Author, obesity researcher .

The Mediterranean Diet and heart disease

The last week in February (2013) saw headlines all over the world: “Mediterranean diet shown to ward off heart attack and stroke.” The Guardian ran with “Mediterranean diet ‘cuts strokes and heart attacks in at-risk groups‘.”  The Sydney Morning Herald announced “Mediterranean diet cuts risk of first heart attack by 30%”. The world headlines were [...]

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Egg yolk consumption, carotid plaque & bad science

“Egg yolks linked to heart disease” screamed the headlines on Monday 6th August 2012.  The newspaper article came from a journal article called “Egg yolk consumption and carotid plaque“. I really have got better things to do than to continually dissect articles from so called scientists, but, when the item under attack is the super [...]

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Can Atkins diet raise heart attack risk for women?

So screamed the headlines on Wednesday 27th June 2012. This was the full article in the BMJ, which was behind the headlines. Another irresponsible article, more misleading headlines – both the article and headlines ignorant about nutrition and the composition of food. There seem to be one of these a day at the moment and [...]

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An apple a day does (not) keep the doctor away – more bad science

I love the Mail! I would have a fraction of the diet and obesity stories to comment on that I do without it. This blog post comes from today’s Mail on Sunday – from the health section in Review (29/4/2012). Described as “Why should we eat five a day? And is butter bad? A food [...]

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Five-a-day – is it enough?!

Five-a-day – is it enough?! Zoe Harcombe comments on an article in The Independent about 5-a-day and heart disease, cancer and bad science.

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Cholesterol & heart disease – there is a relationship, but it’s not what you think

I do a fortnightly newsletter called “Diet & Health Today” in our on line support club. The club is there to help people to lose weight by eating food – real food! Apparently that makes us radical and controversial. The main article in Diet & Health Today is called “The Big Issues” and we have [...]

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Third of heart deaths blamed on overweight

In a 10 year study of 20,000 men and women aged 20 to 65, Dutch scientists have found that being overweight accounted for half of fatal heart disease cases. The people in the study were more overweight than the average, so they allowed for this in their prediction that this meant  1 in 3 fatalities [...]

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Heart attack rate rising for women

This is a really interesting development. The heart attack rate in women is rising. A study of 8,000 people between 1988 – 1994 and then 1999-2004 showed that 2.5% of men and 0.7% of women experienced a heart attack in the first period and 2.2% of men and 1% of women had a heart attack [...]

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Forget Cholesterol and statins – here’s how you really avoid heart disease

This is a great article by Jerome Burne. If you are interested in this area, I cannot recommend highly enough “The Great Cholesterol Con” by Dr Malcolm Kendrick – funny and extremely logical, it should be compulsory reading for every public health advisor and statin prescriber world-wide. Would it surprise you to know that it [...]

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Chocolate twice a week ‘protects heart victims’

No surprise that I liked this article! As a regular consumer of 85%+ cocoa dark chocolate… A Swedish study has shown that heart attack survivors, who eat dark (real) chocolate regularly are nearly 70% less likely to die from cardiac problems than those who rarely eat it. Even a weekly treat can help, almost halving [...]

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