Health & Fitness

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,

My next webinar is on vitamin K. It’s been touted for bone, brain, and heart health, but have vitamin K supplements been shown to help? To complicate matters, there are multiple types of vitamin K: Vitamin K1 is concentrated in greens, and a type of vitamin K2 is found in animal products. Do we need both? Do we have to rely on a healthy microbiome for conversion from one to the other? Do we have to eat a slimy, fermented food called natto? 

Join me for a 60-minute live webinar on October 7 at 2pm ET to learn everything you ever wanted to know about vitamin K.

Key Takeaways: Saturated Fat 

Saturated fat—the kind of fat that is solid at room temperature—is found mostly in animal products like fatty meats and dairy. We’ve known for a long time that saturated fat raises cholesterol, contributing to our number one killer, heart

Is there risk of lead and PPD contamination of red and black henna?

The “average adult uses nine personal care products each day, with 126 unique chemical ingredients.” We used to think that anything applied to the skin would “always remain on the surface of the body,” and the only thing you had to worry about were problems like local skin irritation. But, over recent decades, “it was recognized that some topically applied substances can penetrate into or through human skin” and end up circulating throughout our bodies.

Take the toxic heavy metal lead (Pb), for example. As you can see in the graph below and at 0:38 in my video Is Henna Safe?, to see if lead could be absorbed through the skin into the body, researchers applied lead to a subject’s left arm and then measured the level of lead in the sweat coming off their right

What, if any, are the caveats for tea tree oil use and tips on safe storage?

Is tea tree oil toxic? That’s the topic of my video, Is Tea Tree Oil Safe?. “Anecdotal evidence…suggests that the topical use of the oil is relatively safe, and that adverse events are minor, self-limiting and occasional.” Published data, however, add some caveats: It can be “toxic if ingested in higher doses and can also cause skin irritation at higher concentrations.”

Normally, tea tree oil reduces skin inflammation. Researchers injected histamine into the skin of 27 volunteers, the equivalent of getting bitten by a fire ant. The application of tea tree oil significantly decreased the associated swelling and discoloration—the big, red, swollen mark. As you can see in the graph below and at 0:45 in my video, the swelling and discoloration continues to get worse after application of a placebo oil,

Do the estrogenic effects of tea tree oil get absorbed through the skin?

Concern has been raised about a “possible link between gynecomastia, topical lavender, and tea tree oil.” As I discuss in my video Does Tea Tree Oil Have Hormonal Side Effects?, gynecomastia is the abnormal development of breast tissue. (You can see a photo at 0:14 in my video.) You may recall that I’ve talked about lavender before, but what about tea tree oil?

It all started with a case series published in The New England Journal of Medicine. The researchers described three young boys in whom breast growth “coincided with the topical application of products that contained lavender and tea tree oils.” How do we know the products were to blame? “Gynecomastia resolved in each patient shortly after the use of products containing these oils was discontinued. Furthermore, studies in human cell lines indicated that