Articles

If you are despairing over the weather, you are not alone… Distressing, urgent news is coming at us so thick and fast at the moment that it is hard to keep up. There’s the EU’s failure to ban bee killing neonics, the UK government’s increasingly pro-GM stance, the ongoing scandals of horsemeat adulteration in our […]

The UK government says we are heading for antibiotic apocalypse – but it’s working with an incomplete picture of the problem. Antimicrobial resistance is a ticking time-bomb not only for the UK but also for the world, warns the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies. The evidence behind the warning is summed up […]

As big food corporations do their level best to redefine what ‘food’ is, it’s worth asking yourself: What is food? For the purposes of ensuring a booming food industry the basic definition of food adopted by most government agencies is vague and non-committal and goes something like: “any item that is to be processed, partially […]

This week’s UNEP report on the environmental causes of cancer was spread across the newspapers with a great splash. Anyone would think that this analysis was our first inkling that toxic chemicals in our environment, particularly in everyday items like household cleaners, cosmetics and paints as well as those chemicals that leech out of plastics […]

“We’re busy doing nothing, working the whole day through, trying to find lots of things not to do…” Imagine that chorus being sung by an admixture of government ministers, supermarket supremos, catering conglomerates and meat-packers and you have the essence of the official response to the the horsegate scandal. Today it emerges that the Government […]

Nutritional dogma has nothing to do with human health. When it arises, you can bet someone’s making money off it.   It’s been a week when a couple of the cherished dogmas of nutritional advice have come crashing down. Long may it continue. First, there was the much publicised study, based on data from half […]

Two long running stories of health and deception have suddenly hit the news. I don’t know about you but I  feel like we’ve all had to hit the ground running in 2013. Two issues in particular have dominated my inbox: the looming threat of GM salmon and the drip, drip, drip of compensations being awarded […]

If we want parents to make ‘informed decisions’ then we need to tell them the truth It never rains but it pours and in the last couple of weeks we have found ourselves in the middle of a deluge of news stories about childhood vaccinations. Perhaps as a result, an extraordinary paper, published by a […]

Even with a whole armament of conventional drugs, we aren’t anywhere close to winning the ‘war’ against cancer – and now, according to an eminent scientist, taking antioxidants may actually make the problem worse. Or at least that’s how some of the media have interpreted the recent, and quite complex, article in the journal Open […]

Intensive livestock rearing is a particularly bad example of the way humans continue to foul their own nests There are many things to abhor about the way we raise the animals that provide us with meat, milk and eggs. The intensive livestock system is dirty, cruel and unethical. It damages the animals caught up it […]