When the USDA erroneously decided all animal fat and meat were poison, Americans were told to eat more plant foods, like soy. Soy was touted as a perfect protein and source of fat to replace meat, lard and butter. Soybean oil was marketed as a versatile cooking oil that wouldn’t increase your cholesterol, textured protein crumbles made in a lab were smashed together and dyed to look like hamburger patties and soybean oil was hydrogenated to be solid at room temperature. “Eat margarine,” they said, “it's better than butter,'' they said. Well folks, it turns out hydrogenated vegetable oil is a source of trans fat. And eating trans fat not only increases your risk of heart disease but the Food and Drug Administration now prohibits food manufacturers from adding the major source of artificial trans fat to foods and beverages. But, I digress, let’s get back to the soyification of the world. So the government declares all animal meat and fat bad, processed plant foods are better. AKA “we know better than nature what is healthy”. So, cheap soy floods the market. And now you can pick up 80% of the items in the grocery store and see soy in the ingredient list. Soybean oil, lecithin from soy, soy protein, textured vegetable protein (also soy), vegetable gum, vegetable broth, vegetable starch, this list goes on. The 4 Dangers of Eating soy: #1 Weed-killer in Soy Soy is a leading food source of glyphosate (the weed-killer Roundup). Oats, wheat and corn are up there as well and you’ll notice I don’t recommend eating those either. Glyphosate is a synthetic herbicide patented by the Monsanto Company and now manufactured and sold by many companies in hundreds of products. Glyphosate has been associated with: - Cancer - Liver damage - Reproductive and developmental issues According to the Environmental Workgroup (EWG) genetically engineered soy has the highest levels of Roundup: “Crop scientists have genetically engineered soy to survive blasts of Roundup so farmers can spray this chemical near crops to get rid of weeds. But some so-called “super weeds” resistant to Roundup have developed. In turn, some farmers use yet more Roundup to try to kill those hardy weeds. This leads to more Roundup chemicals being found on soybeans and ultimately in the food supply.”

A 2024 University of New Mexico study found microplastics in every one of 23 human testicles tested. The average concentration was 329 micrograms/gram of tissue, nearly 3x higher than dogs in the same geographic environment. The most abundant polymer was polyethylene, the material of plastic bags and bottles. The second was PVC, which researchers noted has been shown to interfere with sperm production and act as an endocrine disruptor. Concentrations were highest in men between the ages of 20 and 45. Peak reproductive years. The same lab then examined placenta samples in a separate study. Every one contained microplastics too, at concentrations ranging from 6.5 to 790 micrograms/gram, averaging 127. That's tissue that only exists for eight months of pregnancy. The concentration built up that fast. Then they moved to the brain. A study published in Nature Medicine in early 2025 found microplastic concentrations in the frontal cortex to be higher than in the liver or kidney. Comparing 2016 samples to 2024 samples, average concentrations rose approximately 50% in eight years. In samples from patients diagnosed with dementia before death, concentrations were up to 5x higher than the 2024 average. That would be one thing if the plastic just sat there. Microplastics have been documented in umbilical cord blood, meaning they cross the placenta and enter the developing baby's circulation directly. Concentrations found range from 1.1-10+ particles/gram of cord tissue. The same particles have been found in amniotic fluid, the medium the fetus develops in for nine months. So the baby soaks in the mother’s exposure, and researchers are just starting to document the correlations with real harm. Honestly, they should have gotten more attention than they have. A 2025 study found that women who developed pregnancy-induced hypertension had 46% higher microplastic concentrations in umbilical cord tissue than women who had healthy pregnancies. The correlation tracked with frequency of plastic tableware use, plastic-packaged beverage consumption, and takeout meals.

