Lung Inflammation Smoking Cannabis vs. Cocaine vs. Tobacco

There is unequivocal evidence that regular cannabis smoking causes acute lung inflammation, but what are the long-term consequences?

“There is unequivocal evidence that habitual or regular marijuana smoking is not harmless and causes respiratory symptoms and airway inflammation.” As you can see below and at 0:24 in my video Effects of Smoking Marijuana on the Lungs, if you take biopsies from the airways of those who smoke “cocaine, cannabis, and/or tobacco,” compared to nonsmokers, there is significantly more damage in the lungs of people who smoke, whether cocaine, marijuana, or tobacco. What’s more, the levels of damage seemed comparable, especially between the marijuana smokers and tobacco smokers. This is remarkable since the tobacco smokers were smoking about a pack a day, whereas the marijuana smokers were only smoking about 20 joints a week, rather than 25 cigarettes a day, and those smoking cocaine were just doing a gram or

Read more →

Does Switching from Cannabis Smoking to a Vaporizer Reduce Respiratory Symptoms?

Cannabis vapor has less tar, but may contain more ammonia. What happens to respiratory symptoms when regular users of joints, blunts, pipes, and bongs switch to a vaporizer?

There are many ways people inhale marijuana, but most smoke it in a bowl, pipe, joint, or bong. This is concerning, since, in many ways, smoke is smoke, and using “devices with water filters, like bongs and hookahs,” doesn’t help in terms of the tar exposure. As I discuss in my video Smoking Marijuana vs. Using a Cannabis Vaporizer, where there’s fire, there’s smoke, and where there’s smoke, there are inflammatory irritants. In fact, the “regular smoking of cannabis…is associated with significant airway inflammation that is similar in frequency, type, and magnitude to that observed in the lungs of tobacco [cigarette] smokers,” which can result in prolonged respiratory symptoms, such as chronic coughing, excess sputum production, wheezing, and shortness of breath,

Read more →

EMF Sensitivity Put to the Test

There have been at least 46 studies involving more than a thousand people to see if those suffering from electrosensitivity are deluding themselves.

“During the past decade a wide range of symptoms has been reported to be triggered by exposure to RF-EMF,” the radiofrequency electromagnetic fields that emanate from cell phones during use, including headaches, nausea, dizziness, and fatigue. The news media has been promoting this as “a new medical condition, called electrosensitivity, or electromagnetic hypersensitivity.” These stories have been driven, in part, by “people who claim to have detected a clear link between their own poor health and exposure to a specific electrical device,” which “can have major implications for a person’s quality of life and is associated with decrements in general health status, increased levels of health service use, and impairments in occupational and social functioning.”

As you can see below and at 0:50 in my video

Read more →

How to Handle Raw Poultry

Poultry is the most common cause of serious food-poisoning outbreaks, followed by fish, then beef. But aren’t people more likely to order their burgers rarer than their chicken sandwiches? The primary location where outbreaks occur is the home, not restaurants.

In 2017, a study of more than a thousand food-poisoning outbreaks determined that poultry, specifically chicken, was the most common culprit, “highlight[ing] the role of poultry as a major source of foodborne outbreaks in the United States.” Fish was the second “most frequently reported food category,” and beef was third. But aren’t people more likely to order rare burgers than rare chicken sandwiches? Yes. The biggest problem with poultry isn’t “inadequate cooking,” but “food-handling errors,” both at home and in the grocery store.

As I discuss in my video How to Shop for, Handle, and Store Chicken, a “shop-along observational study was conducted to determine actual shopping, transportation, and

Read more →

Paper-Filtered Coffee and Cholesterol | NutritionFacts.org

New data suggest even paper-filtered coffee may raise “bad” LDL cholesterol.

In my video from more than a decade ago called Is Coffee Bad for You?, I explained that the “cholesterol-raising factor from…coffee does not pass [through] a paper filter.” As I discuss in my recent video Does Coffee Affect Cholesterol?, if you give people French press coffee, which is filtered but without paper, their cholesterol starts swelling up within just two weeks, as you can see below and at 0:22 in the video. But, if you switch them to paper-filtered coffee, their cholesterol comes right back down. It’s the same amount of coffee, just prepared differently.

The cholesterol-raising factor from coffee beans has since been identified as the fatty substances in the oil within coffee beans. One reason it took us so long to figure that out is that they didn’t raise cholesterol in rats, hamsters,

Read more →