Dr Briffa's Blog - A Good Look at Good Health
A health-focused blog that makes sense of science, and offers accurate, trustworthy and practical advice about all aspects of healthy living.
I’ve seen this week a few reports of a study which compared the potential effects of running and walking on a variety of health markers and outcomes including blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease. The study followed about 33,000 regular runners and about 16,000 regular walkers over a period of about 6 years [1]. For [...]
We have, for a long time, been wary that certain dietary habits are linked to and perhaps predispose people to cancer. The usual whipping boy here is ‘red meat’ – which is often said to be a potential trigger factor in, say, colon cancer. This belief will tend to add the comfort and security some [...]
In my work as a doctor I see a quite-steady stream of individuals who are concerned about their cholesterol-levels. Usually, these people are male, quite young (often in their 40s) and have been diagnosed with ‘raised cholesterol’. They are also often fit, healthy, non-smoking and free of diabetes and high blood pressure. Despite the fact [...]
Although medical practice has a sheen of being ‘evidence-based’, you don’t have to look to far to find a lot of what we do as doctors to be either untested or proven ineffective. I wrote about this recently here where I highlight an initiative by the British Medical Journal entitled ‘Too Much Medicine’ which seeks [...]
Epidemiology is a branch of research which analyses data to look for associations between things. This brand of research will very often throw up ‘facts’ like ‘red wine lowers risk of heart disease’, because of evidence that red wine drinkers are at reduced risk of heart disease. However, epidemiological evidence can never tell us if [...]
I was having a conversation with someone this week which centred around this photo which has done the rounds in the blogosphere. Essentially, this has been used by proponent of low-carb/primal/paleo eating and lifestyle who, as a rule, reject the notion that a healthy diet is one that is largely or completely devoid of animal [...]
I was talking with a colleague last night whose wife is a doctor. He bemoaned the fact that there is a trend in the UK for closure of hospitals. The automatic reaction many of us have to the cutting of health services is that it’s a bad thing, and that people will lose out as [...]
Vitamin D is perhaps best known for its role in bone formation, and vitamin D deficiency is an established cause of rickets (soft, deformed bones in children), as well as a potential underlying factor in osteoporosis. In recent years, the role of vitamin D in muscle function has come to the fore. Two potential features [...]
Last week saw the emergence of some news reports (example here) regarding research which linked the eating of processed meat. The study looked at the relationship between dietary habits and risk of death from a variety of causes in a group of people pooled from 10 European countries [1]. Analysis occurred over an average of [...]
