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Laurie maintains the following Web sites: www.nottrivialbook.com, www.thindiabetes.com, www.gorillaprotein.com, www.nomeasles.com. SHARE
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Laurie taught herself to read at age 4 by analyzing the spelling of the rhyming words in Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss. She has worked as an editor in medical and academic publishing for more than 25 years. She is the author of five books:
Don't Feed the Narcissists! The Mythology and Science of Mental Health
Not Trivial: How Studying the Traditional Liberal Arts Can Set You Free
Thin Diabetes, Fat Diabetes: Prevent Type 1, Cure Type 2
No More Measles: The Truth About Vaccines and Your Health
Where Do Gorillas Get Their Protein? What We Really Know About Diet and Health
(42 comments) SHARE Sunday, December 16, 2012 The Unspeakable Original Intent of the Second Amendment
The original purpose of the Second Amendment was never to enable citizens to attack their government. It was to enable white men to control slaves and Indians.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 21, 2017 Can Donald Trump Read?
Donald Trump does not use teleprompters. Is it because he cannot read? Donald Trump shows many of the telltale signs of functional illiteracy. Journalists should demand that President Trump show us whether he can read.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 28, 2013 Eating Meat, Dairy, Eggs, and Fish Can Make Your Breath Stink!
Dental problems can cause bad breath, but so can eating too much protein, especially protein from animals. Animal protein is particularly rich in the sulfur-containing amino acids that give rise to stinky compounds such as methyl mercaptan.
(1 comments) SHARE Tuesday, April 17, 2012 Why Did the Educators in the U.S. Abandon Phonics?
The scientific evidence was always clear: intensive phonics is the best way to teach people to read English. So why did so many American educators discard phonics altogether, or at least push it to the sidelines? Is it because effective public education was destroying the privileges of the upper middle class?
(10 comments) SHARE Saturday, January 26, 2013 You Can Fix Stupid
Comedian Ron White says, "You can't fix stupid." Yet philosophy and education were developed specifically for the purpose of "fixing stupid." If people remain stupid after having been through school, then their schools need to be fixed.
(24 comments) SHARE Monday, September 2, 2013 Is Dyslexia Really a Learning Disability?
The word dyslexia was originally used to refer to the loss of the ability to read after a brain injury. Today, it is applied to seemingly normal children who are not learning to read in school. But is the problem really in the child, or is it in the school? Labeling the child as learning disabled can cause the problems in the school to go unrecognized and unsolved.
(39 comments) SHARE Friday, December 29, 2017 Science Journal Spreads False Rumors About Vegan Diet
An article published in the prestigious journal PNAS falsely claims that a shift to a vegan diet would be harmful to human beings. The article was written by people who study livestock, not human health and nutrition.
SHARE Monday, December 9, 2013 High-Carb Diets Improve Blood Sugar Control
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, medical research showed that high-fat and high-protein diets undermined the body' ability to control blood sugar. In contrast, high-carbohydrate diets improved blood sugar control, in diabetics as well as in healthy subjects. Yet many physicians today are still telling their patient to reduce their intake of carbohydrates.
(15 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 8, 2015 Nearly Everything You Have Been Told About Diabetes Is False
The most common form of diabetes can be reversed by eating a low-fat, purely plant-based diet. Unfortunately, doctors have been learning practically nothing about nutrition and dietetics in medical school. To solve this problem, healthcare reform activists need to lobby state legislatures and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education.
(6 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 20, 2016 How Language Arts Teachers Will Save Democracy
To play a meaningful role in politics, you need some skills that should be taught in language arts class. Teachers need to ignore the "experts" who want to strip the traditional disciplines (phonics and grammar) out of the curriculum.
(7 comments) SHARE Sunday, May 13, 2012 Starches Are the Solution to Your Weight and Health Problems
The Starch Solution explains that a diet based on unrefined starches and vegetables is the easy and natural way to control weight and prevent or reverse chronic disease.
SHARE Tuesday, March 27, 2012 Constipation Can Cause Pants-Wetting and Bed-Wetting
If a child or teen is wetting his or her pants or wetting the bed, the real cause may be constipation. Adding more fiber to the diet and eliminating dairy products usually solves the problem.
(11 comments) SHARE Friday, March 31, 2017 Doctors Should Use Vitamin C to Treat Sepsis
A combination of intravenous vitamin C, vitamin B1, and steroids prevents people from dying of sepsis. Doctors should not wait for a placebo-controlled study before they start using this simple, cheap, and safe treatment for a disease that threatens life and limb.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, September 26, 2015 Kim Davis and Civil Disobedience
Kim Davis's refusal to issue marriage licenses was an act of civil disobedience. Civil disobedience is political theater. For an act of civil disobedience to be effective, its actors must be well-cast, its audience must be large, and its message must resonate with that audience. When progressives use civil disobedience, it means they are serious. When conservatives resort to it, it means they are losing.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, November 17, 2016 See a Registered Dietitian (RD) Instead of a Lyme Literate MD (LLMD)
Many patients are being given a false diagnosis of chronic Lyme disease. As a result, they are given treatments that do no good and may do serious harm. The overuse of antibiotics in these cases is a threat to public health, as well as to the patient.
SHARE Friday, September 20, 2013 Low-Fat, Plant-Based Diet Protects the Prostate
A low-fat, high-fiber diet helps prevent prostate enlargement and prostate cancer. It can even help to prevent the progression of existing prostate cancers.
(3 comments) SHARE Thursday, March 22, 2012 Yet Another Silly Study About White Rice!
A recent article blames white rice for obesity and type 2 diabetes. Yet populations that have based their diet on white rice have been largely free of both problems. How can that be?
(27 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 14, 2013 Why Trolls Attack!
