A Walk Around the Block At "The Daily Lipid" (And Welcome, Mark Sisson Devotees!)

In the hours since Mark Sisson posted "18 Underrated Blogs You Should Be Reading" over 700 people have clicked their way over here from that post.  Welcome!  And thanks Mr. Sisson!

Here's a brief introduction for people new to my blog.  Long-time readers might find this collection of links useful too.

I'm a doctoral candidate in Nutritional Sciences at the University of Connecticut.  I've been in grad school since January of 2008 and I'm hoping to finish later this year, but I've been writing about nutrition since the fall of 2004, when I wrote "Vitamin A: The Forgotten Bodybuilding Nutrient" for Wise Traditions, the quarterly journal of the Weston A. Price Foundation.  The next spring I wrote  my initial review of The China Study for the same journal, which was a major go-to source for a critical review of that book until Denise Minger thoroughly and completely dismantled the book last summer.  


Perhaps my most significant Wise Traditions article has been "On the Trail of the Elusive X Factor: A Sixty-Two Year Old Mystery Finally Solved -- Vitamin K2 Revealed," which I wrote in the spring of 2007.  My most recent Wise Traditions article is "Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease: A Silent Epidemic of Nutritional Imbalance."

The Daily Lipid is part of Cholesterol-And-Health.Com.  While my blog deals with all sorts of nutritional and sometimes other health-related topics (genetics, sleep, metabolism, etc), the main purpose of Cholesterol-And-Health.Com is to promote awareness of the helpful roles that cholesterol plays in the body and the importance of cholesterol-rich foods in the diet.  On my home page, I describe how a number of scientists have proclaimed themselves as generals in a "war" against cholesterol.  This paragraph sums up the purpose of my site pretty well:

Science is a Search for Truth, Not a War

Those who wage "war" on cholesterol may have impeccable scientific credentials but they are not acting like scientists. Science is not a war against molecules. It is a search for truth. 

On this site, I look for the truth about cholesterol, and I publish what I find. I hope you find this search for truth as fascinating as I do, and I hope you enjoy the site!

I'm not engaged in a war against any molecules, in fact.  I'm highly critical of refined sugar, white flour, and vegetable oil, but I'm not involved in a war against fructose, gluten, or PUFAs.


I just do the best job I can, trying to find the truth about these things, trying to explain it in a way that's easy to understand, and trying to be honest with myself and my readers in the process.

Cholesterol-And-Health.Com, excluding The Daily Lipid blog posts, gets about 60,000 unique visitors, 80,000 visits, and 120,000 page views each month.  That's up from 3500 visitors, 5000 visits, and 8500 page views in August of 2005, the site's first full month on the 'Net.


Over half of my traffic comes directly from Google.  Other top referrers include PerfectHealthDiet.Com, Whole Health Source, Livin La Vida Low-Carb, and Hunt Gather Love.  Each of these sources accounts for less than 0.1% of my traffic, so the people who have contributed to the growth of this site are obviously too innumerable to mention, but I owe a deep debt of gratitude to all of them.  Especially Melissa of Hunt Gather Love, for personal reasons.


Here are some of the most popular pages:

• The Incredible, Edible Egg Yolk
• The Truth About the China Study
• Foods High in Cholesterol Could Save Your Health!

The Daily Lipid, the blog you're reading now, is hosted on Blogger and routed through Cholesterol-And-Health.Com.  I haven't had Google Analytics running the traffic stats on the blog long enough to have a full report, but this blog has been getting just under 60,000 page views per month this year.  Evolutionary Psychiatry, Rense.Com, Conditioning Research, Whole Health Source,  Dr. Eades' Twitter feed, Free the Animal, Hunt Gather Love, and Perfect Health Diet are important contributors to my blog traffic.  

Here are the top ten blog posts:

• Review of Tim Ferriss's The 4-Hour Body
  
  
• The Sweet Truth About Liver and Egg Yolks — Choline Matters More to Fatty Liver Than Sugar, Alcohol, or Fat
  
  
• How a Study Can Show Something to Be True When It's Completely False -- Regression to the Mean
  
  
• Anyone Doing Paleo Without Liver, Bones, Skin, and Greens?
  
  
• Genes, LDL-Cholesterol, and the Central Role of LDL Receptor Activity in Heart Disease
  
  
• Getting Better Sleep -- Cool, Dark, and Lots of B6, Carbs, Calories, and Fat
  
  
• Meeting the Choline Requirement -- Eggs, Organs, and the Wheat Paradox
  
  
• New Study Shows Lying About Your Hamburger Intake Prevents Disease and Death When You Eat a Low-Carb Diet High in Carbohydrates
  
  
• High Fructose Corn Syrup Is Sweet Poison, Honey Is Yummy -- Against "Pulling a Campbell"
  
  
• Gluten Sensitivity -- Promises and Problems

My post "Can Christians Be Paleo? Christianity, Faith, Evidence, Dobzhansky, Evolution, and More" has the distinction of having the most comments.

I also write a blog Mother Nature Obeyed over at WestonAPrice.Org.  The name is taken from the closing words of Weston A. Price's epic work Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, "Life in all its fullness is this Mother Nature obeyed."  That blog is home to "The Curious Case of Campbell's Rats -- Does Protein Deficiency Prevent Cancer?" and many other posts.  For a collection of my articles on the fat-soluble vitamins, see here and here.

The best way to keep up with this blog is with an RSS feed, Facebook, or Twitter.  I post links to all my posts from Mother Nature Obeyed here at The Daily Lipid, so you can keep up with all my stuff through any one of these three ways.


Again, welcome, and again, thanks Mark Sisson for the hat tip!