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.
Brain and Behaviour
I don’t know what health news stories were circulating in other parts of the globe, but here in the UK we have not been able to move for the ‘revelation’ that, for the majority of people who take them, popular antidepressants work no better than placebo. This story was spawned from the results of a […]
Food and Medical Politics
The Food Standards Agency in the UK is the Government agency entrusted with policing the food industry and also with the task of giving us the correct steer on what we should be eating. However, as I have felt compelled to point out of several occasions, the FSA doesn’t seem to do such as good […]
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 difficult to avoid the doom-laden statistics concerning rates of overweight and obesity. And at the same time we’ll no doubt be aware of the standard advice for those wanting to lose weight: ‘eat less and exercise more.’ The problem is, the evidence suggests that neither of these approaches is particularly effective for the purposes […]
Healthy Eating
There’s a general view out there, I think, that vegetarian and vegan diets are, on balance, healthier than those that include flesh foods including meat. I personally don’t agree with this view. My beliefs on this are partly based on the evidence that non-vegetarians don’t appear to have their lives curtailed by their consumption of […]
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 […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
Variously on the site in the past I have attempted to highlight the science (never mind the common sense) that if you have diabetes and want to control it (or don’t want to get this condition in the first place), the part of the diet that generally needs reigning in comes in the form of […]
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 […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
When it comes to cholesterol and blood sugar levels and blood pressure, the general principle in medicine is ‘the lower the better’. The idea here is that the more suppressed these parameters are, the lower (supposedly) the risk of complications such as heart disease and stroke. However, as with everything in life, it’s not necessarily […]
Cholesterol and Statins
Here in the UK we look to the Government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) to guide us regarding what we should be eating, and we also trust them when it comes to ensuring the food industry doesn’t offer us too much shite to eat. Or that’s the theory, anyway. In reality, I reckon the FSA does […]