Food and Medical Politics
For many, cancer screening has obvious appeal. Detecting the disease through screening will generally mean an earlier diagnosis, and earlier treatment should, by rights, lead to better outcomes. Well, that the theory anyway. In practice, though, we know that screening is most certainly not as effective as we might imagine. For example, mammography has been […]
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 […]
Children's Health
Paleolithic diet and diabetes, thyoid disease and miscarriage, sunlight, vitamin D and Crohn’s disease For RSS feeds, click on http://www.podcastmachine.com/podcasts/8966 and then the ‘RSS feeds’ button to the right. For help regarding the playing, downloading and subscribing of the podcasts, click here.
Pregnancy and Fertility
In conventional medicine it is my experience that we tend to struggle a bit with the diagnosis and management of certain conditions, and near the top of the list (again, in my experience) is low thyroid function (hypothyroidism). Conventional wisdom dictates that ‘normal’ levels of thyroid hormones mean normal thyroid function. The ‘screening’ test for […]
Brain and Behaviour
Some individuals have themselves down as ‘emotional eaters’. The idea here is that they sometimes feel driven to eat foods as a result of their emotional state. Usually, this is in response to ‘negative’ states such as stress, anxiety or sadness. In a moment, I’m going to suggest two approaches that, in my experience, can […]
Nutrients and Supplements
Urinary tract infections are quite-common in women, though they can affect men too. Normally, the cause of these infections appears to be organisms (such as E. coli) making their way up the urethra (the pipe taking urine from the bladder to the outside) into the bladder where they can ‘set up camp’ on the bladder […]
Brain and Behaviour
A round-up of all this week’s blog posts (including exercise and the brain, iodine deficiency and thyroid function and the hazards of modern medicine, as well as an answer to a listener’s question regarding how to treat iron deficiency in pregnancy.
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
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 […]
Healthy Eating
If I were to try and condense what I regard as good nutritional advice into a soundbite, I’d say ‘Eat like a caveman (or cavewoman)’. The idea here being to emulate the diet we as a species evolved on, and are best adapted to. There is, I think, abundant research that strongly supports this as […]