Articles

What is natural health? There was a time when the answer seemed a lot simpler and mostly involved a good diet and choosing natural remedies such as herbs, homoeopathy, aromatherapy and massage over conventional medicines wherever you could. These days it’s more complex. Natural health is as much about actively avoiding – as much as […]

How do you know what’s in the products you use? If you are like most of us you look on the label. Clear labelling helps all of us make informed choice is about the products we buy.  It spells out a product’s ingredients – both what’s in the product sand what’s not – its intended […]

As the weather warms up our focus inevitably turns to diet and food. One major analysis has just shown that eating too much red meat – and in particular processed and preserved meats such as bacon, salami, hot dogs and other deli meats – raises our risk of dying early from disease like cancer and […]

Tested, assessed and treated as patients rather than mothers-to-be, it’s no wonder women are afraid of giving birth naturally, says Pat Thomas as International Women’s Day arrives A healthy woman walks into her doctor’s office. She says ‘Doctor, I’d like to have major abdominal surgery, please.’ In most medical settings a doctor would balk at […]

So many of us talk about how hard it is us to survive these days. But consider the notion of ‘survival’ as portrayed in this striking documentary – a study of the bare bones lifestyles of indigenous hunters in the Siberian Taiga where winter temperatures can fall below -50ºc. The action, such as it is, […]

Are we fat because of man-made chemicals? That is what a new documentary, screened on January 12th on Canadian television, asked. The programme, which has gained attention across the globe, is part of environmentalist David Suzuki’s The Nature of Things  series. It looked at the scientific evidence showing that chemicals in the environment may be programming us […]

True story. In 2010/11 I became an anaerobic digester bore. I was campaigning with Compassion in World Farming against the proposed Nocton Dairies in Lincolnshire. There were any number of important reasons to object to the proposal, which initially wanted to raise 8000 cows indoors in disgraceful US-style mega-dairy conditions. But for me the key to stopping […]

Fabrics treated with antibacterial chemicals are leeching these toxic substances into the environment every time they are washed, according to Swedish scientists. As reported earlier in the year, the Swedish government has developed national plan for a toxin free everyday environment and this latest study is part of its commitment to understand how chemicals spread […]

Who decides what risks you will take with your health and your life? And on what information is that decision based?

You could hardly have failed to notice the headlines this week; a new study claims to show that vitamins can kill you. But before we find ourselves in the grip of widespread multivitamin phobia, it’s worth considering the context in which the story has appeared, as well as considering what the study actually said – […]