Publisher Health

His studies showed that a B vitamin deficiency could cause hardened arteries. It took the medical profession more than a decade to catch up.Kilmer S. McCully, a pathologist at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s and ’70s whose colleagues banished him to the basement for insisting — correctly, it turned out — that homocysteine, an amino acid, was being overlooked as a possible risk factor for heart disease, died on Feb. 21 at his home in Winchester, Mass. He was 91.His daughter, Martha McCully, said the cause was metastatic prostate cancer. His death was not widely reported at the time.Still a debated idea today, Dr. McCully’s theory — that inadequate intake of certain B vitamins causes high levels of homocysteine in the blood, hardening the arteries with plaque — challenged the cholesterol-focused paradigm backed by the pharmaceutical industry.Dr. McCully didn’t think cholesterol should be ignored, but he thought it was malpractice to disregard the significance of homocysteine. His bosses at Harvard disagreed. First, they moved his lab below ground; then they told him to leave. He struggled to find work for years.“It was very traumatic,” he told the New York Times medical reporter Gina Kolata in 1995. “People don’t believe you. They think you’re crazy.”Dr. McCully, fashioning himself as a microbe hunter akin to Louis Pasteur, stumbled on homocysteine in the late 1960s at a medical conference in Boston. There he learned about homocystinuria, a genetic disease in which high amounts of homocysteine are found in the urine of some developmentally disabled children.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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A law passed in 2011 required food companies to track food in the event of contamination and a recall. The administration delayed the move, set to take effect next year, for 30 months.The Food and Drug Administration said on Thursday that it would delay by 30 months a requirement that food companies and grocers rapidly trace contaminated food through the supply chain and pull it off the shelves.Intended to “limit food-borne illness and death,” the rule required companies and individuals to maintain better records to identify where foods are grown, packed, processed or manufactured. It was set to go into effect in January 2026 as part of a landmark food safety law passed in 2011, and was advanced during President Trump’s first term.Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, has expressed interest in chemical safety in food, moving to ban food dyes and on Thursday debuting a public database where people can track toxins in foods. But other actions in the first months of the Trump administration have undercut efforts to tackle bacteria and other contaminants in food that have sickened people. The administration’s cutbacks included shutting down the work of a key food-safety committee and freezing the spending on credit cards of scientists doing routine tests to detect pathogens in food.There were several high-profile outbreaks in recent years, including the cases last year linked to deadly listeria in Boar’s Head meat and E. coli in onions on McDonald’s Quarter Pounders.The postponement raised alarms among some advocacy organizations on Thursday.“This decision is extremely disappointing and puts consumers at risk of getting sick from unsafe food because a small segment of the industry pushed for delay, despite having 15 years to prepare,” said Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports, an advocacy group.Many retailers have already taken the steps to comply with the rule. Still, trade groups for the food industry lobbied to delay implementation of the rule in December, according to The Los Angeles Times.In a letter to President Trump in December, food makers and other corporate trade groups cited a number of regulations that they said were “strangling our economy.” They asked for the food traceability rule to be pared back and delayed.“This is a huge step backward for food safety,” said Sarah Sorscher, director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. “What’s so surprising about it is this was a bipartisan rule.”Ms. Sorscher said there was broad support for the measure, since it would protect consumers and businesses, which could limit the harm, the reputational damage and the cost of a food recall with a high-tech supply chain.

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An investigation has been launched into allegations that unauthorised people were allowed to watch procedures being carried out in hospital operating theatres.

Cancer screenings have been missed and criminal convictions overlooked because of how data is collected about people’s biological sex and gender identity, an independent review found.

Dr. Joe Whittington, 47, has been an emergency room physician for two decades, but he can still find it tough to quiet his mind after leaving the hospital.As he tried to doze off after one particularly chaotic shift, he kept thinking about a victim of a motorcycle crash whose vital signs had tanked, a patient who developed sepsis and another whose heart had suddenly stopped beating.His tendency to replay the night’s events — and his irregular work hours — often made it tricky for him to fall asleep. Over the years, he tried deep breathing, meditation and melatonin, before finally stumbling upon a technique called cognitive shuffling.The sleep strategy helps to “force my mind out of that loop and into a state where I can finally rest,” said Dr. Whittington, who has shared it on his Instagram account, which has more than 750,000 followers.“Cognitive shuffling” has been touted on social media for years, but does it really work? We spoke with sleep experts and the scientist who created the technique to learn more.What is cognitive shuffling?Cognitive shuffling is a mental exercise that involves focusing your mind on words that have no association with one another, as a way of signaling to your brain that it’s time to fall asleep. The task is meant to be engaging enough to distract you from the thoughts that may be preventing you from falling asleep, but not so interesting that your brain perks up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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