Topics

Dietary Nudging The policy question of how governments move populations toward healthier eating. The evidence to date divides into two families: 1. Persuasion and mild nudges — campaigns, education, voluntary guidance, s

GLP-1 Microdosing Taking less than the label dose of a GLP-1 receptor agonist (semaglutide, tirzepatide) as the goal , rather than as a step in titration. Distinct from two routine practices: starting low and stepping up

GLP-1s Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists. The new class of obesity + diabetes drugs (Novo Nordisk's Ozempic/Wegovy, Eli Lilly's Zepbound/Mounjaro) that transformed both pharma and the industry. In this vault, GLP

Type 2 Diabetes Remission Remission in type 2 diabetes means blood sugar has fallen below the diagnostic threshold and remains there without glucose-lowering medication . The usual operational definition in modern trials

Nagging People to Eat Healthily Does Not Work (Economist) Summary The capture holds only the opening scene (oblea stalls in Bogotá's Simón Bolívar park: "Life's too short not to eat the food that you love"). The article'

Should You Microdose GLP-1 Drugs for Weight Loss (Economist) Section: Science & technology ( Well Informed column) · Edition: 2026-07-25 Edition · Print headline: "Does microdosing GLP-1 drugs work?" Summary A Well Infor

Eli Lilly Is Reinventing the Pharma Business (Economist) Section: Business · Edition: 2026-07-18 Edition · Print headline: "Trillion-dollar Lilly" Long-form Business feature centred on an interview with CEO Dave Ricks .

RESET for Remission Trial (ScienceDaily) ScienceDaily writeup (Oct 30 2026) of the RESET for Remission randomised, open-label, blinded-endpoint efficacy trial, published simultaneously in The Lancet Regional Health — Ame

Exergaming Video games — now mostly VR titles played standing with motion controllers — that require enough bodily movement to count as physical activity. The measurable question is intensity in METs (rest ≈ 1; walking ≈

Heat Acclimatisation The set of physiological adaptations produced by repeated heat exposure that let the body hold core temperature with less strain. Relevant beyond athletes as heatwaves become routine (western Europe

Minimum Effective Dose of Exercise The smallest amount of physical activity at which measurable health benefit appears. The evidence paged so far converges on one shape: the dose-response curve is steeply front-loaded —

Running Injury Musculoskeletal injury in recreational runners, dominated by overuse injuries — damage from training that is tolerable in any single part but cumulatively exceeds the body's capacity to recover. "Runner's

Sedentary Behaviour Prolonged waking time spent sitting or lying at very low energy expenditure. The paged evidence supports three claims in descending order of strength: sitting a lot is harmful; standing instead is bar

Step Count Targets Daily step counts as a dose of physical activity and the thresholds at which health outcomes change. The question exists because wearables made steps the most widely tracked activity metric, and becaus

How to Combine Exercise with Video Games (Economist) [!note] Partial capture The raw file holds only the lede. The rest of the article's content was reconstructed from a syndicated summary of the piece (an industry-news

Can Joggers Outrun Injury (Economist) [!note] Partial capture Only the opening paragraph was captured. The Economist's framing below is from that lede; the study findings come from the paper's own summaries (BJSM blog, c

Do You Need to Walk 10,000 Steps a Day (Economist) [!note] Partial capture The raw file holds only the opening paragraph of this Well Informed column. The Economist's framing below is from that lede; the findings are fro

How to Train for a Heatwave (Economist) Summary Pegged to England's World Cup squad decamping to Florida two weeks early and to western Europe's third 2026 heatwave, this Science & technology piece explains the physiolog

How Little Exercise Can You Get Away With (Economist) Summary A Well Informed column on the dose-response curve of exercise. The WHO asks for 150 minutes a week of moderate activity plus two strength sessions; fewer than

Why Standing at Your Desk May Be Little Better Than Sitting (Economist) Summary A Well Informed column testing the standing-desk and "active seat" trend against the evidence. Verdict: prolonged sitting is genuinely harmf

Orthosomnia Orthosomnia is the term sleep researchers coined for an unhealthy preoccupation with achieving "perfect" sleep, typically driven by data from a consumer sleep tracker. It is the sleep-specific form of a gener

Sleep Duration and Mortality The relationship between how long people sleep and how healthy they are — including all-cause mortality — is U-shaped : both short and long sleep are associated with worse outcomes than a mid

