Articles

You will have seen the doomsday headlines about the recent government survey which highlighted the looming health disaster that is the average British diet. The media furore suggested that fruit juice and cereal were nothing less than health ‘timebombs’. We’ve certainly reports on the problems of things like the hidden sugars in fruit juice, sugary […]

Question: How many government officials does it take to make sensible decisions about pesticide regulation? Answer: Nobody knows, because it’s never been done. Anybody who follows the pesticide news trail will be aware of the recent report from the US that traces of glyphosate – which since the introduction of GMO crops has become the […]

We might just call it a walk in the woods. But to the Japanese it is known as shirin-yoku, or ‘forest bathing’. In Japan a gentle walk in a forest has become a recognised form of relaxation and/or stress management activity in Japan and is regarded as having similar health benefits to natural aromatherapy. The […]

We all know what climate change brings. It brings changes in weather with more extremes of heat, precipitation and storms. It brings changes in sea levels and broadens the range major vectors of disease like mosquitoes. We’ve covered some of the health risks associated with climate change, including the mental health risks, on our site […]

Sometimes a thing just sticks in your head. The organic food and pesticides story, which we featured in our last newsletter, threw up many questions for me – only some of which got articulated on the day. Given Cancer Research UK’s (CRUK) dismissal of the pesticide/cancer link, one of these questions was: what is the […]

A widely publicised study released today has suggested that eating organic food doesn’t stop you getting cancer. Both sides of the debate are scrambling to make their soundbites seem more sensible than the other guys’ – and for reasons known only to newspaper photo editors, pictures of Gwyneth Paltrow are being used to illustrate the […]

As the UK Prime Minister welcomes the recommendations of his science advisors to ‘go it alone’ in Europe and embrace GMO crops, I wonder – whatever happened to the Precautionary Principle?

If you want to know where someone stands on health and environment there can be few better barometers than their views on the Precautionary Principle (PP). The PP, which is part of the regulatory framework in the EU, but not in the US or many other countries, is based on the idea of ‘forecaring’. It […]

We may be eating more, but we are not eating better and the way we eat – which is fast becoming a dietary monoculture – is leading us down the path to global food poverty. That is the conclusion of two recent reports on global food supplies. The first is a comprehensive new study, relying […]

I don’t know about you but sometimes the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ I have to deal with leaves me feeling exhausted – and paralysed. When I say ‘stuff’ I mean the usual duties linked to house, family and home, but also the other stuff that I know I need to pay attention to: the media […]