Some Internet trolls are just jerks. They simply want to annoy other people. Others imagine that they are taking part in a genuine intellectual exchange. The problem is that they never learned grammar and logic in school. Thus, they never learned to parse or reason. As a result, they have no idea that they are unreasonable.
SHARE Tuesday, September 25, 2012 Hopefully, Grammar Schools Will Go Back to Teaching Grammar
It's okay to use 'hopefully' as a sentence adverb. It's not okay that so many of our public schools in the United States have stopped teaching grammar. The study of grammar provides the basic skills that one needs for logical thinking. That's why grammar was traditionally taught to free people but not to slaves.
(9 comments) SHARE Friday, November 2, 2012 Lesson from the Hurricane: We Need Government, Not Charity
Big disasters show us the need for big government. If we had to rely on private charity, the help that we'd get would be too little, too late, wildly inappropriate, or with too many strings attached.
(57 comments) SHARE Tuesday, July 8, 2014 The Fed Is Not the Problem
Ignore the conspiracy theories. The Federal Reserve is not the problem. The problem is that ordinary people are not electing people who care about ordinary people.
(4 comments) SHARE Sunday, November 2, 2014 Can You Read This? (How Sight Words Cause Dyslexia)
Even the children who have learned several hundred sight words cannot read real stories. Until the child learns phonics, any attempt at reading a real story will be a humiliating, pointless ordeal.
(12 comments) SHARE Monday, October 28, 2013 Why Blame the Teachers When the Problem Is Their Bosses?
Why blame the teachers for the problems in our public schools, when most of those problems are the result of policy decisions that are made at the top of the educational establishment?
(4 comments) SHARE Friday, October 21, 2016 Should Psychiatrists Render Opinions on Political Candidates' Mental Fitness?
American psychiatrists are not supposed to offer psychiatric diagnoses of public figures whom they have not formally evaluated. Fortunately, we voters do not need the psychiatrists' help in judging whether a public figure has a personality disorder.
(6 comments) SHARE Friday, March 16, 2012 Does Your Child Need Drugs or Phonics?
Many emotional and behavior problems in children are the result of an ineffective approach to teaching reading, not to a disease of the child's nervous system. Many of these problems go away by themselves if a proper method is used to teach the child to read.
(1 comments) SHARE Monday, June 4, 2012 Someone Else's Weed-Killers Are Killing My Tomato Plants
Beware of using manure to fertilize your vegetable garden. The manure could contain long-lasting herbicides (weed-killers) that can destroy your vegetables.
(28 comments) SHARE Saturday, October 29, 2016 Who Took the Mercury Out of Vaccines?
Jill Stein has suggested that the FDA cannot be trusted to make good decisions about vaccine safety. In reality, our vaccines are safe because FDA and CDC take vaccine safety very seriously. The best way to fight the false rumors about vaccines is to focus on disease eradication. Once a disease is extinct, sales of the vaccine against it drop to zero.
SHARE Monday, October 20, 2014 The Most Violent People on Earth!
Toddlers are like tiny drunks. To transform them into well-behaved children, you need to teach them important lessons, such as don't hit people. To help them grow into responsible adults, you must teach them a set of subjects that are sadly being neglected in our public schools. Subjects such as grammar, logic, and rhetoric were once called the liberal arts because they were to be reserved for free men, as opposed to slaves.
(5 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 23, 2013 What I Learned From the McGuffey Readers
The McGuffey Readers taught me that the children of my generation were learning abnormally slowly by historical standards. The problem was that the educational system in the United States had abandoned direct instruction in intensive phonics. Our educational system is still using sight words instead of intensive phonics for teaching reading, and children are still learning slowly, if at all.
SHARE Sunday, July 15, 2012 The Three Stooges Do Phonics!
The Three Stooges knew the importance of systematic instruction in phonics. Unfortunately, many of our educators do not.
SHARE Friday, March 16, 2012 Is Your Child Really Reading, or Just Guessing?
This article describes a simple test that parents can use to see whether their children are really reading, or are simply guessing. Unless children can accurately identify the words that were actually written, they aren't reading.
(9 comments) SHARE Thursday, June 9, 2016 This Summar, Cure Your Child's Dyslexia
Dyslexia is not a brain disease. It is the result of using sight words instead of phonics for teaching reading. This summer, use phonics to teach your child to read.
(3 comments) SHARE Tuesday, March 20, 2012 Should Children Learn to Read What the Writer Actually Wrote?
Children who aren't taught phonics have trouble learning to read. Many educators think that it's okay to teach children to guess instead of to read what's really on the page, but is that really reading?
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, November 23, 2013 Is Logic Politically Incorrect?
Some people on the left believe that logic is "Western." Yet that belief may be a symptom of a cultural bias called Orientalism.
(4 comments) SHARE Saturday, February 16, 2013 Why Not Let a Child Escape From a Bad Teacher?
If a child is suffering because his or her teacher is a bully or is simply not connecting with that child, why should the child have to finish the entire year in that classroom? Transferring the child to a different classroom can help the child and can reveal the cause of the problem.
(2 comments) SHARE Thursday, May 15, 2014 Should You Moderate Your Web Site Comments?
Is the comment section of your Web site a forum for serious discussions that advance understanding and help build consensus for productive action? Or is it a nasty playground for bullies? Laurie Endicott Thomas explains how you can enforce civility in your Web site's comments section.
SHARE Tuesday, June 24, 2014 Yes, Virginia, the Income Tax Is Constitutional
The U.S. Constitution gives the federal government the power to lay and collect taxes. However, it originally required that the amount of direct taxes (such as income or property tax) collected from each state had to be proportional to the state's population. That rule was overturned in 1913, with the ratification of the 16th Amendment.