Articles

What happens when researchers find something that challenges the status quo and the huge volumes of received opinions that we have all been led to believe are ‘fact’? This week’s chocolate ‘scandal’ provided some insight. A large 12-year study in the journal Heart, found that people who eat a substantial amount of chocolate every day […]

The news over the last couple of weeks has been awash with stories about cancer ‘cures’. Look carefully at these stories, though. In fact the genetically modified virus that ‘cures’ cancer – only marginally improved survival rates and has struggled to get approval in the US because of concerns over its lack of real benefit. […]

The pro-GM bias of the BBC was plain to see during Monday’s (8th June) Panorama programme. Blinkered and narrow rather than panoramic, selective and prejudicial rather than investigative, this sorry display set a new low for a programme which was once a flagship of investigative journalism. It had no more veracity and insight than the […]

I am not a vegetarian but I wholeheartedly support this week’s National Vegetarian Week. Why? Because for a whole variety of reasons we simply cannot continue to eat the way we are eating. In my lifetime the global population has doubled but our meat consumption has quadrupled; and while the global population is set to […]

Honey bees have disappeared at a staggering rate over the last year, according to a new government report from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The numbers are significant and “troubling” and for the first time summer deaths have outnumbered the winter ones.This is the first time the USDA has released information about summer month […]

Certain things are immutable truths. Entertainers will always ‘go for the crotch’ (as someone once delicately put it) when they can’t come up with anything better or more creative to say. And newspapers will always claim that babies are at risk when they have a story so thin that it’s almost no story at all. […]

They call it the ‘obesity paradox’ – the notion that those with a higher BMI seem to live longer. But even this nickname doesn’t really get to grips with what the evidence is saying. In the news this week is a book called Doctoring Data: How to Sort Out Medical Advice from Medical Nonsense by Dr […]

Are you sitting comfortably? Well maybe you shouldn’t be. One of the very first articles we published on this site had to do with the damaging effect that sitting for long periods of time had on health and wellbeing. We were kind of a lone voice on this issue then. But since that time there […]

“Vaccine will cure diabetes.” You have to admit it is a catchy headline. But like most headlines it was a shiny attention-grabbing balloon for the masses rather than a statement of fact. This week most of the newspapers ran the same story which was actually about the launch of a research product to test a […]

Genetically modified food has been widely publicised as way to feed the world – but could eating it just make our ‘eating problems’ worse? Since it has been shown GMOs don’t increase yields or make food more nutritious, and in fact may even contain higher residues of harmful pesticides, the mythology of feeding the world […]