Healthy Eating
Cancer, in essence, is a condition caused by cells dividing more rapidly than they should to form a clump of abnormal cells. Lots of things appear to have the capacity to trigger cancerous change in cells (some chemicals, free radical damage, radiation, for example), but once cancerous cells form, they still need feeding to survive. […]
Healthy Eating
When in practice, I get to see a fair number of individuals who have traditionally perplexing health issues. Over the past couple of weeks I experienced a mysterious issue of my own. And I had no idea what was causing it. The symptoms? A bitter, metallic-like taste in my mouth, but only when I ate. […]
Cholesterol and Statins
The conventional nutritional approach for ‘heart health’ is a low-fat (specifically, low saturated fat), high-carbohydrate diet. For many reasons, this is not the sort of diet I would generally recommend to ward off heart disease. For more about this, click here. One particular form of carbohydrate that has been vigorously promoted for its heart-healthy properties […]
Children's Health
Of all the foodstuffs that have limited nutritional value and the potential to cause harm, I put soft drinks near the top of the list. The sugar contained in regular beverages has been linked with a range of adverse effects on health including weight gain, metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. And artificial […]
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 […]
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
There was a nice piece in The Times here in the UK on Saturday about my latest book Waist Disposal (see here). This piece, and a small piece that ran in another publication did seem to have some impact: Waist Disposal ended up rocketing up the amazon.co.uk ranking and spent a couple of days in […]
Diabetes/Metabolic Syndrome
I was giving a presentation last night to a group of individuals of Indian sub-continent extraction. As a group, south Asians appear to be particularly prone to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. And judging by the expanded waistlines in the audience, this group were no difference. Part of my presentation focused on the potential […]