There is no question that our microbiome is important to health, but just like science behind mitochondrial function inside cells set off an antioxidant craze in the 1970s, all of the applied health claims about probiotics in the 2000s are nonsense. If you enjoy the taste of expensive yogurt buy it, but if there was any chance it was really impacting your trillions of bacteria, it could just as easily be doing harm.

A few years ago I sent an employee to a debate to argue over what was more harmful for your body, the pizza or the pizza box.

I am not kidding. A subset of activists absolutely says with straight faces that a trace chemical in a box is more harmful than getting fat. And now they have gotten Democrats in Congress to demonize over 6,000 forms of PFAS and open up nearly every company in America to lawsuits.

In a Current Treatment Options in Gastroenterology review, a nutritionist and a gastroenterologist claim that "ultra-processed" food causes obesity.

If you are not familiar with ultra-processed food, that is a new-ish designation, an arbitrary metric of numerous things to separate it from regular processed food. All bread made in the last 10,000 years is "processed" food, for example, and 'all food is processed' reality hobbled efforts by integrative medicine/food is medicine proponents to claim our modern lifestyle is killing us, when the science community instead knows it's simply obesity that is the risk factor.

To future scholars, the 2020s may be the decade that the public discovered epidemiologists don't understand the difference between a hazard, absolute risk, and relative risk. And that skepticism in the next decade will have resulted from too many shoddy claims and spurious correlations in this one.

If you are an African-American hypertensive at high risk of developing associated cardiovascular disease, a new paper from Maharishi Institute - where yogic flying instructors get trained to levitate(1) - says Transcendental Meditation will prevent abnormal enlargement of your heart and reduce chronic heart failure.

New survey results in the Journal of Media Psychology find that how much you enjoy or hate the new "Star Wars" movie will depend a lot on your expectations. Nothing shocking in that, but there is a twist.

And the twist is not that the new movie will make a fortune this week no matter what reviewers or the more rabid fringe of the fan base say. That is entirely predictable.