Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Annals of nutritional epidemiology: Can cabbage mitigate the severity of Covid-19?
Why, you must be asking, am I even asking a question like this?
Because of this study, obviously, which I somehow missed when it came out in August (thanks to toxicologist Marc Stifelman for sending it to me).
The study: Cabbage and fermented vegetables: From death rate heterogeneity in countries to candidates for mitigation strategies of severe COVID‐19. Bousquet U, et al. Allergy. 2020 Aug 6;10.1111/all.14549. Online ahead of print.
The hypothesis:
CAUTION: Correlation does not necessarily mean causation. The diets—and other lifestyle characteristics—of people in Romania and Latvia differ from those in the UK and Italy in other ways besides diet; other differences might well account for these variations.
Personally, I love cabbage in any form.
But for prevention of bad outcomes from Covid-19, I’m counting on vaccination, not kimchi or sauerkraut.
