Articles

It is impossible to talk about health these days without talking about how our environment plays into many modern health problems. As a consequence we spend a lot of time on ‘chemical watch’ – keeping abreast of studies and media reports on industrial chemicals that find their ways into our lives and our bodies. In […]

GMO media-watchers will know that very recently there has been a biotech PR onslaught, the goal of which is to juxtapose the words ‘GMOs’ and ‘safe’ in such a way they the two concepts become ‘normalised’ as being associated with one another. Nothing could be further from the truth and we must do all we […]

A week ago the European Parliament voted on legislation that was largely publicised as a GMO ‘opt out’. The pro-GM lobby and biotech spin was that the new legislation would give Member States that did not wish to plant GMOs the option to remain GM-free. There’s been a lot of disingenuous hand-wringing about how this […]

Today the European Parliament debated then voted on a controversial Directive that would allow individual Member States to ban cultivation of genetically modified organisms on their territories even when the crop is authorised at EU level. While some may think this is a good thing, in fact the flawed and deeply compromised Directive, which was […]

It was a slow news day. You could tell because of the headline “Miranda gets her man” which graced a couple of the newspapers. The reference was to the fate of the lead character in the denouement of a TV comedy show. The other headline was both more interesting and more revealing of the conventional medicine […]

As we are all winding down – or trying to – for the holidays it’s a good time to reflect on health and well-being and what those words actually mean. Achieving “good health” is now one of the single biggest preoccupations in modern society. But what exactly is “good health”? In typical Western fashion we […]

By now everyone has read THAT comment. The one where Dame Vivienne Westwood apparently suggested that if people couldn’t afford organic they should “eat less”. Maybe you were outraged. But I can guarantee you weren’t there to see and hear what really happened. I was. Dame Vivienne was part of a delegation which took a […]

A weeklong exercise in creativity and consciousness-raising, and letting go of boundaries the Burning Man festival takes place in the middle of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Each year it draws more than 60,000 creatives, free spirits and the just plain curious to a sprawling campground called Black Rock City,  so large it can be seen […]

Most things in our world are ruled by natural cycles – even, it appears, the lifecycle of a toxic chemical. Looking forward in science in part requires looking back and evaluating trends and using these to predict future outcomes. In a new study, researcher Rolf Halden, PhD, from Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute, has used […]

A recent trip to the supermarket revealed a new ‘surprise’: Coca-Cola Life At first I thought the bright green can was some obscenely early Christmas promotion, but instead it revealed itself to be a lower calorie – as opposed to no calorie – version of the iconic soda, sweetened with a mixture of sugar and […]