Food and Medical Politics
Mammography involves taking X-rays of the breast, in an effort to detect breast cancer earlier, with the hope that treatment will be more effective. It’s an approach that appears to make eminent sense. Yet, objective study of mammography shows that it doesn’t work so well. For a start, many, many women have to undergo screening […]
Cholesterol and Statins
Big cholesterol news emerged last week on the publication (much publicised) of a massive meta-analysis of statin treatment in those at relatively high risk of cardiovascular disease. The idea of this meta-analysis was to assess whether aggressive lowering of cholesterol (specifically LDL-cholesterol) brings additional benefits in terms of cardiovascular disease protection. The meta-analysis included results […]
Food and Medical Politics
Burgeoning rates of obesity and chronic disease here in the UK have caused our Government to consider and then implement a number of initiatives designed, we are led to believe, to assist us in our attaining and maintaining of a healthy weight. It is considering, for instance, putting a tax on fatty foods. The idea […]
Healthy Eating
Earlier this week my eye was drawn to this report. It concerns the attempts of a professor of human nutrition at the Kansas State university in US to prove that weight management is down to caloric balance and nothing else. The experiment appears to counter the idea that low-carbohydrate diets have merit over those richer […]
Brain and Behaviour
Suck the water out of the brain and what’s left is mainly fat. Fat, one could argue, is ‘brain food’, and one particular fat that has received attention with regard to this is DHA (docosahexaenoic acid). DHA is one of the two main types of ‘omega-3’ fat found abundantly in fish such as sardines, mackerel, […]
Uncategorized
Eggs are one food that have had wildly different press from the nutritional community over the years. Back in the 1950s, here in the UK, we were encouraged to ‘go to work on an egg’ All that changed, though, when we got all cholesterol-conscious and fat-phobic back in the 70s and 80s. Recently, there was […]
Healthy Eating
Here in the UK, temperatures have dropped noticeably of late, which naturally leads people to seek out warmer, ‘heartier’ food than, say, summer salads. One option here is to eat a bog-standard ‘primal meal made up of meat, fish or eggs (e.g. omelette) with some vegetables. Such options are ‘doable’ for most in the evening, […]
Exercise and Activity
While aerobic exercise such as walking, running and cycling appears not to be great for weight loss, I am enthusiastic about it for likely benefits for both body and brain. But there are limits. While exercise may be broadly healthy, more is not necessarily better. For example, practically every amateur runner I have ever met […]
Cholesterol and Statins
In my regular trawl through on-line newspapers this week I came across this story in the Telegraph (UK). Apparently, death rates in the UK are at a record low. This is, on the surface, a good thing. However, such statistics can belie the fact that while individuals may be living longer, the quality of the […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
Last week, one of my blogs explored the potential for the sugar fructose to provoke unwanted bowel symptoms including abdominal discomfort and bloating. I mentioned, albeit in passing, that there were likely other reasons to be somewhat wary of fructose. It has, for instance, been implicated as a potentially potent cause of weight gain and […]