Dr John Briffa's blog, A Good Look at Good Health — writing on food, cholesterol, weight, energy and the science behind everyday health, from the drbriffa.com archive. Filter by topic, browse by category, or search the library.
Food and Medical Politics
Kellogg’s is a company that, in my view, makes a lot of quite-crappy food, particularly breakfast cereals made from highly processed grains with added sugar that are highly disruptive to blood sugar and may well pose hazards for health. Not that you’re likely to learn any of this from Kellogg’s itself, as it continues to […]
Food and Medical Politics
If you’re reading this blog post on 5th March 2012, there’s a good chance you came to it as a result of listening to discussion on BBC Radio 4’s programme ‘You and Yours’ about the most appropriate diet for those suffering from diabetes. You can listen to the broadcast here (the item starts about 15 minutes […]
Brain and Behaviour
I went to a meeting for journalists and broadcasters on Tuesday night, organised by the Guild of Health Writers, dedicated to the subject of dementia. One of the speakers there was Jerome Burne – a London-based health writer of some repute (he won an award from the Medical Journalists Association in January). Jerome in the […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
Baroness Barbara Young is the chief executive of the UK’s largest diabetes charity – Diabetes UK. She’s been on the warpath recently, calling the UK Government out on a ‘lack of political will’ to do something about substandard testing and care of those with diabetes. Baroness Young has this week performed something of a media […]
Food and Medical Politics
Woman’s Hour is an hour-long radio show on the BBC’s Radio 4 station. On Tuesday, I was invited onto the show to discuss weight loss. The item centred around the plight of Sue Lyons – an obese lady who has (like millions of others) failed to control her weight through ‘dieting’. Sue recounts a commonly-heard […]
Food and Medical Politics
Whether a drug is available on the National Health Service (NHS) here in the UK is essentially decided by an organisation known as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE). NICE makes its decisions on drugs based on the cost per ‘quality adjusted life year‘ (QALY). A year in perfect health is 1 […]
Food and Medical Politics
The UK Government is broke, and is doing it’s best to spend as little money as possible, including on pensions. It’s offered state-employed doctors here a pension deal, but the doctors are not happy about it and now there’s talk of strike action. The situation may seem dire for patients who will not have as […]
Food and Medical Politics
News broke last week (see here for an example) that a University of Connecticut researcher had be found to have falsified data concerning his research into the antioxidant resveratrol (found in, among other things, red wine and red grapes). This week the British Medical Journal reports on the fact that a doctor and flu vaccine […]
Food and Medical Politics
I shop for food quite regularly, and so does my girlfriend. We hardly ever shop together, though. When my girlfriend asks me what we need I may have a few ideas but almost always end with this refrain: “Please don’t buy much s**t, because I’ll eat it.” I don’t have a great deal of self-control, […]
Food and Medical Politics
Anti-‘detox’ stance is unscientific and defies common sense, calcium and vitamin D may help rid the body of toxic fat, fever appears to rev up the immune system. For RSS feeds, click onhere.