When it comes to aging, people aren’t afraid of losing their lives. They’re afraid of losing their humanity. Most google-savvy diabetics know the statistic that diabetes takes a decade of your life away. For well-controlled diabetes, it is not a must, but the five-year mortality rate for a diabetic foot ulcer is higher than fifty…
Read more
Attention, flat earthers and aura readers! Here is the book for you. We’re obsessed with health – half of the science stories in the media are medical-based. They bombard us with sciencey-sounding claims. Only more often than not, these have nothing to do with science. The problem with internet journalism is that people are far…
Read more
Bright Spots & Landmines is a self-help book and a diabetes guide in one. It’s free to download, and it’s a good read. I finished it in a very positive mood, which I think is the aim of the book. In four chapters, it deals with food, mindset, exercise, and sleep. Why sleep, you’re asking.…
Read more
You are a marvel of information. If you took all the DNA in your body and formed it into a single strand, it would stretch ten billion miles, or beyond Pluto. The length of all your blood vessels would take you two and a half times around the earth. Learn this and many other things…
Read more
A damning report on the fast food industry, this book has some interesting trivia. For example, did you know that McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc and Walt Disney served together in the same World War I ambulance corp before they went on to set up two of America’s corporate giants? Both from Illinois, they were masterful…
Read more
Over Christmas, I’ve been reading What we eat and why it matters by Jim Mason and Peter Singer. Singer, who’s a moral philosopher at Princeton, hit fame with Animal Liberation in the 1970’s and became a front figure for the animal rights movement. He has since been busy criticising the industrial farm practices which are…
Read more
The macronutrients are at war with each other. It’s saturated fat against polyunsaturated, protein versus carbs, and omega-3 battling it out with omega-6. One day you should eat a lot of protein. The next too much meat will give you cancer. No wonder we’re so confused. How did this happen…
Read more
The other day Dr. Lustig revealed the cover of his new book on Twitter. It reminded me that his first one was still in my bookshelf, unread. It turned out to be a good read. At the time of writing, he’d spent sixteen years treating obese children. By anyone’s standards, that…
Read more
The title for this book comes from a 1976 paper by psychologist Paul Rozin. He studied food selection behavior in rats in the hope of understanding people. When rats come across new foods they nibble a little bit and then wait to see what happens. Something like a stomach ache is committed to memory and leads to lifetime aversion to that particular substance. This is why it’s so difficult to poison rats…
Read more
In The Diet Delusion Gary Taubes showed how nutrition and obesity research lost its way after the Second World War when the European scientific community in the field disappeared. This book is smaller, easier to read, and covers many of the same core ideas…
Read more
Recent Comments