A doctor says that taking just four teaspoons of coconut oil per day reversed her husband's dementia.

Mary Newport is the medical director of the neonatal intensive care unit of Spring Hill Regional Hospital in Florida. In 2003, her husband Steve began showing symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.

"The symptoms of Alzheimer's disease are progressive mental deterioration characterized by an inability to carry out daily activities, a loss of cognitive functions, and a loss of memory functions," writes Tom Bohager in his book Everything You Need to Know About Enzymes.

Alzheimer's disease is fatal, and has no cure. The various drugs on the market have shown only limited effectiveness at slowing the progression of the disease. Indeed, Newport's husband continued to worsen even after being prescribed three different drugs.

Conventional Wisdom always gets an eyebrow raise from me. I can't help it. Eventually, I take an honest look at whatever the experts are saying, but skepticism gets first dibs. I'd call it an instinct if it weren't learned behavior from years of being burned. For example, I once took to task the most pervasive "truth" around: that everyone needs to drink eight glasses of water a day or risk kidney failure, toxin buildup, bladder cancer, and debilitating constipation. It was pretty easy to do.

But it's not all BS. Smoking is bad for you, for example. See? I can admit when they're right!

I wonder about the CW position on sleep, though. We generally agree on the recommended duration of sleep. "About eight solid hours" is what you'll see everywhere, from official governmental health guides to paleo nutrition blogs (I'm sure there's some niche community out there claiming to have "transcended" sleep, though). I'm not going to argue with around eight hours, but note the use of "solid." What does it connote?

Unbroken. Monophasic. Constant. Actually, it both connotes and denotes these things. Solid sleep is good sleep, right? And solid sleep means sleeping for about eight hours without waking. If you wake up, you've got a problem. Right?

Maybe not.

Excessive Pills, Overtreatment, May Do More Harm Than Good

With a few exceptions, when physicians talk, they recommend. Take this. Try that. They satisfy the expectation that automatically comes with a patient's visit or phone call. The physician is compelled to make a recommendation -- a pill, a device or a procedure. Both the physician and medical supplier financially benefit. But is your doctor's advice always in your best interest?

Not always.

In a 2000 JAMA publication, Julie Magno Zito of the University of Maryland and her coauthors stated that there had been an explosion in psychotropic prescriptions for pre-schoolers without adequate safety and long-term studies and generally without FDA approvals.

Dr. Joseph Coyle of Harvard Medical School editorialized on this "troubling change in practice."

A recent study accepted for publication in Endocrinology, a publication of The Endocrine Society, reports for the first time that maternal fructose intake during pregnancy results in sex-specific changes in fetal and neonatal endocrinology.

Fructose is a simple sugar found naturally in honey, fruit and some vegetables. Diets high in dietary fructose, particularly due to calorically sweetened beverages, are now increasingly common and have been shown to be detrimental to the regulation of energy intake and body adiposity. With the increasing prevalence of maternal obesity and its association with gestational diabetes, there has been growing interest in maternal nutrition on the risk of childhood and adult disease in the offspring.

Last week, my post on the "Myriad Benefits of Intermittent Fasting" opened up a can of worms. In it I discussed how fasting can have a positive impact on human longevity, blood lipids, diet compliance and neurological health to name just a few of the potential health benefits. Naturally, many readers wondered if they've been missing the boat on IFing, and whether they should start skipping breakfast, lunch and dinner ASAP. In fact, who needs food anymore when you have IF! Not so fast.

Fasting can be an effective lifestyle hack, but is it right for everyone?

Not exactly. Not always. In other words, no. Let's take a closer look.

Intermittent fasting is a tool that can be used - or misused - in the pursuit of health. As Keith Norris might put it, it's something to add to the quiver. A tool to be drawn upon when the time is right. You know what? Let's extend this archery metaphor, possibly to the breaking point (a skill I'm well-known for). Let's go ahead and butcher Keith's neat and tidy and effective metaphor with a look at a fictional monster-hunting archer with a quiver full of specially designed arrows. This monster-hunting archer, if he's any good at what he does (and I'm going to assume that he is well-versed in classical monster lore, including weak points and monster food allergies and heavy metal sensitivities), is going to pick and choose which arrows - which tools - to draw from the quiver based on the context of the situation. Now, does this archer reach for any old arrow when faced with, say, a vampire? No, he goes for the wood-tipped garlic-laced arrow. He's not going to waste the silver-tipped arrow on the common henchman (being a soft metal, it might not even pierce the armor, let alone kill the guy). He'll save it for the werewolf. The metaphor is probably mangled beyond recognition now, but my point (shakily) stands: IF is a tool to be used in the right context. Zombies, for example, are particularly vulnerable to fasting because their satiety hormones are all out of whack.

Today's edition of Monday Musings is a quick account of two recent studies that highlight actual, literal threats to the fruitfulness and productivity of the human male loin. For years, the average male sperm count has been decreasing, especially in Western industrialized nations, by about 1% to 2% per year. Globally, of course, populations have been increasing, so sperm is successful by playing the numbers game, but we're worried about the individual. We're concerned with per capita sperm count. And it's been dropping.

But why?

