In a rare case of political irony, President-elect Trump has just named Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University to head the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After nearly five years of disparaging scientists who disagreed with the policy of Covid lockdowns, the true scientists have emerged.

Allysia Finley, writing for The Wall Street Journal, calls it “the revenge of the Covid lockdown skeptics.” Francis Collins, the NIH chief between 2009-21, derided Dr. Bhattacharya as a “fringe” scientist for urging the government to focus on protecting the vulnerable while letting others go about their lives. Dr. Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, then at Harvard, and Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta formally expounded this idea in the Great Barrington Declaration in October 2020.

It was far from fringe. Tens of thousands of doctors and scientists around the world signed the document. Before the Covid pandemic, the World Health Organization had opposed lockdowns to control disease outbreaks. Yet after the declaration’s publication, Dr. Collins urged a “quick and devastating published take down of its premises” in an email to Anthony Fauci. I was one of those doctors who signed that document.

In a Washington Post interview, Dr. Collins decried the declaration as a “fringe component of epidemiology.” “This is not mainstream science,” he added. “It’s dangerous” and “fits into the political views of certain parts of our confused political establishment.” Dr. Collins had it backward. We all now know this is true.

Lockdowns endangered democracy, the economy and children’s learning. The confused public-health establishment nonetheless embraced them. Mr. Trump initially went along but reversed course after Scott Atlas, a Covid adviser, arranged for Dr. Bhattacharya and other lockdown critics to educate Mr. Trump about the damage. Mr. Trump proved more open-minded than the mainstream experts, who continue to insist that lockdowns and school closings saved lives despite the evidence to the contrary. Such small-minded zealots again showed their authoritarian side by pressuring social-media companies to suppress lockdown contrarians.

Twitter blacklisted Dr. Bhattacharya in 2021 after he tweeted an article he had written on age-based risks, noting that “mass testing is lockdown by stealth.” He was right. Many school districts later dropped their mandatory Covid testing policies because so many kids with mild or no symptoms were forced to stay home.

Finley tells us Dr. Bhattacharya didn’t deliberately court controversy. People who know him describe him as apolitical and unassuming. Over two decades in academia, he published dozens of wonky papers, such as “Provider visit frequency and vascular access interventions in hemodialysis” and “Heterogeneity in healthy aging.”

Two relate to the NIH and help explain the public-health establishment’s lockstep support for lockdowns. Scientists respond to incentives as much as anyone, and they have a strong incentive to follow public-health leaders if they want to advance professionally and win government grants. These incentives evidently can influence scientific judgment.

In a 2018 working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Dr. Bhattacharya raised the question: “Does the NIH fund edge science?” The answer is yes, though less so than in the past. Dr. Bhattacharya found that the NIH increasingly funds researchers who seek to build on more-established ideas rather than those pursuing novel ones.

In a February 2020 paper, Dr. Bhattacharya analyzed why pharmaceutical advances are slowing. The phenomenon has been called Eroom’s law, a reverse spelling of Moore’s law, which observes an acceleration in computer-chip advancements over time. Dr. Bhattacharya concluded that career incentives encouraged “me-too research.” Citations by other scientists “have become the dominant way to evaluate scientific contributions and scientists.” That in turn has shifted research “toward incremental science and away from exploratory projects that are more likely to fail, but which are the fuel for future breakthroughs.”

Might similar incentives explain conformist behavior during Covid? A young scientist without a secure job might have been reluctant to contradict Drs. Collins and Fauci, lest doing so jeopardize NIH funding for her research. Scientific journals rarely published Covid studies with conclusions that ran against the grain. Research echoing the public-health orthodoxy yielded more citations in the press and journals.

Dr. Bhattacharya’s top charge at the NIH will be returning the agency to its original mission of funding innovation rather than political science masquerading as real science. It’s about time the real scientists were in charge; not just those who want to play the system. Too many lives are depending on our scientists to get it right.

Happy Thanksgiving!

