Articles (Ecologist)

Putting on your best smile doesn’t mean using fancy dental products, says Pat Thomas, it’s achieved by what you eat. There is much more going on in our mouths than of us know. Ads on TV and in glossy magazines suggest that gleaming white teeth and kissably fresh breath are the major goals where your […]

What does Douglas Gowan know that everyone else wants to keep hidden? For 40 years the story of Brofiscin  Quarry –  now the most polluted place in the UK –   has been   suppressed. Documents have been mysteriously lost, witnesses silenced, scientific data ignored. But like the periodic explosions that issue from the depth of the […]

Ethical consumerism in the UK is currently worth £29.3 billion, yet 60 per cent of us feel we don’t have enough information to make an ethical decision. There is an ever-growing array of eco labels, but what do they tell us? Or fail to tell us? Pat Thomas explains It used to be easy to […]

We all know that smokers should quit the habit. But does nicotine replacement really help? Pat Thomas investigates There’s no getting around it. The nicotine in cigarettes is highly addictive and can make stopping smoking a difficult undertaking. Without a regular nicotine fix, smokers can experience withdrawal symptoms such as depression, irritability, insomnia, difficulty in […]

Oliver James’ new book asks if we need a new definition of success to help us find happiness. Pat Thomas agrees The concept of ‘affluenza’ did not originate with Oliver James. It has been in the psychological and sociological lexicon for more than a decade. There are websites devoted to it; TV programmes have been made about it. However it […]

Pat Thomas looks at this common complaint – and how the most common treatment for it may just pile on the pain. In the mid 1970s, US Federal analgesics that they are widely, but wrongly, used to treat other types of no different from ‘pushers’. ‘We’ve got ‘pain’ for which they are not a drug […]

Ethical consumerism in the UK is currently worth £29.3 billion, yet 60 per cent of us feel we don’t have enough information to make an ethical decision. There is an ever-growing array of eco labels, but what do they tell us? Or fail to tell us? Pat Thomas explains It used to be easy to […]

Our love affair with convenience culture extends to a reliance on convenience ‘cures’ for minor complaints. In the first article of a new series, The Ecologist’s Health Editor Pat Thomas says that self-medication isn’t the same as self-help. Achieving ‘good health’ is one of the single biggest preoccupations in modern society. But if pressed, most […]

It has spawned a dozen urban legends. It gets praised and reviled by bloggers. And it tastes like carbonated cough syrup. But does Red Bull do you any good? Pat Thomas reports The global energy crisis isn’t just a problem for cars. Humans across the globe are also suffering a chronic lack of vim and […]

The Environment Agency (EA) is within weeks of letting Monsanto escape its liability for dumping thousands of tonnes of cancer-causing chemicals – including all the ingredients of the DDT defoliant Agent Orange – in two quarries in Wales. Jon Hughes and Pat Thomas report. Unless a claim and ‘adversary action’ is lodged with the US […]