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 don’t believe bread, as we commonly eat it, is a healthy or wholesome food (far from it). And last year I was surprised to read a ‘review’ lauding the nutritious attributes of bread and lamenting the fact that, here in the UK, bread consumption is declining. The review was authored by a scientist connected [...]
We’re often told that statin (cholesterol-reducing) drugs are effective for preventing heart disease and stroke (cardiovascular disease). Whether you buy into this statement or not depends, to a degree, on how you look at the data. It is true that statins reduce the risk of heart attack by about a third. However, this ‘relative risk’ [...]
So-called ‘omega-3’ fats found in oily fish (like salmon, trout, mackerel and herring) have a reputation for being healthy, including an ability to ward off cardiovascular diseases such as heart disease and stroke. I was interested to read a recent study which points out that while earlier studies found that supplementing individuals with omega-3 fats [...]
Conventional nutritional ‘wisdom’ has it that saturated fat (found in foods such meat, eggs, dairy products, coconut and palm oil) is bad for heart health, while ‘polyunsaturated’ fats (including ‘vegetable’ oils) are good. These concepts emerged decades ago and were mostly based on the impact of these fats on cholesterol levels. There’s a big potential [...]
Many years ago I was having dinner with a friend who was, herself, a young hospital doctor specialising in ‘care of the elderly’ (what used to be called ‘geriatrics’). She worked in a busy department, and lamented the fact that so many elderly people were suffering from what she believed to be the adverse effects [...]
The idea that cholesterol causes cardiovascular disease comes from studies which find that higher cholesterol levels are linked with raised risk of heart disease and stroke. However, it’s important to bear in mind that such studies are ‘epidemiological’ (also termed ‘observational’) in nature, which means we cannot infer from them that cholesterol causes heart disease [...]
Good communication is, I think, the bedrock of a good relationship between a doctor and a patient. One thing that frustrates some doctors is when their patients do not take their advice. A major gripe can be the failure to take medications as prescribed. In a recent study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, [...]
I had an email recently from a journalist friend of mine this week which included a communication he’d had from a reader. The reader had been refused health insurance on the basis of his ‘raised’ cholesterol. It was suggested to him that he would be eligible for insurance once his cholesterol ‘problem’ was ‘under control’. [...]
Statins are drugs that reduce cholesterol by inhibiting an enzyme in the liver known as ‘HMG-CoA reductase’ which ‘drives’ cholesterol production (most of the cholesterol in the bloodstream is made in the liver and does not come directly from the diet). But HMG-CoA reductase also facilitates the production of a substance known as ‘coenzyme Q10’ [...]
Ezetimibe is an effective cholesterol-reducing drug (it works by blocking cholesterol absorption from the gut). I came across a study this week from a group of researchers based in Michigan in the US which concluded that ezetimibe appeared to have a ‘protective effect on major AD [atherosclerotic disease] events and all-cause mortality…’ [1]. In other [...]
