Healthy Eating
Table sugar, the form of sugar individuals generally spoon into their tea or coffee or use when making, say, cakes and puddings, is comprised of sucrose. Sucrose is technically termed a ‘disaccharide’, a term used to describe sugars which are comprised of two individual sugar molecules joined together. Those two sugars, in the case of […]
Brain and Behaviour
Today’s post on drbriffa.com is its 1000th. I’m marking the occasion with a personal account of my health and wellbeing transformation over my life. Many people who don’t know me imagine, given my profession, that I’m a naturally health-conscious and relatively clean-living individual. Actually, that’s not true at all. For long periods in my earlier […]
Brain and Behaviour
Monosodium glutamate (MSG) is a flavour enhancer used liberally in processed foods and Asian cuisine. While MSG is a permitted ingredient in the food supply, there have in the past been questions asked about its potential role in weight gain and obesity. In 2008, I wrote a post about research linking MSG with increased body […]
Healthy Eating
While some see body weight as simply a function of the balance of the calories going into and out of the body, there is little doubt in my mind that this stance is becoming increasingly untenable. It is clear that body fat regulation is influenced by many factors, including levels of key hormones. A central […]
Healthy Eating
The conventional view is that obesity is the result of eating too much and/or not being active enough. I don’t quite subscribe to this view myself, as I see body weight as the result of a complex interplay between a variety of factors including the form calories come in the diet and hormonal factors. One […]
Exercise and Activity
‘Aerobic’ exercises such as walking, running and cycling can undoubtedly have benefits for health and wellbeing, but as I’ve written about more than once, there is scant evidence these forms of activity do much in terms of weight loss. One reason for this is the fact that these activities, unless quite-intense and extended in duration, […]
Healthy Eating
I’m a big believer that if individuals want to eat healthily easily, it makes sense not to let the appetite run out of control. Once we get ravenously hungry the desire to eat rubbish can be overwhelming. One of the strategies I have generally advocated to achieve good appetite control is to eat the right […]
Exercise and Activity
Sleep
My eye was caught by the report of a study presented this week at the American Heart Association meeting in Atlanta in the US. In short, what this research found is that sleep deprivation led to increased eating (in the order of about 300 calories a day). This is not the first study to link […]
Exercise and Activity
There’s a quite widely-held view that the solution to obesity is simple – we just need to eat less and exercise more. Despite the sense that seems to surround this notion, the reality is that such strategies generally fail to deliver significant weight loss benefits in the long term. I have written before about the […]