Category: General Interest

For years, “healthy dessert” meant one thing: take something delicious and start removing bits of it. Less sugar. Less butter. Less of whatever made it worth eating in the first place, until you’re left with something that’s technically fine but nobody actually wants seconds of.

I don’t think that’s the right way to think about it anymore.

Finish reading: https://goodnesslover.com/blogs/health/7-gut-loving-desserts

Ten head-to-head clinical trials — pulled from the GreenMedInfo archive — in which honey, turmeric, saffron, ginger and a handful of other kitchen staples matched or outperformed prescription medications. Each one links to the full research write-up.

For nearly two decades, GreenMedInfo has done one thing most health publishers never bother with: we go into the National Library of Medicine and pull out the studies where researchers put a natural substance directly against a drug — same condition, same patients, same scoring — and then publish what they found.

Those studies exist. There are thousands of them. They just don’t get press releases, because nobody holds a patent on honey.

Below are ten of the most striking. Every one is a human trial. Every one is indexed in our database. And every one links to the long-form article where you can read the methodology, the numbers and the citations for yourself.

A word before we start: this is research information, not medical advice. Several of these trials are small. Some are single studies that have not been replicated. I have flagged which ones have the strongest designs. Read them, bring them to your practitioner, and decide for yourself. That is the entire point of having the archive.

Finish reading: https://open.substack.com/pub/sayerji/p/they-compared-the-spice-to-the-drug

The Great Mystery of the Mexican Lettuce

FDA has finally discovered Cyclospora at the Mexican operations linked to this summer’s record-breaking outbreak: one positive sample came from a tank holding outgoing wastewater at the Taylor Farms de Mexico processing plant, and another from a drainage ditch at one of its lettuce growers.

Nearly 13,000 Americans got sick. More than 570 were hospitalized. Two died.

And yet FDA says there is still “not enough evidence to conclusively determine how contamination occurred.”

Really?

Cyclospora is a fecal-oral parasite. Humans are its known host. It gets onto food when human feces contaminate water or soil.

So somewhere between human feces, wastewater, a drainage ditch next to a lettuce field, and Cyclospora showing up in all, lies one of the great unsolved mysteries of modern food safety. The FDA still can’t quite figure out the relationship.

So we made the Venn diagram for them.

Keep reading: https://open.substack.com/pub/rwmalonemd/p/poop-peppers-and-a-mouse-in-the-brine

A lifelong prescription for a problem no one is trying to solve: a root-cause and risk-benefit reckoning

magine your smoke alarm goes off in the middle of the night. You have two choices. You can find the fire. Or you can buy a subscription service that injects a chemical into the alarm once a week so it stops making noise, while the house keeps burning.

For a growing share of the population, the second option is now the standard of care.

Around 12% of U.S. adults are now taking a GLP-1 drug like Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, or Zepbound (Associated Press, citing KFF). In 2025 alone, Eli Lilly’s tirzepatide franchise brought in about $36.5 billion, outselling Keytruda, the cancer drug long considered the most lucrative product in pharmaceutical history (BioSpace). The leading medical societies now say these drugs, once started, are meant for “long-term or lifelong use” (Obesity, 2026).

Read that again. Lifelong. For a condition that barely existed at population scale two generations ago.

That is the absurdity I want to examine. My argument is not that these drugs do nothing; they clearly change the numbers on the scale and on the lab report. My argument is that they do nothing to address why those numbers went wrong in the first place. And once you see the full ledger of risks against that backdrop, the approach looks less like a medical breakthrough and more like an elaborate, profitable way of not asking the obvious question.

https://sayerji.substack.com/p/silencing-the-alarm-why-glp-1-drugs