It's crazy when you think about all the different kinds of foods we eat.

We just swallow and hope it all works out for the best.

Well, it turns out there are better ways to think about keeping our bodies humming healthfully

along.

Welcome to Nutrition Facts.

I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Feeling lousy?

Take two aspirin and call me in the morning or not.

To down the podcast, we take a closer look at the health effects of regular aspirin use.

In our first story, we weigh daily aspirin use against the risk of internal bleeding.

Salicylic acid, the active ingredient in aspirin, has been used for thousands of years as an

anti-inflammatory pain killer in the form of willotree bark extract, which hypocrite is

used to treat fever until alleviate pain during childbirth.

It became trademarked as a drug in 1899, and remains to this day probably the most commonly

used drug in the world.

One of the reasons it remains so popular, despite the fact that we have better pain killers

now, is that it also acts as a blood thinner.

Millions of people now take aspirin on a daily basis to treat or prevent heart disease.

It all started back in 1953 with the publication of this landmark study in the New England

Journal of Medicine, length of life and cause of death in rheumatoid arthritis.

Paper started out with the sense it has often been said that the way to live a long life

is to acquire rheumatism.

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