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.
Cholesterol and Statins
Statins are drugs that reduce cholesterol. They also reduce risk of heart disease and stroke. That does not mean, though, that they do they via their cholesterol-reducing effect. There are several lines of evidence which actually suggest otherwise. For example, statins can have clinical benefit before they reduce cholesterol levels. They also have been purported […]
Nutrients and Supplements
In previous posts (here and here) I have highlighted the benefits vitamin D has with regard to improving the immune response and helping keep infections such as flu at bay. It has been mooted that the upsurge in viral infections during the winter is connected with the generally lower vitamin D levels at this time. […]
Healthy Eating
Where weight loss is concerned, there are many ways to skin a cat. But the two most commonly applied dietary strategies are low-fat and low-carb. This week I came across a report of a study here in which obese women were put on either a ‘low-fat’ or ‘lower-carb’ diet for a period of 12 weeks. […]
Healthy Eating
Carbohydrates that tend to be disruptive for levels of sugar in the bloodstream (high glycaemic index carbs) can provoke disease-causing changes in the physiology and biochemistry in the body, including enhance inflammation (see here for more about this). The pro-inflammatory effect of high-GI carbs has important implications, because inflammation turns out to be a key […]
Unhealthy Eating!
‘Fatty liver’, as it’s name suggests, is a condition characterised by the deposition of fat in the liver. Fatty liver has for a long time know to potentially have its roots in the overconsumption of alcohol. However, increasingly doctors are seeing individuals who have fatty liver where alcohol does not appear to be the causative […]
Food and Medical Politics
Common sense dictates that fats found naturally in the diet that we’ve been eating for hundreds of thousands of years and have therefore evolved to eat and unlikely to be detrimental to health. For instance, saturated fat (a primal foodstuff if there ever was one) turns out not to have the heart-stopping properties we’ve been […]
Healthy Eating
Conventional wisdom often dictates that we should eat three meals a day with nothing in between. The idea here is that snacks just add to our calorie intake, and therefore can only contribute to our body weight. However, I find in practice that for successful weight management, more frequent feeding is required. Regular eating can, […]
Brain and Behaviour
Post natal depression or PND – sometimes referred to as post-partum depression – affects about 10 per cent of women after having a baby. You can read more about the condition here. From a nutritional perspective, one of the things that has been shown to help protect against PND are the so-called omega-3 fats found […]
Cholesterol and Statins
Back in April I wrote about my ‘love-hate relationship’ with dairy products. The love part of my relationship relates to the fact that many dairy products are rich in protein and low in carbohydrate, coupled with the fact that I actually like the taste of things like cream, yoghurt and cheese. The hate part of […]
Food and Medical Politics
A month or so ago I wrote a piece about regarding the fact that in medicine, less can be more. It is certainly the case that some conventional medical approaches have downsides that outweigh any upside. Some are worth than useless. Modern medicine, with its learned personnel, sophisticated testing and machines that go bing, has […]