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.
Brain and Behaviour
I learned this week that life expectancy in the UK has reached an all-time high. Yet, while quantity of life is important to most of us, so is quality of life. What the life expectancy statistics don’t tell us about is health issues that can come as part and parcel of the ageing process that […]
Food and Medical Politics
Those familiar with my work will know that, generally speaking, I am a relative fan of diets that are largely bereft of starchy carbohydrates such as bread, potatoes, rice, pasta and breakfast cereals. A combination of a generally fast-sugar-releasing nature and the fact that they tend to be eaten in quantity gives these foods considerable […]
Food and Medical Politics
Last week I wrote a piece challenging prevailing nutritional wisdom about the role of dietary fat in the burgeoning rates of fatness seen in many countries [click here]. Of course, obesity is not the only condition usually put down to fat in the diet ” another is heart disease. In fact, health professionals often trot […]
Children's Health
Fruit juices generally have a healthy reputation, and a lot of people see them as a decent swap for whole fruit. However, for a variety of reasons, fruit juice actually bears only a passing relationship to the from whence it came. One reason for this relates to the fact that many nutritious elements in the […]
Healthy Eating
It was hard to miss the story recently which trumpeted the miraculous, health-preserving properties of a plant chemical in red wine known as resveratrol. Recent research conducted at Harvard Medical School in the USA found that feeding mice with resveratrol helped counteract the ill effects of a fatty, calorie-laden diet. Unfortunately, the results of studies […]
Healthy Eating
Today’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association publishes yet another study in the tide of research focusing on the health effects of consuming fish [1]. Researchers from the American School of Public Health discovered that eating fish once or twice a week is associated with a 36 per cent reduced risk of […]
Brain and Behaviour
The home page of drbriffa.com asks: Ever noticed how health advice, especially natural health advice, can seem to flick-flack from one extreme to another? Well, another example of the way health advice can seemingly blow in the wind came about this week when pregnant women were advised to be on ‘oily fish alert’. For some […]
Brain and Behaviour
Today’s big health story is the National Institute of Clinical Excellence’s (NICE) final decision to restrict the prescribing of drugs for Alzheimer’s disease. Basically, NICE has said that there’s not enough evidence of cost-effectiveness to support the use of such drugs in individuals in the early stages of this condition. Patient groups, including the Alzheimer’s […]
Exercise and Activity
The on-line version of the British Medical Journal recently published a study in which the effects of exercise on body weight was assessed in some 545 children with an average age of 4 [1] The children exercised for 30 minutes, three times a week. Basically, this additional exercise made no difference to their weight. The […]
Children's Health
This month’s edition of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition has published a study which found that women drinking four or more cola drinks a week were at increased risk of reduced bone density (1). And this is not the first evidence that has linked the drinking of fizzy drinks to weaker bones. A number […]