Berkson’s Blogs

Oxygen is essential for life. But it’s high maintenance. It comes at a cost. When we use oxygen during normal cellular functions to keep us alive and kicking, dangerous reactive oxygen species (ROS) also get produced. These cause aging and cancer. This mechanism happens right inside your skin. As you go outside to hike, bike, golf, or paddle board, your skin is exposed to the sun. There is a good news and bad news part of this story. The good news is that your skin then initiates the rather multi-stepped process of production of vitamin D. This helps you absorb nutrients, [...]

You go to a salad bar. Everything looks so colorful, crispy, and tasty. You don’t know it and can’t see it, but there may be some fungus lurking or even a parasite right inside that healthy-looking lettuce or shredded carrots or in that pile of garbanzo beans. It may have come from the hands of a food handler back in the kitchen who wasn’t wearing gloves. They may not know they are contaminated. Or they may not have washed their hands adequately. Or it may have come in from the water the veggies were washed with. You swallow, and these pathogens [...]

Keeping your brain shape healthy is now a major goal of anti-aging and total wellness in general. Yet many drugs that we consider common, safe, and are widely prescribed, are being shown, by irrefutable brain imaging studies, to decrease brain volume and hamper normal brain metabolism in shockingly short periods of time of regularly taking these medications. The drugs that have this shadow side include many over-the-counter allergy, sleep, incontinence and anxiety medications. You need to know the risk versus benefits of any drugs you are taking. If you must take them, work with a medical nutritionist or functional practitioner who [...]

Cancer in the colon or rectum (colorectal cancer) is the 3rd leading cause of cancer-related deaths. It’s happening in younger people. It used to occur more in seniors. So it was recommended to start colonoscopy screenings at age 50. But more people are getting more colorectal cancers at younger ages. And, sadly and shockingly, colonoscopies are not the complete detection imaging method that we might have thought (this does not mean you should not get them). Many people and doctors do not realize that this. Colonoscopies detect growths called polyps. Polyps are pedunculated. This means they “hang” down on a stem. [...]