Articles

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 […]

  The narrative of conservation and environment is often one of destruction and despair. Because so many big issues happen so far from our doorsteps, it’s easy to distance ourselves from it all and assume that nothing anybody does will make a difference. In this book the author, a Professor of Conservation Science at Cambridge, […]

A sequel to the 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning The Prize – an epic account of the oil industry from its early days to the modern times – this book’s central premise that peak oil is largely a myth, or at least so far in the future that we don’t need to worry about it just […]

Too much sugar is bad for you. Decades of research make that statement a pretty sure bet. High sugar diets depress immunity and raise your risk of stroke, heart disease, diabetes, obesity and just about every other modern ill. But anyone who thinks that artificial sweeteners are, by implication, good for you should think again. […]

  Frozen. Remote. Hostile. Extreme. Barren.  These are the usual adjectives usually applied the Antarctic. Most of us view it through a lens of ignorance, or romance, but for scientists like James McClintock, a renowned marine biologist with 13 polar expeditions, both overland and underwater, under his belt, it is so much more. In a […]

When our children ask us – and they will – what we did to make the future safe and healthy for them, what will we say? A large part of my own career was established when I became what some people dubbed the ‘Chemical Cassandra’. Long before it was fashionable, I was involved in exposing the toxic […]