See also: Women Are Taking Over Medicine—Not Necessarily Good For Them, Or Their Patients Eight years ago, as I prepared to retire from medical practice, health care was under assault. A federally-mandated computerized medical record had complicated charting patients and added hours of daily unproductive work for hospital staff, with no improvement in the quality... Read More

The hardest part of writing about the “Equity� racket is reading the illiterate drivel that its scribes churn out. In this case, though, the effort may be just barely worth it. Your health is at stake, at least to the extent that the medical profession has any effect on it. Consider this from Aletha Maybank,... Read More

Post updated, 7/23/15. See below! At long last, I reach my 200th blog post. It's been a quite a ride! Blogging on human biodiversity – or simply humanity – has taught me a great deal. Since the start, I hoped that I could offer some meager contribution to mankind with this blog. I will continue... Read More

I've added a new page, which covers many of the key facts about obesity – facts which are conveniently ignored or misunderstood in the many emotionally charged discussion of the matter. See: Obesity Facts I've made this a page rather than a post because I anticipate updating it fairly frequently, as more information becomes available.... Read More

Can be quite substantial. Jump off the Empire State Building and see for yourself. But, beyond that, the question remains how much of the variation in health outcomes and longevity can be explained by behavioral variation? Well, we don't quite know. But we do have evidence which indicates that – at least in the developed... Read More

I have recently updated two key posts, my post More Behavioral Genetic Facts and More Maps of the American Nations. In More Behavioral Genetic Facts, I have expanded on an analysis on the meta-analysis of the heritability of criminality. This meta-analysis, a seminal work, represents the single best treatment of what we know of the... Read More

Well said! I spotted it in a conversation with Dennis Mangan. I guess it's good to see that someone else has brought up these points. Here's the rest of the conversation: Unfortunately, it seems, Dennis Mangan – like many in the medical establishment – appears permanently locked into a rather unscientific way of thinking. The... Read More

A couple of interesting stories have come to my attention lately. Despite my efforts to get them across on Twitter, they are still not quite getting the attention I think they deserve, so I'm going to recite them here. These stories are on the role of sugar and the role of antibiotics in human health.... Read More

Updated, 10/17/15. See below! In this post, I will review Gregory Cochran's "gay germ" hypothesis. I wanted to make an index of Cochran's posts from his and Henry Harpending's blog West Hunter that discuss it. These posts don't seem to all show up under the "Homosexuality" category there, and I wanted links to them to... Read More

In this post, I don't mean in the way some people might think (though it does work in that sense too), I mean in terms of longevity. Mainstream thinkers, and some in the HBD-sphere, are fascinated and confounded by the persistent variation in health and lifespan of different peoples around the world. This has given... Read More

This was on NBC Nightly News two nights ago: [gigya src=" width="500" height="300" FlashVars="launch=53617685&width=592&height=346" allowscriptaccess="always" allowFullScreen="true" wmode="transparent" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage=" "The evidence would suggest that if one chooses nuts over other alternative foods, there is potentially a 20% improvement in mortality, which is quite striking." I'll say. Does this mean you have a 20% better chance... Read More

Recently, it has become a craze to demonize hydrogenated vegetable oils, also known as trans fats. Indeed, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (F.D.A.) is seeking to outright ban this class of substances, since they are, after all, "artery-clogging" and "a threat to public health." Trans fats are found in most pre-packaged foods, especially anything... Read More

Last week, Ross Douthat wrote an article (Why Not Medicaid For All?) claiming Obamacare – and socialized medicine in general – would, if adopted in the U.S., have the deleterious effect of discouraging medical innovation, an area where the United States currently leads. This was brought to my attention by a tweet by Kay Hymowitz.... Read More

Former president George W. Bush recently had surgery to open a blocked coronary artery. As the NBC Nightly News reported (click link for video) So George W. Bush, a famous fitness fanatic, had a blocked artery. Now, he was experiencing no symptoms, so "heart disease" may be a bit of a strong term. Indeed, it... Read More

This is my 100th blog post. Upon reaching this milestone, I thought that this would be a great time to take moment to look back at my experience as a blogger in Human BioDiversity (HBD) and share my thoughts on the things to come. 1. The Beginning 2. Fertility 3. Immigration and the economy 4.... Read More

In my previous post, I noted that the oft-mentioned association between obesity and poor health and "early" death may be a function of the lower average IQ of obese people. I suggested that the true correlate of these things was in fact low IQ. And indeed, I've stumbled on additional studies that suggests that this... Read More

Previously, I intimated that the connection between obesity and cardiovascular disease and death from such diseases may not be what is commonly believed: The idea is that people who are in poorer health have all around poorer genetic quality – in other words, they tend to have higher levels of genetic load (see here at... Read More

Gary Taubes recently wrote an essay about the causes of modern obesity. In it, he correctly points out that modern medical science is woefully ignorant of the true causes of obesity. I haven't yet read Taubes's book, and I'm not particularly convinced of his carbohydrate hypothesis (which I'll address shortly), but I wanted to comment... Read More

Continuing my inquiry into this matter, one question that hasn't been satisfactorily answered is why has the obesity rate shot up in the past few decades? As I've made plain in previous posts, variation in obesity between individuals within a group at any given time is largely heritable, as is a good portion of the... Read More

A recent article in the UK Daily Mail featured the "Weight of the World" chart made by Visual.ly. It graphically represents the average body mass index (BMI) of the inhabitants the countries of the world. In keeping with my recent series on the matter, I wanted to see what it'd look like if I turned... Read More

My recent series on diet and cardiovascular health has produced some interesting findings. Within these findings, I have noticed some intriguing patterns. Following in the tradition of my "Tales of Two Maps" series, here are another set of two maps: This is the previously featured map of the year 2000 mortality rate from cardiovascular disease... Read More

In my Twitter feed I encountered this 2007 article that notes that the conventional wisdom about exercise and weight loss–that exercise leads you to lose weight and keep it off–is wrong: For most of us, fear of flab is the reason we exercise, the motivation that drives us to the gym. It’s also why public-health... Read More

Comedian/documentarian Tom Naughton recently made a highly intriguing post about the "Spanish Paradox"; that is, the low rate of cardiovascular illness among Spaniards despite their apparently poor markers of heart health. This post was made on the discussion site of Naughton's 2009 documentary Fat Head. This movie (which I have yet to see, but plan... Read More

ABC News recently aired a story about the drug Qnexa, which is a combination drug which seems to treat obesity (watch the story here). The results have been impressive, as can bee seen in the featured before and after photos. And yes, like almost all other diet drugs, it comes with side effects. The question,... Read More