Status Updates From How Not to Die: Discover th...

finished my loan time for this on libby and there are like ten people in line waiting to read it so i’m gonna DNF it until i get the book again on libby

Super interesting and well written

“The hormone content in milk may explain why women who drink it appear to have five times the rate of twin births compared to women who do not drink milk. When it comes to cancer, though, the greatest concern may come from growth hormones.”

“Most tragically, antidepressants may make people more likely to become depressed in the future. Studies show that patients are more likely to become depressed again after treatments with antidepressants than after treatment with other means, including placebos.”

“Antidepressants are currently prescribed to more than 8% of the population. Just because antidepressant drugs may not work better than fake pills doesn’t mean they don’t work at all. They offer substantial benefits to millions of people suffering from depression & although placebo effect is real & powerful, antidepressants do seem to beat out sugar pills in most severely depressed (10% patients)” 90% hmm

Even worse, the FOIA docs revealed that the FDA knew that these drugs, such as Paxil and Prozac, didn’t work much better than placebo, yet made an explicit decision to shield drug companies by keeping this info from the public/prescribing physicians. How could they get away with this? pharmaceutical industry is one of most profitable/politically powerful in USA + mental illness is a golden goose (chronic/common)

2/2 did not work after all. When all data, published & unpublished, were combined, antidepressants failed to show a clinically significant advantage over placebo sugar pills. This finding suggests the placebo effect explains the apparent clinical effectiveness of antidepressants. Patient belief in power of drug was most powerful aspect of antidepressants

1/2 Depression psych meds:
Researchers applied to the U.S. FDA under FOIA to get access to published & unpublished studies submitted by pharmaceutical companies and what they found was shocking; according to published literature, the results of nearly all antidepressant trials were positive. In contrast, FDA analysis of trial data, inc. unpublished studies, demonstrated that roughly 1/2 the trials showed the drugs

Contemporary longitudinal studies suggest that low dietary folate intake may increase the risk of severe depression by as much as 3x.

- supplements did not help

- only dietary folate, like antioxidant rich tomatoes and folate packed greens, lowered depression risks