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
Back in January I reported on some research which had discovered that of a sample of North American doctors polled on their prescribing habits, about half of them had prescribed placebos. The subject of the placebo effect in medicine came up again in this week’s copy of the British Medical Journal. The power of the […]
Food and Medical Politics
It might be twee and a bit naïve, but I recommend that eating a diet found as close as possible to what is found in nature makes good sense. This means, of course, avoiding, when we can, substances are not to be found naturally in the food chain. Perhaps rather predictably, the science supports this […]
Children's Health
When working with nutritionally-based medicine, one gets a feel over the years for what tends to work and what doesn’t. One thing I’ve learned to be fairly certain of is that when an diabetic individual who is eating the mounds of carb so often recommended to them switches to a diet with less carb in […]
Food and Medical Politics
Earlier this month, one of my blogs focused on thyroid function testing. The main point I wanted to make was that ‘normal’ thyroid function tests do not necessarily mean all is well with the thyroid and health. The blog focused on research that shows that even with the ‘normal’ range, higher levels of the hormone […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
While fruit juices have a healthy reputation, I don’t believe their as healthy as their image suggests. Some of the issues I have with them are detailed here. One key property of fruit juices that causes me to advise their consumption with caution is the fact that they tend to be very sugary indeed. Many […]
Healthy Eating
I don’t make any secret of the fact that I think the low-fat/high-carb paradigm that has seemingly shaped much nutritional advice for the last few decades is not founded in good science. And variously, on this site, I’ve presented the evidence that supports this stance. Some of this research has examined the distinct lack of […]
Brain and Behaviour
When I was growing up, I was very interested in ‘unexplained’ phenomena like spontaneous human combustion and hypnosis. My interest in the former has waned somewhat, but my interest in the latter remains with me to this day. More than 20 years ago I went to see a stage hypnotism act while on holiday in […]
Food and Medical Politics
Last week’s big ‘nutritional news’ was that taking certain nutritional supplements increases risk of death. Apparently. News headlines throughout the UK were awash with the reports of a study which found that the taking of ‘antioxidant’ nutrients (namely beta-carotene, vitamin A and vitamin E) in supplement form is associated with a statistically significant increase in […]
Food and Medical Politics
Some of you may have noticed that I don’t believe much conventional nutritional ‘wisdom’, including the notion that some highly processed, relatively new-fangled foods are somehow ‘healthy’, and perhaps ‘better’ for us than those we’ve been eating for, say, hundreds of thousands of years. One commonly-employed tactic used by the food industry to convince us […]
Food and Medical Politics
Earlier this month one of my blogs was devoted to the seeming suppression of data from a study which showed that two cholesterol-reducing drugs were no better than one. It appears that the drug companies who make the drugs sat on these results for two years, before it was forced out of them by a […]