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.
With rates of overweight and obesity generally on the up, it’s perhaps no surprise that many of us will seek to lose weight at one time or another. My experience is that the great majority of people who want to lose weight will be able to, but the issue can be the sustainability of that [...]
I came across this story today. Published yesterday in the Daily Mail, it reports research in which, apparently, high-fat meals were found to induce sleepiness in individuals, compared to high-carb ones. I have looked for this study on-line and can find no trace of it (only references to it). What this sometimes means is that [...]
Recently, I had a request from a BBC journalist to contribute to a piece on low-carbohydrate diets. Here’s her request: Essentially, I am really after the evidence as to whether the Atkins (and other low-carb diets) work (as a diet, and also are they good for our health?) – are you able to summarise the [...]
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 [...]
I’ve had a few emails this week about a study which appeared in the British Medical Journal last year [1]. In short, it purported to show that Swedish women eating a ‘low-carbohydrate, high-protein’ diet over a period of 16 years had greater risk of cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or stroke. I was well [...]
I was away for most of this week and, as a result, this on-line article (and several similar ones) passed me by. It focuses on the ‘research’ conducted by Dr Aine O’Connor of the British Nutrition Foundation and published in its ‘journal’ – the Nutrition Bulletin [1]. I’ve not read the article itself, but here’s [...]
I’m a long-time advocate of diets that are generally lower in carbohydrate than those encouraged by most Governments, health agencies and health professionals. I’m not very prescriptive about it, and prefer not in my talks or writings to give specific carbohydrate ‘targets’ e.g. no more than 50 g of carbohydrate a day. I do, however, [...]
Obesity is essentially unknown in populations that live a traditional ‘hunter-gatherer’ way of life. As is well recognised, it’s different in Westernised populations. Why? Well, one theory, at least, is that hunter-gatherers are much more active, and are burning off more calories than their Western counterparts, which affords them the ability to maintain health weights. [...]
