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
A couple of weeks back I was talking with a close family member, and he mentioned that for many years he had been getting digestive discomfort that tended to come after meals. When I asked to point to where his pain was, he indicated that it was in the middle of the abdomen just at […]
Healthy Eating
Conventional nutritional wisdom dictates that we eat a diet rich in ‘polyunsaturated’ fats. At least part of the rationale for this relates to the fact that we are told that these fats help to reduce the risk of heart disease (you will, for instance, often see or hear ‘polyunsaturates’ being referred to in adverts for […]
Food and Medical Politics
Most of us will be familiar with the H1N1 (‘swine flu’) pandemic that never was. At the height of the hysteria here in the UK, individuals could phone up a help-line, answer a few questions, and get sent the drug Tamiflu (oseltamivir). According to a news report here, it turns out that only about 20 […]
Exercise and Activity
Previously, I have written about the drug combination of simvastatin and ezetimibe (sold as Vytorin in the US). Both of these drugs reduce cholesterol, but through different mechanisms. Taken together, these drugs do do a good job of reducing cholesterol levels And we all know that the lower we get the cholesterol levels down the […]
Healthy Eating
I generally advise against eating refined sugar. I, personally, eat hardly any, but I do eat some. Practically all of this comes in the form of 85 per cent cocoa chocolate. I, for quite some time now, have been recommending dark chocolate as a sweet treat of choice. Firstly, dark chocolate is generally lower in […]
Nutrients and Supplements
When someone takes a medicine, it is generally in the hope that it will do some good. However, whether it does or doesn’t is only half of the story: even the seemingly most innocuous of drugs can have adverse effects on health. In an editorial in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr John Ioannidis of […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
The obvious answer to this question is ‘yes’, seeing as many wheat-based foods are very disruptive to blood sugar (they have high glycaemic index), particularly when eaten in quantity (meaning they have high glycaemic load too). As a result, the pancreas will generally need to pump out plenty of insulin. This, in time, can lead […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
I recently mentioned in a blog that I’d tidied up my diet a bit (in conjunction with some mindful eating). Part of the ‘tidying up a bit’ meant taking out ALL foods with added sugar from my diet. I don’t consume much added sugar habitually, but I am generally no angel either. So, I won’t […]
Healthy Eating
I’ve been a coffee drinker since childhood. At one point (when I was a student) I was drinking 10 or more mugs of instant coffee a day (each with two teaspoons of sugar in, I might add). As I got older, my tastes became more refined. I was persuaded by my older brother Joe to […]
Children's Health
Probiotic supplements contain gut bacterial organisms believed to exert beneficial effects. As expected, much of the focus to date has been on the effects such supplements can have within the gut. For example, probiotics have been test in and been found to be useful for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). See here for more about this. […]