The body mass index (BMI) is the standard and most commonly-used method for assessing body weight by health professionals. It is calculated by dividing an individual’s weight in kg by the square of their height in metres. The fact that some arithmetic is required to ascertain the BMI makes it look quite scientific and robust. [...]

Diabetes UK is the UK’s largest and most prominent diabetes charity. Have a look here and you will se the charity proudly proclaiming that: “We stand up for the interests of people with diabetes by campaigning for better standards of care.” However, I’m doubtful that Diabetes UK is fulfilling its brief in this respect, seeing [...]

The body likes to keep its internal environment quite stable, and this includes the amount of sugar circulating in the bloodstream. The chief blood sugar lowering hormone is insulin. In diabetes, there can be a problem here leading for blood sugar levels to be higher than is healthy. Diabetics either don’t have enough insulin, or [...]

Because for so long we have been encouraged to eat a diet based on carbohydrates, it’s natural to have warm feelings toward this ‘macronutrient’. Yet, many carbohydrates, particularly those that cause considerable fluctuation in blood sugar and insulin levels, I think should be handled with considerable caution.
Not that long ago, I blogged about a [...]

On Monday I started a blog about the artificial sweetener aspartame with a reference to my preference for a diet rich in natural, unprocessed foods. Such a diet might be described in various ways including a ‘hunter-gatherer’, ‘caveman’ or ‘paleolithic’ diet. However such a diet is described, the aim is the same: to feed [...]

I don’t make any secret of the fact that I think the low-fat/high-carb paradigm that has seemingly shaped much nutritional advice for the last few decades is not founded in good science. And variously, on this site, I’ve presented the evidence that supports this stance. Some of this research has examined the distinct lack of [...]

Last month one of my posts was devoted to some research which found a link between weight accumulation around the mid-riff (abdominal obesity) and an increased risk of dementia. In this post, I also explored some of the mechanisms which might explain this association. At the heart of these suggested mechanisms is the hormone insulin. [...]

Previously on this site I have presented evidence that the traditional way of assessing body weight – the body mass index (BMI) – is pretty useless as a marker for health. Part of the explanation for this lies in the fact that the BMI tells us nothing about the composition of the body. Neither does [...]

Variously on this site I, and quite a few commentators, have expressed concern for the conventional vogue of advising a diet rich in carbohydrate. Excesses of carbohydrate can cause gluts of the hormone insulin which in turn can predispose us to all sorts of problems including weight gain, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]