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.
Unhealthy Eating!
Variously on this site I’ve discussed the notion that ‘a calorie is a calorie’. Simply put, this concept, widely populated by doctors, dieticians and other health professionals, is that when it comes to their effects of weight, all forms of calorie are the same. In terms of its impact on body weight, a kilogram of […]
Exercise and Activity
I have since last June been undertaking a bit of a personal experiment. Over couple of years I’d found I’d somehow managed to accumulate some added fat to my midriff. At 43, I suppose ‘middle-aged’ spread might have had something to do with it. But also when I looked at my diet with as much […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
Where weight and fat loss is concerned, I favour a relatively low-carbohydrate, high-protein diet on the basis that such diets generally outperform low-fat, carb-rich diets traditionally advocated for weight loss. A lower-carb diet I think may have particular advantages for diabetics because, well, they have difficulty handling carbohydrate as a result of impaired insulin function […]
Weight Loss
When it comes to official advice about body weight, the norm is still to base recommendations on the body mass index (weight in kg divided by the square of height in metres). We are traditionally encouraged to conform to a ‘normal’ or ‘healthy’ BMI of 18.5-24.9. It is amazing to me just how rarely (if […]
Healthy Eating
I suspect there’s always going to be a raging debate about the best way to go about losing weight. From a dietary perspective, a myriad of suggested approaches exist, though within these the two most popular and well-known ‘diets’ are those low in carbohydrate and fat respectively. Both of these approaches have their advocates. I’m […]
Healthy Eating
I was attempting to give a friend and colleague some writing advice on Friday. Here it is in a nutshell: don’t be flowery and literary with your writing ” keep is short and simple. Because when communicating information of any sort (including health information), I believe the chances of someone acting on it (in the […]
Brain and Behaviour
I’ve been attempting to catch up on some reading over the last few days, and this included skimming through the last couple of copies of New Scientist magazine. One article that caught my eye from the late December/early January issue concerned the effect of artificial sweeteners. In particular, the piece (by San Francisco-based writer Douglas […]
Exercise and Activity
It’s mid-January, and no doubt quite a lot of people will be persisting with New Year resolutions that have something to do with their health, with ‘losing weight’ being generally high on their list of priorities. Exercise is usually thrown into the mix here, and while walking my dog this morning I witnessed a distinct […]
Healthy Eating
I came across this report here of a study recently published in the British Medical Journal [1]. It concerns a device known as a ‘Mandometer’ ” which has been developed as an aid to weight loss. The Mandometer, a Swedish invention, is essentially a set of weighing scales connected to a small computer. A plate […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
My last post here detailed just a few relatively easy-to-apply lifestyle changes that might make good New Year resolutions. One of them, was to eat a ‘primal’ diet ” essentially a diet based on the foods we’ve been eating the longest in terms of our time on this planet. The record suggests that for the […]