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 came across this story today in the Daily Mail, concerning what can happen when we deny ourselves something. Apparently, according to this research, resisting something we desire can make us think about it more. Interestingly, if the same thing is denied to people more generally, it tends not to have this effect [1]. So, [...]
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 [...]
Binge eating is a phenomenon where someone may start eating but then find it difficult to stop. I actually think that binge eating is more common than perhaps is recognised. Lots of lots of people will, for instance, find that what started as ‘just one biscuit’ turns into half a packet or that a few [...]
I came across this report recently of a study which found that stopping men sleeping for a night led to them choosing bigger portions of ‘energy-dense’ food at a buffet [1]. Previous work from the same group at Uppsala University in Sweden found that sleep deprivation caused greater activity in the parts of the brain [...]
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 [...]
I don’t hide the fact that I am not a fan of the artificial sweetener aspartame. It’s widespread use in processed foods and drinks gives me cause for concern, seeing as there’s a considerable body of evidence that links it with everything from weight gain to cancer. Some of the most incriminating evidence comes from [...]
Even if you have only a passing interest in nutrition and the subject of ‘healthy eating’, you’re likely to have picked up a change of wind in recent times regarding the dietary cause of obesity. For three or four decades, conventional wisdom has had it that dietary fat is the true villain of the peace. [...]
In a recent blog post I wrote about research which linked consumption of artificial sweeteners and aspartame in particular with certain cancers. This sort of ‘epidemiological’ evidence cannot prove that aspartame or other artificial sweeteners cause cancer. However, as I pointed out in the blog post, we have research which shows that giving aspartame to [...]
Aspartame and cancer, flu vaccination and ask me what my cholesterol level is.