For candidate number one, let's look to the bones. Bones, as you know, are active, living organs rather than passive inert structures. They grow (in response to a complex soup of hormonal messaging), they densify (in response to weight-bearing activity), they even atrophy (in response to a lack of weight-bearing activity and/or gravity). The primary regulators of bone growth and function are the sexual organs, which manufacture testosterone and estrogen, the hormones with a big effect on bone structure, but new mouse research is showing that it's a two-way street: osteocalcin, a hormone produced by bone osteoblasts, induces the testicles to produce testosterone (link). Male mice dads with low osteocalcin levels produced smaller, less frequent litters than male mice with normal levels of osteocalcin, who had larger litters and more of them. The tiny mice testicles actually carried a heretofore undiscovered osteocalcin receptor; we human males carry the same receptor in our testicles, so it's likely that osteocalcin plays a similar role in human male fertility. You'd better take your osteocalcin supplements, fellas!

Sodium lauryl sulfate is an effective degreaser used to clean oil stains from the floor of my mechanic's repair shop; what's it doing in my toothpaste and my daughter's bubble bath? And, why is the long-known carcinogen nitrosamine, banned in Canada and the European Union, still a common ingredient in my mascara, concealer, sunless tanning lotion and baby shampoo?

The simple answer is that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration still doesn't bother to regulate anything it dismisses as cosmetics -- any products used topically - despite the growing science showing how easily poisons and pollutants can be absorbed through the skin. Since the 1930s, the only thing the FDA regulates is the accuracy of the labeling on cosmetics.

As long as manufacturers list in gory detail the witches' brew of industrial chemicals, heavy metals, and toxic substances they blend into your eye cream or face wash, they are free to dump whatever they want into your epidermis.

All disease begins in the gut. - Hippocrates

Hippocrates said this more than 2,000 years ago, but we're only now coming to understand just how right he was. Research over the past two decades has revealed that gut health is critical to overall health, and that an unhealthy gut contributes to a wide range of diseases including diabetes, obesity, rheumatoid arthritis, autism spectrum disorder, depression and chronic fatigue syndrome.

In fact, many researchers (including myself) believe that supporting intestinal health and restoring the integrity of the gut barrier will be one of the most important goals of medicine in the 21st century.

There are two closely related variables that determine our gut health: the intestinal microbiota, or "gut flora", and the gut barrier. Let's discuss each of them in turn.

The gut flora: a healthy garden needs healthy soil

Our gut is home to approximately 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) microorganisms. That's such a big number our human brains can't really comprehend it. One trillion dollar bills laid end-to-end would stretch from the earth to the sun - and back - with a lot of miles to spare. Do that 100 times and you start to get at least a vague idea of how much 100 trillion is.

The human gut contains 10 times more bacteria than all the human cells in the entire body, with over 400 known diverse bacterial species. In fact, you could say that we're more bacterial than we are human. Think about that one for a minute.

We've only recently begun to understand the extent of the gut flora's role in human health and disease. Among other things, the gut flora promotes normal gastrointestinal function, provides protection from infection, regulates metabolism and comprises more than 75% of our immune system. Dysregulated gut flora has been linked to diseases ranging from autism and depression to autoimmune conditions like Hashimoto's, inflammatory bowel disease and type 1 diabetes.

Unfortunately, several features of the modern lifestyle directly contribute to unhealthy gut flora:

• Antibiotics and other medications like birth control and NSAIDs
  
• Diets high in refined carbohydrates, sugar and processed foods
  
• Diets low in fermentable fibers
  
• Dietary toxins like wheat and industrial seed oils that cause leaky gut
  
• Chronic stress
  
• Chronic infections

Antibiotics are particularly harmful to the gut flora. Recent studies have shown that antibiotic use causes a profound and rapid loss of diversity and a shift in the composition of the gut flora. This diversity is not recovered after antibiotic use without intervention.

We also know that infants that aren't breast-fed and are born to mothers with bad gut flora are more likely to develop unhealthy gut bacteria, and that these early differences in gut flora may predict overweight, diabetes, eczema/psoriasis, depression and other health problems in the future.

If an individual with heart disease takes cocaine, their chance of having a heart attack increases 26-fold.

If a person with heart disease is exposed to heavy traffic fumes, their chance of having one increases by five per cent.

But because most people are exposed to traffic fumes, and only a small number take cocaine, on a population-wide basis traffic pollution triggers more heart attacks, concluded the Belgian researchers.

Applied to Britain, where there are around 124,000 heart attacks each year, traffic fumes could trigger 9,200 heart attacks, and cocaine around 1,100.

Scientists at Hasselt University and the Catholic University of Leuven, both in Belgium, came to their conclusions after looking at 36 studies.

New York - A groundbreaking study published today by one of the world's leading neuroscientists challenges the longstanding conviction that radiation emitted from cellphones is too weak to have an effect on the brain.

You can think of cellphone saturation as one giant, uncontrolled human experiment. There are now 293 million wireless connections in use in the United States, according to the trade group CTIA-The Wireless Association. And Americans log a staggering 2.26 trillion minutes yakking on those mobile devices every year - all at a time when the biological effects of cellphones remain controversial and the research on those effects often of dubious quality.

A study published today by leading researchers in the premiere medical journal JAMA hasn't found a smoking gun, but it does challenge the longstanding conviction that radiation emitted from cellphones is too weak to have an effect on the brain. It is notable not only for that finding and for appearing in a top journal - it is also turning heads because the lead researcher is Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and one of the world's leading brain scientists.