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
Who decides what we should eat? Usually Government departments advised by scientists and researchers. Here in the UK, that job was entrusted to the Food Standards Agency until recently. And what a mess this body made of giving us science-based information and advice. See here, here, here and here for some examples of the sort […]
Food and Medical Politics
Burgeoning rates of obesity and chronic disease here in the UK have caused our Government to consider and then implement a number of initiatives designed, we are led to believe, to assist us in our attaining and maintaining of a healthy weight. It is considering, for instance, putting a tax on fatty foods. The idea […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
Last week, one of my blogs explored the potential for the sugar fructose to provoke unwanted bowel symptoms including abdominal discomfort and bloating. I mentioned, albeit in passing, that there were likely other reasons to be somewhat wary of fructose. It has, for instance, been implicated as a potentially potent cause of weight gain and […]
Children's Health
One of the emerging themes in nutrition over the last decade has been just how toxic the sugar fructose can be to the body. This sugar, originally touted as ‘healthy’ as a result of the fact that it was found in fruit and did not raise blood sugar levels in the short term, has been […]
Healthy Eating
There’s no shortage of awareness about the burgeoning rates of overweight and obesity afflicting Westernised countries. There are two principle theories about what causes obesity: 1. It’s all about calories in/calories out Proponents of this theory state that body weight is simply a function of the calories we put into our body (food and drink) […]
Exercise and Activity
Earlier this month one of my posts focused on a study which tested the effect of exercise on weight loss in women. This year-long study found that, on average, the women needed to exercise for 77 hours to lose a kg of fat. Now, if I said I had pretty-much foolproof way of getting a […]
Healthy Eating
I came across this post recently, on the website of a Tom Naughton – a comedian and now nutritional commentator based in the US. Now I should imagine that comedians don’t necessarily make for the best nutritional commentators ordinarily. But Tom is an exception to this rule – he does a great job, in my […]
Food and Medical Politics
Variously, I have written about the now quite voluminous and ever-growing body of research which demonstrates that fructose has considerable potential to harm health. See here, here, here and here for examples of research which implicates fructose as a potential causative factor in a wide range of health issues including weight gain and cancer. So […]
Healthy Eating
What I write about on this blog is inspired by a variety of things, including published research and political issues that arise in the area of food or health generally. Another source of inspiration is the clients who consult me in practice. And yesterday, I spoke to more than one person over the course of […]
Food and Medical Politics
There’s been a lot of reporting of a study that came out on Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine [1], and it’s going to be the focus of today’s blog. Here, in brief, is the design of the study: almost 5000 men and women who had had a heart attack previously were randomised […]