Adults aren't off the hook on this one either. Researchers in Australia looked at the diets of 2,192 adults between 40 and 70, none of whom had dementia, and tested their thinking with a standard computerized battery. Writing in Alzheimer's & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, they reported that for every 10% more of a person's diet that came from ultra-processed food, attention scores were slightly lower and their score on a common dementia risk calculator was slightly higher. That pattern held even after accounting for how closely people followed a Mediterranean-style diet, which is the part I keep coming back to. Eating some good food doesn't cancel out the rest. This was a snapshot in time rather than a study that followed people forward, so it can't tell us the food caused the difference. I'm not sharing it to scare anyone. My point is simpler, and it hasn't changed in twenty years: make real food the vast majority of what you eat. That doesn't mean you can never have a bag of chips or a store-bought cookie, and it doesn't mean being rigid, which carries its own costs. It means that when you look at your week honestly, most of what was on your plate came from a plant or an animal rather than a factory.

A landmark trial published in Nutrition Journal, "A single consumption of curry improved postprandial endothelial function in healthy male subjects" (Nakayama et al.), demonstrated something remarkable and immediate. Researchers fed 14 healthy men, average age 45, either a single serving of curry or an identical-looking spice-free control meal (about 500 kcal with rice), then measured what happened inside their blood vessels one hour later. The curry itself was a traditional eight-spice blend: clove, coriander, cumin, garlic, ginger, onion, red pepper, and turmeric. The measurement they used, flow-mediated dilation (FMD), is one of the most respected non-invasive windows into cardiovascular health we have. It gauges how well the inner lining of your arteries, the endothelium, can relax and let blood flow. The results split cleanly: - The plain control meal made arteries stiffer. FMD dropped from 5.8% to 5.1%. - The curry meal made arteries open. FMD rose from 5.2% to 6.6%. In other words, the very same meal that constricts your arteries when eaten plain can be transformed into one that opens them, simply by adding the spices humans have been cooking with for millennia. The researchers concluded that curry "ameliorates postprandial endothelial dysfunction and may be beneficial for preventing cardiovascular events." There is a beautiful piece of etymology buried in all of this. The word recipe, in its first recorded 16th-century use, literally meant a "medical prescription." Every family recipe passed down through the generations may be exactly that: a prescription we forgot we were writing.

Around 65% of US women between the ages of 15 and 49 are on some form of contraception. About 17.5% of those women use the birth control pill. Most were first prescribed it as teenagers, often for reasons that had nothing to do with preventing pregnancy. Things like acne, painful periods, and irregular cycles. On the surface, it seems to work. Women on the pill dramatically reduce the chance of pregnancy and often see improvements in non-pregnancy issues for which they get a prescription. But below the surface, a decade or more of the pill does things to a woman's body that the average doctor doesn't discuss. If you are a man reading this, you have a stake in this too. The women in your life, the relationships you're in, the children you may have someday… All of it is downstream of a decision most women made before they were old enough to vote. Later in the piece, I go into what the male side of this equation looks like. Now, hormonal birth control can be legitimate medicine for some women with legitimate medical conditions. And if you take it electively, it’s your choice. No shame. I simply want you to know the potential drawbacks so you’re more confident talking with your doctor about these things and making the best decision for you. Here is what the research shows: Depression. In 2016, a Danish research team led by Charlotte Skovlund published a nationwide cohort study in JAMA Psychiatry following 1,061,997 women aged 15 to 34 for over six years. Combined oral contraceptives users had a 23% higher rate of first-time antidepressant use than nonusers. Adolescent users on combined oral contraceptives had nearly double the rate. All hormonal contraception types (pill, patch, ring, IUD) showed elevated risk, with the highest signals among the youngest women. Suicide risk. The same team published a 2018 follow-up in the American Journal of Psychiatry using a separate cohort of 475,802 Danish women. Current or recent hormonal contraceptive users had roughly double the risk of a first suicide attempt and triple the risk of completed suicide compared to women who had never used it. The highest risk was in the first months after starting. The patch showed the strongest signal, followed by the IUD, the ring, and the pill.