News

I have a piece in the NYT Sunday Review on the observation that children who grow up on farms, and who drink raw milk, often seem to have a lower prevalence of asthma and allergic disease than their nonfarming peers. This is usually called the “farm effect.” Enough people have heard of it by now that I think it’s been embedded in a vague way in our collective (un)conscious(ness). The reason I wrote this piece,

I have an essay in the NYT Sunday Review on socioeconomic class, stress, and health. The gist: the lower one ranks in society, the more stressed, and the worse one’s health. Many see the yawning divide between the haves and have-nots as a public health issue, and even as an economic problem. (How better to save money on healthcare costs than to prevent disease in the first place?) Nothing about microbes in this

I have a piece in the NYT Sunday Review on class, stress, health and the persistent effects of early-life stress and / or poverty on health and cognition. I’m throwing up a few references for people eager to know more. More info on nuances etc here.   GENERAL STUFF Last year PNAS had an entire issue dedicated to this question of status and health entitled “Biological Embedding of Early Social Adversi

I have a piece on the microbiome in metabolic syndrome and obesity in Mother Jones. A few things bear mentioning. First off, the takeaway of this piece is not to go out and drink OJ with your bacon cheeseburger and fries. It’s to avoid refined food generally, and steer toward real food, like oranges, other fruits, veggies and whole grains. They feed your beneficial bacteria. Second, I noticed one comment on Twi

Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, includes An Epidemic of Absence in his “Favorite Books on Food and Nature” list at Barnes & Noble. His blurb in toto: What in the world does the ecosystem of microbes living in the gut have to do with the development of autism or heart disease or allergy? Quite possibly everything, according to this masterful work of scie

I have a piece today in the NYT Sunday Review on the microbiome in celiac disease. A lot of interesting material ended up on the cutting room floor. I’ll post some below. And I’ll try to preemptively answer questions that, if I were reading the piece for the first time, would occur to me. When exactly am I supposed to introduce gluten to my baby?  The NYT fact-checker and I had a long discussion about thi

A piece in Slate on the vaginal microbiome’s role in human existence. (And yes, there’s also a penile microbiome. When I figure out a compelling angle, I’ll pen an article on it. Suggestions welcome.) The major takeaways from this article. First: the places we assumed were sterile (uterus, ovaries, lungs) are turning out to naturally contain microbes. My bet is that any part of the body connected to

Epidemic included in Booklist’s top ten science and health books of 2012. It shares the list with work by David Quammen and E.O. Wilson, among others. Pretty amazing company. The intro: From gripping memoirs to tours de force born of arduous research and masterful writing, the 10 best science and health books of the last 12 months offer arresting and invaluable insights into the workings of our minds and bodies

The NYT gives An Epidemic of Absence a so-so review. My favorite graf: Clearly, if true, the hygiene hypothesis is the single greatest medical story of our time, undercutting a century of putative progress. Is it true? Probably some of it is. But Mr. Velasquez-Manoff’s ambitious compendium of data and supposition — a great dense fruitcake of a book whose 680 endnotes, the author notes apologetically, refer to only a

Salon runs a chunk of my opening chapter.