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Nutrition Topics
Stephanie Seneff, PhD

In this all-day presentation, I will show how most if not all modern diseases and conditions -- diabetes, obesity, heart disease, arthritis, autism, Alzheimer's disease, etc. -- can be traced back to nutritional deficiencies and environmental toxins.  I will argue that the key factor in all of these conditions is sulfate deficiency (in the soil, in the plants, and in our bodies), and I will show how Big Pharma and Big Farming have led us to our current health care crisis. I will explain the crucial positive roles that bacteria play in maintaining health and biological equipose, and, more generally, how widespread use of antibiotics and environmental toxins is causing great harm by destroying bacterial ecosystems.

In the first half of the talk, I will focus on nutrition, discussing which foods are healthy or unhealthy, and why, as well as describing how modern farming and food processing methods are eroding our health.  The second half of the lecture concerns biological mechanisms.  I will focus on the importance of sunlight-stimulated cholesterol sulfate synthesis in the skin to health, and will show that many of the modern diseases can be traced back to deficiencies in cholesterol and sulfate. Important topics include cholesterol transport, blood homeostasis, autophagy, and the effects of various environmental toxins.  I will also devote considerable time to a discussion of how bacteria rescue us from our health crises. I will provide specific recommendations for dietary and lifestyle practices that will lead us back to good health.

Stephanie Seneff, PhD, is a Senior Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. She has a Bachelor's degree from MIT in biology with a minor in food and nutrition, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, also from MIT.

Throughout her career, Dr. Seneff has conducted research in diverse areas, including human auditory modeling, spoken dialogue systems, natural language processing, information retrieval and summarization, and computational biology. She has published nearly 200 refereed articles in technical journals and conferences on these subjects, and has been invited to give several keynote speeches. Dr. Seneff has recently become interested in the effect of drugs and diet on health and nutrition, and she has written several essays on the web articulating her view on these topics. She is currently developing spoken dialogue systems to support intelligent search and summarization of user-provided reviews in the medical domain. She is the first author of three recently published papers on theories proposing that a high-carbohydrate diet contributes to the metabolic syndrome and to Alzheimer's disease, and that sulfur and vitamin D deficiencies play an important role in autism.