Stevia comes from the leaves of Stevia rebaudiana, a plant native to South America. Its leaves are packed with compounds called steviol glycosides — the most abundant being rebaudioside A and stevioside — which are about 200–300 times sweeter than table sugar. The stevia you’ll find in foods and drinks today isn’t the same form as the crushed leaves people used for centuries to sweeten tea. The FDA only allows the use of high-purity stevia extracts containing 95% or more steviol glycosides, compounds that don’t raise blood sugar, provide calories, or have the same metabolic and hormonal impacts as sugar. So why the scrutiny? For starters, when stevia hit the U.S. market in 2008, it followed decades of backlash against artificial sweeteners like aspartame and sucralose and got inaccurately lumped into the same category. How Is Stevia Metabolized in the Body? Stevia moves through your body like a widget on a factory line: - Your small intestine passes it to your colon - In the colon, workers (your gut bacteria) break it down into parts.  - Then it rolls down the conveyor belt to your liver, which repackages it into a harmless form — steviol glucuronide— and ships it off to your kidneys.  - They prep it for delivery and send it out to be excreted in urine, no scraps left behind. Here’s how that process works in a bit more detail. 1. Digestion and absorption The chemical structure of steviol glycosides includes a steviol backbone with sugar molecules that your digestive enzymes can’t break apart.

If you've been avoiding the gym because you think you need to lift heavy weights to build muscle, new research in The Journal of Physiology has liberating news. When researchers had participants perform resistance training with either heavy loads (70-80% of their one-rep max) or light loads (30-40% of their one-rep max) for 10 weeks, they found identical muscle growth in both groups, provided that both groups trained to failure. The study tracked multiple measures of hypertrophy, from whole-body lean mass to individual muscle fiber size, and consistently found no advantage to lifting heavier weights. Even more interesting, the hypertrophic response was relatively conserved within individuals regardless of which load they used, suggesting your inherent biology matters more than the specific weight on the bar. This debunks the persistent myth that you must lift heavy to gain significant muscle. The keys are: lift loads you can tolerate, train close to failure, accumulate volume over time, progress consistently, and stop obsessing over finding the "optimal load." For many people, lighter weights mean lower injury risk and better exercise adherence, which ultimately matters more than any theoretical advantage of heavier loading. Pick weights that allow you to train hard, safely, and consistently.

1. Help Heal Wounds and Burns For minor cuts, scratches, and burns, honey can be applied topically to help speed healing. Honey acts as a broad-spectrum antibacterial agent and is known to lower prostaglandin levels while elevating nitric oxide end products, processes that help explain honey's wound-healing powers. Honey's unique formulation, including its acidity, hydrogen peroxide content, osmotic effect, and antioxidants, is responsible for a number of beneficial processes that stimulate and promote wound healing, such as: - Enhanced tissue growth - Increased epithelialization - Reduced scar formation - Stimulation of immunity Honey is so potent that, in a study of critically ill children with pressure injuries, the use of a Manuka honey dressing or gel reduced wound-healing time compared with standard care. In fact, the children treated with honey were 1.9 times more likely to have their wounds completely healed than those who received only standard care. 2. Soothe Coughs and Upper Respiratory Tract Infections Honey is regarded as highly beneficial for soothing irritating coughs in the ancient Indian medical system known as Ayurveda. Hippocrates also used honey for coughs. Modern research supports this use, with honey found to relieve cough symptoms more effectively than no treatment, placebo, or the antihistamine diphenhydramine. It also reduces cough duration more effectively than the asthma medication salbutamol. A systematic review and meta-analysis also found that honey was superior to usual care in improving symptoms of upper respiratory tract infections, including reduced cough frequency and severity. Among children with upper respiratory tract infections, honey was as effective as the over-the-counter cough medication dextromethorphan and superior to no treatment for nighttime cough relief. Furthermore, parents rated honey more favorably than cough syrup, leading researchers to conclude that "Honey may be a preferable treatment for the cough and sleep difficulty associated with childhood upper respiratory tract infection."

For more than three decades, statins have been widely prescribed under the assumption that lowering cholesterol — specifically low-density lipoprotein (LDL) — protects against cardiovascular disease. Over time, this assumption has calcified into medical dogma, reinforced by clinical guidelines, pharmaceutical marketing, and statistical framings that favor surrogate markers over biological reality. Yet a growing body of biomedical evidence points to a far more uncomfortable conclusion. This pattern of well-intended but scientifically oversold interventions is not unique to statins. It also appears in other areas of cardiovascular care, including common supplements — such as calcium — where presumed benefits have masked unanticipated harms. According to research indexed in PubMed and the National Library of Medicine, statin drugs are now associated with more than 350 adverse health effects, impacting nearly every major physiological system. These findings are not anecdotal or fringe. They are cumulative, reproducible, and increasingly difficult to reconcile with the claim that statins are biologically benign--let alone intrinsically cardioprotective. The deeper issue is not merely the number of adverse effects, but their nature. A drug that damages muscle tissue, impairs mitochondrial energy production, disrupts metabolic signaling, and injures peripheral nerves cannot logically be assumed to protect the most energy-demanding, nerve-dense muscle in the human body: the heart. Since 2006, I have been issuing public alerts about these overlooked risks. I began systematically documenting and indexing the peer-reviewed literature linking statins to muscle injury, mitochondrial dysfunction, metabolic disruption, neurological harm, and paradoxical cardiovascular impairment. Today, 1000s of published sutides substansitae these concerns, forming an evidentiary record that remains largely absent from mainstream patient risk-benefit discussions despite its clear clinical relevance.

Most people define processed food as obvious junk like candy, soda, and fast food, but that definition misses a critical category: foods marketed as healthy that are still highly processed. Think strawberry Greek yogurt, protein bars, plant milks, Chipotle bowls, and granola. If a food has a long ingredient list, including seed oils, added sugars or syrups, "natural flavors," or health buzzwords, it's processed, regardless of how it's marketed. The food industry didn't make food healthier; they made marketing better. Here's a useful guideline I share with patients: if it comes in a bag or a box, minimize it. Obviously, there are exceptions, as some real whole foods can be packaged this way, but this simple heuristic helps cut through the confusion created by health claims and wellness marketing. Real food doesn't need a label claiming it's good for you. The best nutrition comes from foods you could theoretically hunt, gather, grow, or raise yourself. This doesn't mean you can never eat anything processed, but understanding that many "health foods" are still processed helps you make more informed choices about where to spend your dietary budget. When most of your diet comes from actual whole foods, the occasional processed item matters less.