In the United States, about one in ten people have diabetes. About 90-95% of those people have Type 2 Diabetes, which means they develop it later in life rather than as children, who are considered Type 1 Diabetics. According to the National Institutes of Health, that amounts to about 38.4 million Americans with Type 2 Diabetes.

That’s a lot of people! But now there is good news for these people. Huey Freeman, writing for The Epoch Times, tells us there is new information that suggests a low carbohydrate diet can make a real difference in their lives.

Freeman says, “Type 2 diabetes patients who went on a low-carbohydrate diet saw their insulin production double, potentially eliminating their need for medication, according to a new study published on October 22 in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism.”

Type 2 diabetes occurs when insulin-producing pancreatic beta cells become less effective. Insulin is needed to regulate blood sugar levels, and when there is not enough being produced, blood sugar levels rise, causing various diseases linked to Type 2 diabetes.

No conventional drug for Type 2 diabetes has been shown to improve beta cells’ immediate insulin secretion. Beta cell function usually declines despite treatment with anti-hyperglycemic agents, the researchers wrote in the study.

“This study shows people with type 2 diabetes on a low-carbohydrate diet can recover their beta-cells, an outcome that cannot be achieved with medication,” Barbara Gower, lead author and professor of nutritional science at the University of Alabama–Birmingham, said in a statement. “People with mild type 2 diabetes who reduce their carbohydrate intake may be able to discontinue medication and enjoy eating meals and snacks that are higher in protein and meet their energy needs.”

Carbohydrates are converted into sugars in the liver. That means a high carbohydrate diet produces more sugar which increases the burden on the pancreas to produce insulin to regulate the levels of sugar in the blood. A low-carb diet reduces the demand on the pancreas to produce insulin, which is in low supply in diabetics.

Insulin Production Doubled

Researchers conducted a randomized clinical trial with 57 Type 2 diabetes patients who weren’t using insulin treatments. The trial was designed to determine whether a change in diet alone would affect the beta cell function in people with Type 2 diabetes.

After discontinuing participants’ medications for one to two weeks, researchers divided participants into two groups: a low-carb group eating 9 percent carbohydrates and 65 percent fat and a high-carb group eating 55 percent carbohydrates and 20 percent fat.

After 12 weeks, participants whose diet was low in carbohydrates experienced a twofold increase in activity in the insulin-producing cells. Those served the higher-carbohydrate meals had a 32 percent increase in beta cell activity.

The researchers concluded that a carbohydrate-restricted diet “has beneficial effects on [beta cell] function in patients with mild [Type 2 diabetes]. ”The new research could be very beneficial for diabetes patients, Dr. Jason Fung, a physician and the author of “The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally,” told The Epoch Times.

“People with Type 2 diabetes need to know that a dietary intervention, reducing carbohydrates, has the potential to reverse their disease without the need for medication,” Fung wrote in an email. While medication can help manage Type 2 diabetes, it cannot reverse the condition on its own, as it does not address its root cause: diet, according to Fung.

Improved Beta Cell Activity May Halt Diabetes Progression

Beta cells’ insulin secretion immediately after meals, known as first-phase secretion, is important in removing excess glucose from the blood.

The researchers noted that inadequate first-phase secretion leads to high blood sugar levels, which initiates the development of Type 2 diabetes. The study showed that low-carb dietary interventions could increase beta cell activity, suggesting that this dietary approach may be able to stop diabetes before it takes hold. “This result reinforces the results of many other studies that showed the same thing: that reducing carbohydrates could reverse Type 2 diabetes,” Fung said.

This is great news for diabetics and for older adults who may yet develop diabetes. This should be very comforting as you prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving!

When I was in college, I took a course in Genetics. I clearly remember a trick question on the mid-term exam: What is a safe level of radiation? The correct answer was zero! There is no such thing as a safe level of radiation.

