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I have a piece in the NYT Mag on CBD, or cannabidiol, the molecule from cannabis (AKA marijuana, weed) that has recently become so trendy (CBD enema anyone?). I could see the piece being controversial for any number of reasons — or perhaps not, given the accelerating acceptance of cannabis — but for the moment, my mind keeps returning to a riff in the story that’s probably not controversial at all: the part where I discuss theories on why the cannabis plant produces the cannabi

I have a piece on carbon farming in The New York Times Magazine. It tells the story of the people behind the Marin Carbon Project. A lot ended up on the cutting room floor. At one point, the story was almost 50 percent longer than its current length. So a few things: First, if you want to know more about regenerative agriculture, I highly recommend David Montgomery’s book Growing A Revolution. And if you’re interested in the bigger question of how civilizations have dealt with the inevitable dec

I have a piece in the NYT Mag on the community of people who self-treat with parasites. They operate almost entirely outside of any regulatory or medical oversight. This is a story about desperate people trying to cure themselves with an unproven therapy. It’s not a story about whether the therapy works. We don’t know if it does. And in fact, there’s good evidence, in the form of double-blinded placebo-controlled studies on the pig whipworm that failed to show any benefit, that this approach and

For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research, inspiring him to study how diet and native microbes shape our risk for disease—came from a village in the African hinterlands. A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbi

I have a piece in the NYT Sunday Review exploring the question: Should we bank our own stool for microbial reconstitution? A few notes and interesting tidbits that didn’t make it into the piece. First, an interesting study linking early-life microbial disturbances with the later development of asthma was just published in Science Translational Medicine. Unlike other studies, which look backward in time to make these associations, and which are therefore weaker, this one was prospective. It

I’ve gotten a few emails in response to the NYT “gluten myth” piece asking how I could ignore pesticides in the celiac question. Interesting you should ask (and it’s something I want to look into) While reporting, one scientist did in fact mention pesticide residues in food as a possible explanation for the rise of celiac. When I asked for evidence in support of the idea, however, he said that there wasn’t any — that it was pure speculation. Good scientist. Di

I have a piece on “gluten myths” in the NYT Sun Review. It’s received a fair amount of attention. And I’ve received a few unhappy emails. So a few clarifications: The piece in no way argues that people who have problems with gluten shouldn’t go on a gluten free diet. In fact, it acknowledges the robust evidence of a real increase over time in celiac disease. And although this isn’t in the piece, I suspect the non-celiac gluten sensitivity that scientists still

AS many as one in three Americans tries to avoid gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. Gluten-free menus, gluten-free labels and gluten-free guests at summer dinners have proliferated. Some of the anti-glutenists argue that we haven’t eaten wheat for long enough to adapt to it as a species. Agriculture began just 12,000 years ago, not enough time for our bodies, which evolved over millions of years, primarily in Africa, to adjust. According to this theory, we’re intrinsically hunter-

In the mid-2000s Harry Sokol, a gastroenterologist at Saint Antoine Hospital in Paris, was surprised by what he found when he ran some laboratory tests on tissue samples from his patients with Crohn’s disease, a chronic inflammatory disorder of the gut. The exact cause of inflammatory bowel disease remains a mystery. Some have argued that it results from a hidden infection; others suspect a proliferation of certain bacteria among the trillions of microbes that inhabit the human gut. But wh