Here’s a quick quiz question for you. What do laughing gas and a vegan diet have in common?
The answer is dementia and permanent damage to the central nervous system if the source of problem – vitamin B12 deficiency – is not addressed in time.
I probably see more clients with IBS than anything else: approximately 10%-20% of people are affected. Despite having had a battery of tests, including colonoscopy, endoscopy, and blood assays for various diseases such as coeliac and Crohn’s, these people have rarely been offered a test for small intestinal bacterial overgrowth (SIBO). Yet up to 80% of people with IBS are estimated to have SIBO. If you don’t look for it, you won’t find it. So what is it?
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Great news: a new Alzheimer’s drug was recently proven to slow down memory loss in people at the early stages of the disease.
Also great news: there are several dietary interventions that are also proven to slow down memory loss in people at the early stages of the disease.
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A paper published in November 2022 describes data from 223 international studies that reveal that sperm count across the globe has decreased by more than half over the last fifty years. According to the team of scientists who made this discovery, humanity faces a “fertility crisis.”
You might take the view that — what with eight billion of us already on the planet — the situation is more of a solution than a problem. However, as well as being highly distressing for couples struggling to conceive, low sperm count is associated with a number of male health issues, including testicular cancer, and all-cause mortality.
I recently went to a local Christmas craft fair. It was delightful, in a tinsel-tat sort of way. The food stall was the main attraction, for me, so I quickly made my way over, hoping to discover something new and special. Alas no, it was the usual cake fest. Don’t get me wrong: there’s no denying the artistry of the craft. But there’s also no denying the artistry of how sugar creates cravings that lead to overeating, however pretty the presentation.
The one, non-sugary offering was artisanal bread. I rarely eat bread, or indeed any starchy carbohydrate, but it did look very good, in a homespun way. I wasn’t alone in my thinking. Mr Cross suggested we buy a loaf and keep it in the freezer, “for guests”. I know a cunning ruse when I hear one, but on this occasion I willingly played along.
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I recently came across these empty cooking oil containers that had been deposited behind a restaurant near my home. It’s not an unusual sight in areas with catering establishments. Less visible is the damage that these commonplace oils do to human health.
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Without sufficient iron, you’re likely to feel very, very tired. But that’s just the start of it. And if you think you’re immune because you already eat plenty of iron, think again. What you eat and what you absorb are two very different matters.
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Treatment for mental health conditions is not always effective. Sometimes the meds work, sometimes they don’t. When they don’t, science has to look beyond the usual parameters for the solutions needed.
That’s why, between 2019 and 2020, French psychiatrists carried out an experiment on adults with “severe, persistent mental illness”. These various illnesses included major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, and schizoaffective disorder. Their symptoms had responded poorly to intensive drug treatment.
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A raw food diet sounds like the perfect antidote to these polluted, toxic times: clean and detoxifying, even a touch spiritual. You can atone for past dietary transgressions with uncooked vegetables.
There’s more than a whiff of the puritanicals at work here, but little evidence to substantiate the many health claims made in favour of this departure from the usual human diet. That’s probably because a raw food diet is both unnatural and unhealthy. Here are three reasons why you should carry on cooking.
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The human brain is often likened to a computer. I don’t know why; it’s nothing like a computer. Break open a head and you will see that the organ within is just a lump of wobbly fat. Yet it took millions of years of human evolutionary biology to fine tune that lardy lump. It runs entirely on what you feed it.
The dry weight of the brain is 60% fat. The rest of it is cholesterol (also very important) and protein (ditto). No other organ contains so much fat or needs it so much. Without it, the brain simply cannot function.
