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
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that the commonly-held belief that saturated fat cause heart disease appears to be waning. In the last few weeks alone we have seen the publication of two significant and weighty studies which have found no link between sat fat and heart disease. These come hot on the heels of another […]
Cholesterol and Statins
One of things I try and do on this blog is right what I see as nutritional wrongs. So, if there’s a common perception that artificial sweeteners are better than sugar for weight loss, but there’s really no evidence for that, then I’m inclined to write about it. If the evidence suggests that margarine is […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
My last post here detailed just a few relatively easy-to-apply lifestyle changes that might make good New Year resolutions. One of them, was to eat a ‘primal’ diet ” essentially a diet based on the foods we’ve been eating the longest in terms of our time on this planet. The record suggests that for the […]
Food and Medical Politics
A couple of weeks back I was talking with a close family member, and he mentioned that for many years he had been getting digestive discomfort that tended to come after meals. When I asked to point to where his pain was, he indicated that it was in the middle of the abdomen just at […]
Food and Medical Politics
Most of us will be familiar with the H1N1 (‘swine flu’) pandemic that never was. At the height of the hysteria here in the UK, individuals could phone up a help-line, answer a few questions, and get sent the drug Tamiflu (oseltamivir). According to a news report here, it turns out that only about 20 […]
Food and Medical Politics
Last month I wrote a blog post about how the information about the adverse effects of drugs can be neglected, restricted, distorted and silenced. Why is this important? Well, it can harm and kill people, for a start. Some of you may remember that in 2004 the drug company Merck pulled its painkiller Vioxx (rofecoxib) […]
Food and Medical Politics
Perusing on-line newspapers yesterday I came across this. According to the national newspaper the Observer (UK), Professor Chris Hawkey, president of the British Society of Gastroenterology (BSG), is set to debunk more than a dozen ‘fad’ diets when he addresses Gastro 2009 conference for doctors. Locked in his crosshairs, apparently, are the concepts of chewing […]
Cholesterol and Statins
Type 1 diabetes is a condition characterised by raised levels of sugar in the bloodstream, and it’s underlying cause is a lack of insulin (usually secreted by the pancreas). The condition is ‘auto-immune’ in nature, which means that it is caused by the body’s immune system reacting to and damaging it’s own tissues (in this […]
Brain and Behaviour
Exercise is generally good for health, and one form of exercise that I advocate strongly is walking. Regular walking has been associated with protection from chronic diseases such as heart disease and type 2 diabetes. It also is an activity that tends to take people outdoors. This may have spin-off benefits in terms of, say, […]
Food and Medical Politics
Probably all of us know that life events and ‘stress’ can change our mood, but there’s less acknowledgement, I think, that what we can have impact here too. One example relates to blood sugar imbalance: if blood sugar levels plummet it can switch on the body’s stress response, which in turn can induce feelings of […]