Maybe everything you thought you knew about fat, cholesterol, heart attacks and health is wrong. Maybe everything about everything is wrong? We certainly seem to be entering a period where we are not merely questioning everything and everyone. But, entering a period where what we learn anew requires us to unlearn everything we already thought we learned.

Nearly every high-quality (prospective) observational study ever conducted found that saturated fat intake is not associated with heart attack risk (3). So if saturated fat increases blood cholesterol, and higher blood cholesterol is associated with an increased risk of having a heart attack, then why don't people who eat more saturated fat have more heart attacks?

Of all the studies I came across, only the Western Electric study found a clear association between habitual saturated fat intake and blood cholesterol, and even that association was weak. The Bogalusa Heart study and the Japanese study provided inconsistent evidence for a weak association. The other studies I cited, including the bank workers' study, the Tecumseh study, the Evans county study, the Israel Ischemic Heart study, the Framingham study and the Health Professionals Follow-up study, found no association between the two factors.

Overall, the literature does not offer much support for the idea that long term saturated fat intake has a significant effect on the concentration of blood cholesterol. If it's a factor at all, it must be rather weak, which is consistent with what has been observed in multiple non-human species (13). I think it's likely that the diet-heart hypothesis rests in part on an over-interpretation of short-term controlled feeding studies.

If you're a parent, or plan to become one, the following should be memorized:

An extensive review of relevant research has demonstrated that the more physically active schoolchildren are, the better they do academically. 

More from the health site, Mercola.com:

"Physical activity and sports are generally promoted for their positive effect on children's physical health; regular participation in physical activity in childhood is associated with a decreased cardiovascular risk in youth and adulthood.

There is also a growing body of literature suggesting that physical activity has beneficial effects on several mental health outcomes, including health-related quality of life and better mood states.

In addition... there is a strong belief that regular participation in physical activity is linked to enhancement of brain function and cognition, thereby positively influencing academic performance.

There are several hypothesized mechanisms for why exercise is beneficial for cognition, including:

(1)  Increased blood and oxygen flow to the brain

(2)  Increased levels of norepinephrine and endorphins resulting in a reduction of stress and an improvement of mood

(3)  Increased growth factors that help to create new nerve cells and support synaptic plasticity

FastCompany looks at the growing market for mobile health applications and services:

This is the thrilling, disruptive potential of "mHealth," the rapidly growing business of using mobile technology in health care. Leveraging the wonders of a device that's fast becoming ubiquitous--two in three people worldwide own a cell phone--a new generation of startups is building apps and add-ons that make your handheld work like high-end medical equipment. Except it's cheaper, sleeker, and a lot more versatile. "It's like the human body has developed a new organ," says Raja Rajamannar, chief innovation officer at Humana. Smartphones can already track calories burned and miles run, and measure sleep patterns. By 2013, they'll be detecting erratic heartbeats, monitoring tremors from Parkinson's disease, and even alerting you when it's prime time to make a baby.

At stake is the future of health care--and a share of the $273 billion medical-device industry, which is dominated by the likes of GE and Philips. Although today's mHealth market barely tops $2 billion, experts predict that number will skyrocket over the next decade as smartphones get smarter and patients lose, well, patience with the high costs and hassles of health care.

Stephen Hawking may be no Sir Isaac Newton, but he is extraordinary. In particular, he should have been dead long long ago:

British scientist Stephen Hawking has decoded some of the most puzzling mysteries of the universe, but he has left one mystery unsolved: How has he managed to survive so long with such a crippling disease?

The physicist and cosmologist was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease -- also called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS -- when he was 21. Most people die within a few years of the diagnosis. Today, Hawking turns 70.

"I don't know of anyone who's survived this long," said Ammar Al-Chalabi, director of the Motor Neurone Disease Care and Research Centre at King's College London. He does not treat Hawking but called his longevity "extraordinary."

