Brain and Behaviour
This blog is about the safety of MMR and the science and politics surrounding this issue. I didn’t have any intention of writing about this until very recently. Let me say up front I have no special interest in this area, other than having met a significant number of people who believe their children have […]
Brain and Behaviour
Back in September of last year I reported on a study which found that certain food additives (specific colourings and the food preservative sodium benzoate) had been found to have a statistically significant adverse effect on children’s behaviour and attention [1]. This study (sometimes referred to as the ‘Southampton study’) was actually performed in ‘normal’ […]
Food and Medical Politics
Earlier this week I was working from home in the morning. I had the radio on in the background. My normal choice of oral wallpaper is BBC Radio 4. It’s often on, but I’m rarely ‘listening’ to it. I rely on the ‘cocktail party effect’ to pick up on anything vaguely relevant. In other words, […]
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 […]
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 […]