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 had an email from someone asking me about the blood type diet. The ‘Eat Right for your Type’ diet was hugely popular in the US and also here in the UK from the mid 90s. The diet is based on the ‘ABO’ system of typing blood. This system gives us four blood groups depending [...]
When I was medical school, I noticed one of my friends had lost a bit of weight (intentionally). Even though I was not really interested in things like weight control and diet in those days, my curiosity got the better of me and I asked him how he did it. Had he cut back on [...]
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 [...]
I noticed yesterday that a certain study [1] concerning artificial sweeteners had got some press. In the study, overweight and obese adults were randomized to one of three dietary interventions: 1. advice to replace more than 200 calories a day of calorific beverages (softs drinks/soda) with water 2. advice to replace more than 200 calories [...]
Previous research has found a link between lower levels of vitamin D and higher body weight, causing some to speculate that vitamin D deficiency may be a factor in obesity. The problem with this sort of evidence is that while it can show a link between vitamin D deficiency and, say, obesity, we can’t tell [...]
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. [...]
