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.
For some time now there has been debate in some nutritional circles about the relative merits of different ‘diets’. Certainly, there has been at least two factions here. One argues for a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet which usually includes plenty of starchy carbohydrates such as bread, potato, rice, breakfast cereals and pasta. Others (including me) argue [...]
The last few decades have seen a rise in rates of overweight and obesity. Average duration of sleep has declined in the Western world too. Could the two be connected? Actually, yes. There are a number of mechanisms through which reduced sleep time might be somehow contributing to the obesity ‘epidemic’, and these were summarised [...]
I came across this report yesterday. It concerns a study presented at the American Heart Association meeting in San Diego this week. From the report it appears that overweight individuals were randomised to one of two diets for 6 months (along with moderate exercise). ‘low-carb’: 30, 40, 30 per cent of calories from carbohydrate, fat [...]
The body mass index is a commonly used measure of body size. It’s calculated by dividing someone’s weight in kilograms by the square of their height in metres. It looks kinda ‘sciency’, but actually it’s a quite useless measurement, principally because it takes absolutely no account of the body’s composition nor the distribution of fat [...]
Last Saturday the Times here in the UK published a piece I wrote about ‘intermittent fasting’. This topic has been getting a lot of press of late (the Daily Mail, for instance, carried a piece earlier this week too). I’m pleased to see that intermittent fasting is getting some attention, and there’s some challenge to [...]
Earlier this month I wrote about a study in which the effect of sleep deprivation on appetite ratings in response to images of food was tested [1]. Overall, subjective feelings of hunger were significantly greater after the night of sleep deprivation. The study subjects underwent brain scanning too (functional magnetic resonance imaging). After a night [...]
Woman’s Hour is an hour-long radio show on the BBC’s Radio 4 station. On Tuesday, I was invited onto the show to discuss weight loss. The item centred around the plight of Sue Lyons – an obese lady who has (like millions of others) failed to control her weight through ‘dieting’. Sue recounts a commonly-heard [...]
There is a ton of research which links higher levels of vitamin D (and/or increased sun exposure) with reduced risk of a range of conditions including diabetes, multiple sclerosis, several forms of cancer and heart disease. These studies are voluminous, and tend to be quite consistent, but they still can’t tell us for sure that [...]
Matt Edmundson emailed me awhile back relaying the story of what happened when he read and applied the principles laid out in my book Waist Disposal. His daughter, it turns out, used to call him ‘baggy belly’, but not anymore! After Escape the Diet Trap was released, Matt kindly asked to interview me about the [...]
