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
On Monday, my blog featured mooted plans in New York to ban so-called ‘trans fats’ from restaurant and fast food joints. Later this week, I though I would check how this initiative is getting on, and one of the sites I checked for information on this was www.bantransfat.com. The folks at bantransfats have been instrumental […]
Food and Medical Politics
Listening to the radio this morning I learned about plans in New York to ban heart-stopping ‘trans fats’ from foods served in restaurants and fast food outlets. Apparently, a voluntary scheme for the removal of these fats from food has not worked out so well, and now the city’s health commissioner, Thomas Frieden, is reigniting […]
Food and Medical Politics
It’s a near-constant refrain from cardiologists: moderate drinking reduces the risk of heart disease. We’ve recently had another dose of this advice following the publication of a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine which looked at the relationship between drinking habits and heart attack risk in healthy men [1]. The US researchers responsible for […]
Low-Carbohydrate
Some of you may have been aware of the recent research that has linked the eating of white bread with an increased risk of cancer. The study, published in the International Journal of Cancer, found that individuals eating the most white bread (equivalent to five slices of bread a day) were almost twice as likely […]
Food and Medical Politics
Water is becoming an increasingly precious commodity. This week the Institute of Civil Engineers in the UK suggested that one way to help combat this is to recycle effluent to make drinking water. Doesn’t sound like a great idea, health-wise, does it? Actually, most of tap water is already comes from a sort of effluent […]
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 […]
Children's Health
Last week, one of my blogs focused on the association between cola consumption and weakened bones, and the fact that milk, contrary to popular perception, is actually not an ideal beverage for building bones click here. Further evidence for the uselessness of milk in this capacity has come from a study published in this week’s […]
Food and Medical Politics
You may have heard that the Coca-Cola Company has just launched a new drink that goes by the name of Enviga that, it is claimed, actually helps us to burn calories. The drink contains both caffeine and an extract of green tea that, we are told, stimulate the metabolism. Apparently, drinking three cans of Enviga […]
Food and Medical Politics
Over the weekend, I was reading about an Australian study in which individuals shopping on-line for food were able to be diverted away from foods rich in saturated fat by some nifty software that gives purchase-specific dietary advice. I like the idea of anything that gives individuals the opportunity to make informed eating choices more […]
Food and Medical Politics
This week’s British Medical Journal contains a report of a study published this week in the journal Critical Care in which diabetes was found to be associated with an increased risk of organ failure (such as heart or kidney failure) and death from this, but obesity (in the absence of diabetes) was not. This is […]