If you asked most people a similar question about alcohol, they probably would say “One beer, or one glass of wine.” Even the Bible says “No longer drink water exclusively, but use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments.” (I Timothy 5:23)

But George Citroner, writing for The Epoch Times, tells us there is a new study challenging the long-held beliefs about alcohol and brain health. He says, “There may be no safe amount to drink if you want to protect your mind from dementia. Researchers have uncovered evidence that the comforting notion that light to moderate drinking can provide cognitive benefits may not be true. The research directly links alcohol consumption to an increased risk of developing dementia.”

Projected estimates indicate that worldwide, the number of people living with dementia could balloon from more than 57 million in 2019 to nearly 153 million by 2050. This trend points to an urgent need for effective prevention strategies, particularly as research continues to elucidate the complexities of known modifiable risk factors for the condition, such as alcohol consumption. Research published this month in eClinicalMedicine found that increased predicted alcohol consumption based on genetic factors is positively linked with a greater risk of developing dementia among current drinkers.

The findings cast doubt on the idea that any level of alcohol consumption is safe for dementia prevention. While heavy drinking is a well-established risk factor for dementia, whether there is a similar association between light-to-moderate alcohol consumption and dementia has remained a subject of debate.

Past studies often contained biases, such as “abstainer bias” in which nondrinkers tended to be compared with drinkers who may enjoy better health or cognitive function, skewing the results. These analyses sometimes didn’t account for cognitive decline occurring before the study or interactions with pre-existing health conditions.

Claire Sexton, senior director of scientific programs and outreach at the Alzheimer’s Association, told The Epoch Times that there remains some debate regarding the impact of light-to-moderate alcohol consumption. According to Sexton, some studies suggest that “among adults at midlife and older, light to moderate drinking may be associated with lower risk of cognitive decline compared with not drinking.” At the same time, she said, other studies show that “moderate levels of alcohol may be associated with adverse brain outcomes, including lower hippocampal volumes.”

Is there a genetic predisposition to drinking?

The findings of this recent study indicated that individuals possessing genes associated with greater alcohol consumption were more likely to develop dementia, particularly women. According to researchers, this suggests that alcohol may have a direct role in elevating dementia risk, especially among those who consume higher amounts. In men, the risks of alcohol may be masked by other associated risk factors, such as smoking.

The study concluded that a linear relationship exists between alcohol intake and the likelihood of developing dementia, which contradicts prior epidemiological findings suggesting that moderate alcohol intake conferred protective benefits.

“This study reports that higher levels of current alcohol consumption were linked with increased incidence of dementia among current drinkers, and found no ‘safe’ level of alcohol consumption,” Sexton said.

Dr. Asish Gulati, a board-certified neurologist affiliated with George Washington University Hospital in Washington, told The Epoch Times in an email that alcohol can significantly affect brain health, “particularly in areas responsible for memory and cognition.” “Research shows that the hippocampus is particularly vulnerable to alcohol, and even moderate consumption can lead to its shrinkage,” she said.

“Additionally, alcohol use can contribute to overall brain shrinkage and disrupt white matter integrity, which affects brain function.” Gulati said that long-term drinking is associated with various cognitive impairments, including difficulties with learning, memory recall, and executive functioning. “The negative effects of alcohol on brain health are profound, highlighting the importance of moderation and abstinence and awareness of its potential consequences,” she said.

However, ceasing alcohol consumption and adopting a healthy lifestyle can promote recovery. According to Gulati, neurogenesis, or the formation of new neurons, can occur, particularly in the hippocampus, and this can lead to improvements in cognitive functions. “Though complete recovery may not be possible,” she said, “significant benefits can arise from lifestyle changes and abstaining from alcohol.”

“The current study found a positive linear relationship between any level of alcohol consumption and dementia risk,” Gulati said. “While the focus on current drinkers of white British descent may limit the generalizability of the findings, the results underscore the necessity for increased caution regarding any alcohol intake due to its potential detrimental effects on cognitive health.”

Makes you think twice about that beer you were looking forward to drinking!