I think I’ll have to add calcium to my list of the Top Six Supplements You Should Not Take. Here’s why.A year and a half ago, I reported on a very large study of 26,000 men and women that asked if vitamin D helps to prevent bone fractures, as many people (including some doctors) believe. Well, it doesn’t. That study found that people who took vitamin...

 Most animals have tails, including almost all mammals. For some reason, we humans don’t. This difference has been the source of much speculation among scientists over the years, and many arguments have been made about why we don’t tails. One line of reasoning goes like this: tails are very useful for animals that live in trees, but once our ancestors...

It’s like playing whac-a-mole. No matter how many times I write a column showing that some wildly implausible practice is nonsense, new articles pop up claiming “Hey, look at this! It really works!”So I’m going to try to whack another mole, because people can be harmed by bad information, especially when it comes in the form of medical advice.Recently...

After years of debate, the National Institutes of Health finally rolled out a data sharing policy early this year, one that should greatly increase the amount of data that biomedical researchers share with the public. This week, three prominent scientists from Yale described, in an op-ed in the New England Journal of Medicine, how “the potential effects...

 You’d think that coffee afficionados had tried everything by now, and that few if any tricks remained undiscovered. Well, you could be right–but there’s one trick that most ordinary coffee drinkers probably don’t know, and it’s remarkably easy to do.I’ll jump right to the punchline, and then I’ll explain the (new) science that explains it. To make...

 Readers of this column will know that I’m highly skeptical of dietary supplements. So you might imagine my reaction when I saw headlines a few days ago about “Taurine, the elixir of life?” (at CNN) and “Supplement slows aging in mice and monkeys” (NY Times).Unlikely, I thought. But I read the scientific article behind these reports, and now I’m intrigued.What...