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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Back in October I wrote about the artificial sweetener aspartame. This food ingredient is perhaps the most controversial of all: its manufacturers and official bodies claim it’s safe, but a stack of anecdotal evidence and a fair degree of science says it’s not. Tellingly, whether a study finds for or against aspartame seems to […]

If I were to summarise what is conventionally regarded as a ‘healthy’ diet, I’d say it would be one which is low in fat, and rich in carbohydrate, including fruit and vegetables and fibre. I don’t particularly have much enthusiasm for such as diet myself: while I’m a general fan of fruit of veg, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Here in the UK we look to the Government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) to guide us regarding what we should be eating, and we also trust them when it comes to ensuring the food industry doesn’t offer us too much shite to eat. Or that’s the theory, anyway. In reality, I reckon the FSA […]

I read yesterday that Alan Johnson, the Health Minister here in the UK, is going to call this week for the practice of water fluoridation to be extended here in the UK. Currently about 10 per cent of the UK population is piped fluoridated water, something that is that we are told would reduce […]

News broke in the UK this week that prescriptions for obesity drugs topped 1 million in 2006 – an eight-fold increase in just seven years. No doubt some of this increase has come about as a result of the increasing dire statistics about the burgeoning rates of obesity. However, as I revealed here […]