work, almost by definition, is that people go on them, then they go off of them. Permanent weight loss is only achieved through permanent lifestyle change. So, what’s the point of fasting if you’re just going to go back to your regular diet and gain right back all of that lost weight? 
     
    Fasting proponents cite the psychological benefit of realigning people’s perceptions and motivation. Some individuals have resigned themselves to the belief that weight loss for them is somehow impossible. They may think “that they are ‘made differently’ from those of normal weight” in some way, and no matter what they do, the pounds don’t come off. But the rapid, unequivocal weight loss during fasting demonstrates to them that with a large enough change in eating habits, it’s not just possible, but inevitable. This morale boost may then embolden them to make better food choices once they resume eating. 
     
    The break from food may allow some an opportunity “to pause and reflect” on the role food is playing in their lives—not only the power it has over them but the power they have over it. In a fasting study entitled “Correction and Control of Intractable Obesity,” a patient’s personality was described as changing “from one of desperation, with abandonment of hope, to that of an eager extravert full of plans for a promising future.” She realized that her weight was within her own power to control. The researchers concluded: “This highly intellectual social worker has been returned to a full degree of exceptional usefulness.” 
     
    After a fast, newfound commitment to more healthful eating may be facilitated by a reduction in overall appetite reported post-fast, compared to pre-fast, at least temporarily. Even during a fast, hunger may start to dissipate within the first 36 hours. So, challenging people’s delusions about their exceptionality to the laws of physics—thinking they are “made differently”—with “short periods of total fasting may seem barbaric. In reality, this method of weight reduction is remarkably well tolerated by obese patients.” That seems to be a recurring theme in these published series of cases. In the influential paper “Treatment of Obesity by Total Fasting for up to 249 Days,” the researchers remarked that the “most surprising aspect of this study was the ease with which the prolonged fast was tolerated.” All of their patients “spontaneously commented on their increased sense of well-being, and in some, this amounted to frank euphoria.” They continued that, although “treatment by total fasting must only be prescribed under close medical supervision,” they “are convinced that it is the treatment of choice, certainly in cases of gross obesity.” 
     
    Fasting for a day can make people irritable and feel moody and distracted, but after a few days of fasting, many report feeling clear, elated, and alert—even euphoric. This may be in part due to the significant rise in endorphins that accompanies fasting, as you can see in the graph below and at 5:48 in my video. Mood enhancement during fasting is thought to perhaps represent an adaptive survival mechanism to motivate the food search. This positive outlook towards the future may then facilitate the behavioral change necessary to lock in some of the weight-loss benefits. 

    Is that what happens, though? Is fasting actually effective over the long term? There are articles with titles like “Death During Therapeutic Starvation for Obesity.” Is fasting even safe? We’ll find out next. 
     
    This is the sixth in a 14-part series on fasting for weight loss. In case you missed any of the others, see the related videos below. 

    My book How Not to Diet is all about weight loss. You can learn more about it and order it here. 

    Michael Greger M.D. FACLM

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  • Bill Ackman Claims Martin Luther King Jr. Would Have Been Against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—And Yes, He Was Serious

    Bill Ackman Claims Martin Luther King Jr. Would Have Been Against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—And Yes, He Was Serious

    Billionaire Bill Ackman, who’s been in the news a lot of late thanks to his quest to oust former Harvard president Claudine Gay, spent part of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in a conversation on X with Democratic presidential candidate Dean Phillips and X owner Elon Musk. The big takeaway from that chat? That Ackman believes King—who was, quite famously, against racism—would have hated diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that have been implemented in schools and businesses.

    Yes, according to the hedge fund manager, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is “precisely about a world where people will be judged not by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. And when I came to learn about the DEI movement, which is an ideological movement, it’s really the reverse of that…I think Dr. King would be very opposed to this sort of ideology, even though you know, diversity is a good thing, even though of course, a culture where everyone feels comfortable and included is critically important.”

    Ackman—who claimed earlier this month that DEI initiatives are “racist,” that he’s worried about “reverse racism,” and that DEI is “a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large” and must be stopped—is of course not the first person to cherry-pick a single line from King’s most famous speech and argue that it is proof the civil rights leader was calling for color blindness. In fact, King’s words are regularly co-opted by the right* to do exactly that.

    Earlier this month, then GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy tried to argue that King would not have approved of critical race theory or DEI efforts. In 2021, while promoting Florida’s Stop Woke Act, which prohibits public schools and businesses from discussing race and racism in a way certain white people don’t like, Ron DeSantis boldly suggested MLK Jr. would be all for it, saying, “You think about what MLK stood for. He said he didn’t want people judged on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character. You listen to some of these people nowadays, they don’t talk about that.” The same year, then GOP lawmaker Kevin McCarthy tweeted, in all seriousness, “Critical Race Theory goes against everything Martin Luther King Jr. taught us.”

    Unfortunately for the individuals invoking King’s words to fit their worldview, his own daughter has said he would absolutely not be on their side. “People using ‘not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character’ to deter discussion of, teaching about, and protest against racism are not students of the comprehensive #MLK,” Bernice King wrote on X just a few months ago. “My father’s dream and work included eradicating racism, not ignoring it.” As Reverend William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign told Axios, King “said to us that we must address fully systemic racism, systemic poverty, ecological devastation, and militarism. It’s dishonoring of the memory of King not to raise that full critique, no matter how unnerving, unsettling or uncomfortable it is.” And, in a revelation that those committed to the “MLK Jr. would have been against DEI initiatives” bit will very much not be pleased to hear, reporter Judd Legum noted on Monday that in 1965, King was asked if he supported “a multibillion-dollar program of preferential treatment for the Negro.” He responded: “I do indeed.”

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    *Ackman has historically supported Democrats but said last week he no longer wants to associate with the party. He also said Saturday he would give $1 million to a political action committee supporting Democratic primary hopeful Dean Phillips.

    Bess Levin

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  • Did Harvard's plagiarism scandal doom DEI?

    Did Harvard's plagiarism scandal doom DEI?

    Aaron Sibarium, a staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, whose work has been widely credited for exposing the plagiarism of former Harvard President Claudine Gay, joins Reason‘s Zach Weissmueller and Liz Wolfe on the latest episode of Just Asking Questions to discuss Gay’s downfall, as well as its implications for the Ivy League; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and writers and thinkers of all kinds who can now have their work subjected to AI-powered plagiarism detection.

    Watch the full conversation on Reason‘s YouTube channel or on the Just Asking Questions podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcatcher.

    Sources referenced in this conversation:

    “Harvard President Claudine Gay Hit With Six New Charges Of Plagiarism,” Washington Free Beacon

    “Excerpts From Dr. Claudine Gay’s Work,” The New York Times

    Bill Ackman on X

    “Claudine Gay: What Just Happened at Harvard Is Bigger Than Me,” The New York Times

    Christopher F. Rufo on X

    Zach Weissmueller

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