Healthy Eating
When glucose (a sugar) is absorbed from the gut into the bloodstream, a healthy pancreas will secrete the hormone insulin in response. One chief effect of insulin is to reduce blood sugar levels by facilitating the transfer of sugar into the body’s cells. This is a critically important function, and without it sugar levels can […]
Healthy Eating
For many of us, this time of year brings with it generally greater opportunity to eat more than is strictly necessary. While I do not particularly believe in sacrifice or deprivation, I do think it’s useful to be aware of strategies that can be used to prevent over-consumption of food and drink with ease and, […]
Brain and Behaviour
I am a fan of low-carbohydrate eating, and my position is based on the science (showing it to be usually effective for weight loss and improvements in disease markers) and my experience with it in practice. However, not everyone shares my enthusiasm for this way of eating. Many people like to paint carbohydrate restriction as […]
Healthy Eating
The big diet news of the week surely has to be the publication of a study in the New England Journal of Medicine comparing the effect of different types of diet on weight regain [1]. In this study, 938 ‘obese’ (average body mass index – 34) adults (average age – 41) were put on an […]
Food and Medical Politics
Who decides what we should eat? Usually Government departments advised by scientists and researchers. Here in the UK, that job was entrusted to the Food Standards Agency until recently. And what a mess this body made of giving us science-based information and advice. See here, here, here and here for some examples of the sort […]
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 […]
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 […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
Back in December I wrote this post which explored the apparent ability of cinnamon to reduce blood sugar levels, particularly in diabetics. One of the studies mentioned in this post showed that cinnamon added to normal diabetic care led to improved outcomes compared to standard diabetic care alone. While this result was certainly promising, the […]
Healthy Eating
Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in men in the Western world. However, many of these cancers are slow growing, and do not prove to be fatal. Many men, actually, will die with prostate cancer that never showed itself when they were alive. However, prostate cancer can and does kill with enough […]