Sleep Tracking Consumer sleep tracking is the use of a smartwatch, smart ring or phone app to estimate how long and how well a person slept. Adoption is now mass-market: roughly half of US adults (48% in the AASM's 2025

Should You Use a Sleep Tracker (Economist) Summary A Well Informed / Science & Technology column asking two questions of the consumer sleep-tracking boom (nearly half of Americans, ~40% of Britons now track sleep with a

Is Too Much Sleep as Bad as Too Little (Economist) Summary A Well Informed / Science & Technology column testing the "eight hours" rule (traced to Robert Owen's 1817 "eight hours labour, eight hours recreation, eight hou

Food Fads A food fad is a surge in demand for one ingredient or product driven by social contagion rather than by new evidence of need. Fads are old (Georgian pineapples, 1960s fondue), but social media now spreads them

Gut Microbiome The trillions of bacteria in the human gut digest complex carbohydrates into short-chain fatty acids (about 10% of a person's calories ), synthesise vitamin K and several B vitamins , tune the immune syste

Hot Beverages and Oesophageal Cancer The association between drinking very hot liquids and oesophageal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) — one of the two main subtypes of oesophageal cancer, the other being adenocarcinoma (A

Infant Formula Manufactured breast-milk substitute. The regulatory floor is solid (the US FDA requires minimum levels of 30 nutrients including iron, iodine and vitamin D); the open question is whether the premium additi

Hot Coffee Could Cause Oesophageal Cancer (Economist) Summary The capture holds only the opening paragraph: a study published on 8 September 2026 in the International Journal of Cancer "adds to a growing body of evidence

From Protein to Matcha Food Fads Spread Faster Than Ever (Economist) Summary A Business-section piece (sub-head: "Supply chains struggle to keep up") on how social media now builds demand for a single ingredient in weeks

Electrolytes You Probably Don't Need (Economist) Summary A Well Informed / Science & Technology health column. Tracing electrolyte drinks from the 1965 University of Florida origin of Gatorade to today's PepsiCo-driven "

How Good Is Infant Formula (Economist) Summary A Well Informed column on whether the "extras" in modern formula (prebiotics, probiotics, long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, LCPUFAs) deliver the brain, eye and immune

Can You Hack Your Gut Microbiome (Economist) Summary A Well Informed column on whether direct-to-consumer (D2C) stool-testing firms can improve on generic "eat a varied, partly fermented diet" advice. The verdict: divers

Dementia Prevention The evidence that dementia risk is modifiable : partly through a known list of lifestyle and medical risk factors, and partly through one unexpected intervention, the shingles vaccine . Also covers th

Mental Health Access (China) The gap in China between rising prevalence of mental disorders and the capacity, affordability and regulation of treatment. Research notes; one source so far. Prevalence - 191m people with a

A No-Brainer for Protecting Your Brain (Economist) Section: Leaders · Edition: 2026-07-11 Edition · Print headline: "A no-brainer for your brain" Summary A Leader arguing that dementia is less inevitable than the headlin

In China Treatment for Mental-Health Problems Is a Luxury (Economist) Section: China · Edition: 2026-08-15 Edition · Print headline: "Help wanted" Summary A China-section piece on the gap between rising mental-illness pr

The Brain May Be About to Have Its Ozempic Moment (Economist) Section: Science & technology · Edition: 2026-08-15 Edition · Print headline: "Wide awake" Summary The thesis is an analogy: GLP-1s showed what happens when a

IVF Add-ons Optional tests and procedures sold on top of a standard IVF cycle with the promise of raising the chance of a live birth. Context: roughly 60% of IVF attempts fail , which creates demand for anything that mig

Newborn Genome Sequencing Whole-genome sequencing of babies at birth, replacing or extending the heel-prick blood-spot screen. Two goals ride together in nearly every programme: screening (catch treatable genetic disease

Polygenic Embryo Screening Scoring IVF embryos for traits and diseases governed by many genes ( PGT-P ), using polygenic risk scores derived from genome-wide association studies, and choosing which embryo to implant on t

Do High-Tech IVF Add-ons Work (Economist) Summary About 60% of IVF attempts fail , and clinics sell a long menu of optional "add-ons" promising better odds. A review published 23 June 2026 in the Lancet Obstetrics, Gynae

Should Every Baby's DNA Be Sequenced (Economist) Summary A Science & Technology piece on whole-genome screening of newborns. England's Generation Study is sequencing 100,000 babies for around 200 childhood-onset conditio

