Where weight loss is concerned, could it be that it’s more than calories that count?
I was in a meeting today, and the subject of weight loss came up. As some of you may know, I have previously written about how exercise tends not to be particularly effective for those wishing to shed pounds. I made the point that those wanting to lose weight would do better to, among other [...]
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Antidepressants generally no better than placebo, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to stop
I don’t know what health news stories were circulating in other parts of the globe, but here in the UK we have not been able to move for the ‘revelation’ that, for the majority of people who take them, popular antidepressants work no better than placebo. This story was spawned from the results of a [...]
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Is the public cottoning on to the fact that the British Government does not give reliable advice regarding healthy eating?
The Food Standards Agency in the UK is the Government agency entrusted with policing the food industry and also with the task of giving us the correct steer on what we should be eating. However, as I have felt compelled to point out of several occasions, the FSA doesn’t seem to do such as good [...]
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Animal foods linked with reduced risk of breast cancer, while starch found to be associated with enhanced risk
Most of us will be all too aware of the long-standing and regularly-rammed home recommendations to eat less fat. Fat, and animal fat in particular, is often said to be at the root of many of our ills including obesity and heart disease. However often and forcibly this notion is repeated, the fact remains that [...]
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Study finds those eating low-fat diets with high insulin levels are most prone to weight gain
It’s difficult to avoid the doom-laden statistics concerning rates of overweight and obesity. And at the same time we’ll no doubt be aware of the standard advice for those wanting to lose weight: ‘eat less and exercise more.’ The problem is, the evidence suggests that neither of these approaches is particularly effective for the purposes [...]
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Vegans found to be more likely to break bones, but not if they get enough calcium
There’s a general view out there, I think, that vegetarian and vegan diets are, on balance, healthier than those that include flesh foods including meat. I personally don’t agree with this view. My beliefs on this are partly based on the evidence that non-vegetarians don’t appear to have their lives curtailed by their consumption of [...]
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Why carbs can turn your liver into foie gras
It’s funny how things seem to come in threes, and this week was an example of this maxim in that I saw three patients all of whom had deranged liver function tests. All of them had raised levels of at least two liver ‘enzymes’. This, in medicine, is generally taken as a sign of damage [...]
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More evidence (should you require it) that supports the notion that fat doesn’t induce diabetes, but carbs can
Variously on the site in the past I have attempted to highlight the science (never mind the common sense) that if you have diabetes and want to control it (or don’t want to get this condition in the first place), the part of the diet that generally needs reigning in comes in the form of [...]
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More evidence that artificial sweeteners don’t help weight loss
When it comes to healthy living, my tendency is to favour as natural a course as possible. The word ‘natural’ means different things to different people, but in the context of our diet I take it to mean food that is close as possible to the way it found in nature. This does not guarantee [...]
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Study of aggressive drug treatment of diabetics halted due to enhanced risk of death
When it comes to cholesterol and blood sugar levels and blood pressure, the general principle in medicine is ‘the lower the better’. The idea here is that the more suppressed these parameters are, the lower (supposedly) the risk of complications such as heart disease and stroke. However, as with everything in life, it’s not necessarily [...]
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