My first read of the year was A big fat crisis by RAND scientist and medical doctor Deborah Cohen. Written in 2013, the same issues still rule supreme as little has changed in how we deal with the obesity epidemic. Cohen points to two core reasons why our waistlines keep expanding. The first is human nature and…
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For the past two years, I’ve had the same thing for breakfast: a two-egg omelette with 50g of cheese. It’s perhaps not that strange that I got fed up and started to feel queasy just thinking about eggs. The reason it’s a good idea to eat the same thing every day if you have diabetes is that you can take the same insulin dose with predictable results. In the morning…
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We speculate on the causes of the obesity epidemic. At first glance, easy access to delicious food everywhere you go definitely has something to do with it. But there’s more to it. The Carbohydrate-Insulin Model is interesting from a biochemistry point of view. It suggests that a diet heavy in carbohydrates leads to weight gain…
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I’m following a Twitter discussion where the OP asked: What’s the biggest misconception about nutrition that you wish you knew 5-10 years ago? The answers are interesting coming from people who’ve done a lot of research and embarked on diets that differ from the Eatwell plate. The misconceptions include: All calories are equal Whole grain…
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While reading an article about the link between diabetes and dementia – which apparently doubles in type 2 diabetics – I came across something interesting in Life’s Simple 7. It’s a list of seven steps that you can take to improve cardiovascular health recommended by the American Heart Association. They sound like a good idea…
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A recent study from the American Society for Nutrition found no association between eating red meat and the risk of early death, cancer, stroke, or heart disease. The study was quite large, with 134,297 individuals from low-, middle-, and high-income countries participating. In total, there were 7,789 deaths during a nine-and-a-half-year period. While there was…
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Last month I ate the same things, a cheese omelette for breakfast and chicken salad for dinner, pretty much every day. I just found out there’s a name for this – the Groundhog Day diet. Followers eat the same meals every day, and it’s popular with countless celebrities. Victoria Beckham has a piece of salmon…
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I just finished The Longevity Diet by Valter Longo, a scientific look at how we eat. Longo is a research biologist at USC Davis School of Gerontology, where he developed the fasting-mimicking-diet (FMD). It’s one of the topics of his books, along with what to eat to live longer and other potential routes to life…
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Malcolm Gladwell is an excellent storyteller. I’ve read three of his books and recently started listening to his podcast series Revisionist History. During season 2, there’s a thought-provoking episode called McDonald’s Broke My Heart. It tells the story of multi-millionaire businessman Phil Sokolof. In the 1960s, at the age of 43, he had a heart…
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There’s a good documentary on YouTube about how western food companies are making people in poorer countries fatter. It’s called Global Junk Food and opens up in India, a potentially massive market for fast food restaurants with 1.3 billion people. While some Indians are still suffering from malnutrition, there’s a budding obesity epidemic amongst the…
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