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.
Children's Health
Over the years, I’ve spoken to or have been consulted by a fair few people who, by their own admission, don’t have the best eating habits. A quite common picture I see involves the skipping or breakfast, a sandwich-centric lunch, followed by general overeating in the evening. This will usually entail some snacking before supper […]
Exercise and Activity
I was in a meeting today, and the subject of weight loss came up. As some of you may know, I have previously written about how exercise tends not to be particularly effective for those wishing to shed pounds. I made the point that those wanting to lose weight would do better to, among other […]
Healthy Eating
Most of us will be all too aware of the long-standing and regularly-rammed home recommendations to eat less fat. Fat, and animal fat in particular, is often said to be at the root of many of our ills including obesity and heart disease. However often and forcibly this notion is repeated, the fact remains that […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
It’s difficult to avoid the doom-laden statistics concerning rates of overweight and obesity. And at the same time we’ll no doubt be aware of the standard advice for those wanting to lose weight: ‘eat less and exercise more.’ The problem is, the evidence suggests that neither of these approaches is particularly effective for the purposes […]
Healthy Eating
There’s a general view out there, I think, that vegetarian and vegan diets are, on balance, healthier than those that include flesh foods including meat. I personally don’t agree with this view. My beliefs on this are partly based on the evidence that non-vegetarians don’t appear to have their lives curtailed by their consumption of […]
Cholesterol and Statins
Here in the UK we look to the Government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) to guide us regarding what we should be eating, and we also trust them when it comes to ensuring the food industry doesn’t offer us too much shite to eat. Or that’s the theory, anyway. In reality, I reckon the FSA does […]
Brain and Behaviour
Just like overweight individuals are often seen as greedy or lazy (that’s not a view I hold myself, I should add), prison inmates and young delinquents are generally seen as ‘bad’. But are they? Could, for instance, their errant behaviour and criminal ways be related to something more physiological than social or psychological? Say if […]
Food and Medical Politics
Those of you familiar with my nutritional beliefs will know that I don’t have too many good things to say about the ‘low-fat’ paradigm that has pervaded nutritional advice for some 30 years. Not only do I believe that there is not much to be feared in naturally-occurring fats in the diet, but the fat-phobia […]
Healthy Eating
You don’t have to wait too long before reading some statistic or other that tells us about how rates of obesity are soaring left, right and centre. As ever, though, the advice to ‘eat less and exercise more’ remains the same. That’s a shame, seeing as there is abundant evidence that neither of these approaches […]
Children's Health
I think they’d be few people who will not have noticed that children’s diets have deteriorated significantly over the last few decades. More and more, it seems, children are eating less real food, and way more rubbish stuff such as processed foods high in refined sugar, processed fats and other unwanted additives including salt, colourings, […]