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.
Healthy Eating
I don’t make any secret of the fact that I think the low-fat/high-carb paradigm that has seemingly shaped much nutritional advice for the last few decades is not founded in good science. And variously, on this site, I’ve presented the evidence that supports this stance. Some of this research has examined the distinct lack of […]
Brain and Behaviour
When I was growing up, I was very interested in ‘unexplained’ phenomena like spontaneous human combustion and hypnosis. My interest in the former has waned somewhat, but my interest in the latter remains with me to this day. More than 20 years ago I went to see a stage hypnotism act while on holiday in […]
Food and Medical Politics
Some of you may have noticed that I don’t believe much conventional nutritional ‘wisdom’, including the notion that some highly processed, relatively new-fangled foods are somehow ‘healthy’, and perhaps ‘better’ for us than those we’ve been eating for, say, hundreds of thousands of years. One commonly-employed tactic used by the food industry to convince us […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
Something interesting came in the post today, though I’m not sure who it has come from because the person who sent it marked it with their email address only. The item is a photocopy from what I think is a book, that seems to be called ‘Diabetes for Beginners’. The page (page 36) has a […]
Brain and Behaviour
Back in October I wrote about the artificial sweetener aspartame. This food ingredient is perhaps the most controversial of all: its manufacturers and official bodies claim it’s safe, but a stack of anecdotal evidence and a fair degree of science says it’s not. Tellingly, whether a study finds for or against aspartame seems to be […]
Children's Health
I think the salt is somewhat over-emphasised as an unhealthy food constituent, though the likelihood is that most of us eat more of it than is strictly good for us. Personally, I don’t consume much salt because I don’t eat much processed food (where most of our salt comes from) and I add little, if […]
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 […]
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 funny how things seem to come in threes, and this week was an example of this maxim in that I saw three patients all of whom had deranged liver function tests. All of them had raised levels of at least two liver ‘enzymes’. This, in medicine, is generally taken as a sign of damage […]
Brain and Behaviour
When it comes to healthy living, my tendency is to favour as natural a course as possible. The word ‘natural’ means different things to different people, but in the context of our diet I take it to mean food that is close as possible to the way it found in nature. This does not guarantee […]