Hawking achieved all that despite being nearly entirely paralyzed and in a wheelchair since 1970. He now communicates only by twitching his right cheek. Since catching pneumonia in 1985, he has needed around-the-clock care and relies on a computer and voice synthesizer to speak.

A tiny infrared sensor sits on his glasses, hooked up to a computer. The sensor detects his cheek pulses, which select words displayed on a computer screen. The chosen words are then spoken by the voice synthesizer. It can take up to 10 minutes to formulate a sentence.

"The only trouble is (the voice synthesizer) gives me an American accent," the Briton wrote on his website.

In my first novel, The Empty Spaces, available on Kindle and the best way to support this site and my work here...

Wake up!

Seriously. In my book one of the storylines involves the potential for smartphones to cause cancer. The verdict:

It's a work of fiction so I sent that storyline in a completely different direction (instead, smartphones may kill our desire for chocolate and marijuana). But, being the person of ethics that you know me to be, I did not incorporate any false or misleading data into the cancer debate and I had one of the characters reviewing the information state quite clearly that the muddled view we have on this topic. Essentially: well, it probably doesn't matter because we've all decided to have and use our smartphones, cancer be damned. 

The famed Dr Mercola, says otherwise. He believes that major studies reviewing smartphones and cancer are (possibly deliberately) flawed and that smartphones do indeed cause cancer. Especially for heavy users such as business persons:

A new BMJ study being widely circulated in the media claims to have found no association between long-term use of cell phones and brain or central nervous system tumors, but the study was deeply flawed and misleading

The BMJ study excluded the heaviest cell phone users -- more than 300,000 business users, which represented nearly 30 percent of the original group – which skews the results significantly

A cell phone “user,” as defined by the study, was anyone who made one call a week for 6 months, which again does not reflect the true risk of heavy cell phone use that is commonplace today

Cell phone studies are commonly spun by industry to support cell phone safety, when in fact closer analysis reveals increased cancer and other health risks

The science is very clear, and many worldwide health agencies, now concur, that the cancer risk from cell phones is real, and steps should be taken immediately to minimize your risk.

Via TechCrunch, a little company that is little more than a YouTube video, but with big dreams. I wish them the best.

Okay, part of that I made up. In my novel, The Empty Spaces, the very popular smartphone app (The Empty Spaces) does not appear to cause cancer. I wrote in the book, as I believed, that smartphones probably have a minimal impact on cancer rates and, let's face it, we've all made our choice. We choose smartphones.

Of course, this being a novel and all I explained how smartphone radiation effectively sterilized select receptors in the brains -- the very ones, and they are the same, that promote the feelings of being 'high' from consuming marijuana, or eating chocolate.

Time will tell if this was prescient or just wild ass storytelling. Time will not tell, it seems, at least not in a definitive way, if smartphones actually do cause cancer. Via the "largest study" undertaken:

Proving a negative in science is really, really hard — and that may well be the task that researchers trying to evaluate the potentially carcinogenic effects of cell phone use may have before them.

To wit: in a new study published in the BMJ, European researchers — looking at more than 300,000 Danes who had used cell phones — concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that using a cell phone increased the chance of developing a brain tumor. That was true even for people who had used cell phones for more than a decade, and the BMJ study is the biggest so far to look at cell phone radiation and cancer. As the study authors themselves wrote in the conclusion:

In this update of a large nationwide cohort study of mobile phone use, there were no increased risks of tumours of the central nervous system, providing little evidence for a causal association.

Case closed, right? That all depends on your perspective. Other researchers and activists were quick to criticize the study, arguing that it was still not broad enough to fully exonerate cell phones. Devra Davis, an expert in the environmental causes of illness and the president of the Environmental Health Trust, said in a statement:

From the way it was set up originally, this deeply flawed study was designed to fail to find an increased risk of brain tumors tied with cellphone use. In order for any study of a relatively rare disease like brain tumors to find a change in risk, millions must be followed for decades.

[Brian: bonus points for their use of 'to wit' which I'm the only one that I ever see using that ol phrase]