Trans fat ban planned in New York – what we need to know to protect ourselves from this toxic food ingredient
Listening to the radio this morning I learned about plans in New York to ban heart-stopping ‘trans fats’ from foods served in restaurants and fast food outlets. Apparently, a voluntary scheme for the removal of these fats from food has not worked out so well, and now the city’s health commissioner, Thomas Frieden, is reigniting [...]
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Is moderate drinking genuinely good for our health?
It’s a near-constant refrain from cardiologists: moderate drinking reduces the risk of heart disease. We’ve recently had another dose of this advice following the publication of a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine which looked at the relationship between drinking habits and heart attack risk in healthy men [1]. The US researchers responsible for [...]
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Drug company accused of ‘disguised marketing’ – and why we all need to be aware of industry funding of patient advocacy groups
Last week’s blog and newsletter featured ‘a little bit of politics’. Here, I highlighted the evidence that the pharmaceutical industry can bias the results of ‘scientific’ endeavour, and I also drew attention to the conflict of interest that exists between this drug companies the medical journals that publish and help popularise their research. All of [...]
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Does eating white bread ’cause’ cancer?
Some of you may have been aware of the recent research that has linked the eating of white bread with an increased risk of cancer. The study, published in the International Journal of Cancer, found that individuals eating the most white bread (equivalent to five slices of bread a day) were almost twice as likely [...]
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Effluent to be turned into drinking water? No thanks – tap water is already a health hazard as it is!
Water is becoming an increasingly precious commodity. This week the Institute of Civil Engineers in the UK suggested that one way to help combat this is to recycle effluent to make drinking water. Doesn’t sound like a great idea, health-wise, does it? Actually, most of tap water is already comes from a sort of effluent [...]
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More evidence that eating fish does more good than harm
Today’s edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association publishes yet another study in the tide of research focusing on the health effects of consuming fish [1]. Researchers from the American School of Public Health discovered that eating fish once or twice a week is associated with a 36 per cent reduced risk of [...]
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Should women eat oily fish in pregnancy – yes or no?!
The home page of drbriffa.com asks: Ever noticed how health advice, especially natural health advice, can seem to flick-flack from one extreme to another? Well, another example of the way health advice can seemingly blow in the wind came about this week when pregnant women were advised to be on ‘oily fish alert’. For some [...]
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Exposed: the way drug companies can influence research and the medical journals that publish it
One of the aims of drbriffa.com is to expose the how the food and pharmaceutical industries can sometimes act as a barrier to you getting accurate health information and advice. My experience is that industry funding and involvement can seriously bias the ‘conclusions’ drawn from scientific studies. Sound cynical? Well, researchers and scientists have in [...]
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Yet more evidence that calcium and dairy products do little or no good for our bones
Last week, one of my blogs focused on the association between cola consumption and weakened bones, and the fact that milk, contrary to popular perception, is actually not an ideal beverage for building bones click here. Further evidence for the uselessness of milk in this capacity has come from a study published in this week’s [...]
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Why the only place Coca-Cola’s Enviga is likely to leave you lighter is in the pocket
You may have heard that the Coca-Cola Company has just launched a new drink that goes by the name of Enviga that, it is claimed, actually helps us to burn calories. The drink contains both caffeine and an extract of green tea that, we are told, stimulate the metabolism. Apparently, drinking three cans of Enviga [...]
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