How Much Would You Pay for a Smarter Baby (Economist) Summary Business feature on the Silicon Valley embryo-screening startups ( Nucleus , Orchid , Herasight ) selling polygenic scores (PGT-P) for disease risk, height, I

In Praise of Designer-ish Babies (Economist) Summary The Leader accompanying How Much Would You Pay for a Smarter Baby (Economist). Position: polygenic embryo screening is immature and over-sold, and the ethical objectio

African Health Sovereignty The push, accelerated by the 2025 collapse of American health aid and stress-tested by the 2026 Ebola outbreak, to fund, staff, supply and regulate African health systems domestically. (Batch t

Childhood Vaccine Schedules The set of vaccines recommended for all children and the timing of doses. In the US the CDC issues the recommendation; states set school-entry requirements, which is why federal changes have l

Covid-19 Policy Retrospective What the record says about why covid outcomes differed between rich countries, with the United States as the outlier. Kept as a ledger of numbers and causes, not of blame. The mortality comp

Ebola Has Put Africa's Fragile Health Systems in the Spotlight (Economist) Summary The worst Ebola outbreak since 2018 (Bundibugyo strain, eastern Congo and Uganda) hit health systems still absorbing the 2025 collapse of

The Real Covid-19 Scandal Is Still Unfolding (Economist) Summary A United States column prompted by Anthony Fauci's Senate Homeland Security Committee appearance (he took the Fifth throughout, on lawyers' advice, after c

Donald Trump Takes a Fresh Swipe at Childhood Vaccines (Economist) Summary On 10 August 2026 a US executive order told the federal government to split the combined MMR vaccine into three shots, give childhood jabs at sep

Cancer Vaccines A therapeutic cancer vaccine trains the immune system to recognise neoantigens — mutated proteins present on a patient's tumour cells but not on healthy ones — so it will destroy cells carrying them. The

KRAS Inhibitors KRAS is a RAS-family signalling protein that acts as a binary on/off switch in the cell-division pathway. A single point mutation can jam it "on", sending a permanent proliferate signal — the defining pat

Lung Cancer Screening and Prevention Lung cancer is the most common cancer diagnosis worldwide despite steep declines in smoking; ex-smokers and people with long exposure to high air pollution remain at elevated risk. Pr

Photobiomodulation Photobiomodulation (PBM) is therapy using red and near-infrared light (typically ~630–850 nm; the studies below use 670 nm). The long wavelengths penetrate tissue and are absorbed by cytochrome c oxida

Skin Ageing and Retinoids Skin ages through two processes: time, and environmental damage from ultraviolet light, pollution and smoking . Both degrade the collagen and elastin fibres of the dermal extracellular matrix, p

Xenotransplantation Xenotransplantation is transplanting organs across species — in current practice, kidneys (and hearts) from pigs whose genomes have been edited with CRISPR to remove the antigens that trigger immediat

A Transplanted Pig Kidney Buys Time for a Human One (Economist) [!note] Partial capture The raw file holds only the article's opening paragraph. The case it describes — Tim Andrews, Massachusetts General Hospital — is do

Edible Medical Sensors (Economist) Summary A long-read on ingestible/edible electronics — sensors and capsules the size of a Tic Tac that travel the GI tract, take continuous chemical readings, and transmit data wireless

A New Drug Targets One of Cancers Master Switches (Economist) Summary The "master switch" is KRAS , a RAS-family signalling protein that, when jammed "on" by a single mutation, tells cells to keep dividing. Daraxonrasib

Predicting and Preventing Lung Cancer (Economist) Summary An international team identified a 14-protein blood "signature" that predicts lung-cancer risk five or more years before diagnosis, opening the door to drug-based

The Chemicals That Reduce Wrinkles (Economist) Summary Most anti-wrinkle product claims rest on company-funded studies, but a handful of ingredients have genuine clinical backing. Tretinoin (a vitamin-A derivative) has t

The Surprising Benefits of Red Light (Economist) Summary A survey of photobiomodulation (PBM) — therapy with red and near-infrared light — from a clinically established use (healing chemotherapy mouth ulcers) through ear

It Now Seems Possible to Vaccinate Against Cancer (Economist) Summary Interim phase 3 results (19 August 2026) for intismeran autogene , a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine from Moderna and Merck given alongside the check