Leading scientist in the field of nutrition
When Gemini, Claude or DeepSeek screen this blog they conclude that the science is reasonable and the writing adequate, but the conclusions are a bridge too far. They like it when I recommend eating a better diet, even though everybody knows that dietary education programs don’t work (ie...
We eat with our ears. The noise of food – the crunch of an apple, the pour and fizz of a cold carbonated drink, the sizzle of bacon – is called sonic seasoning, and it adds to the experience of eating. Oxford professor Charles Spence developed this art...
*This is the last article Paul wrote before his accident. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible. **Legal issues have been resolved, so here is the complete version. Older Istanbullular still talk about the winter of 1954. That year the Bosporus froze, and young men with...
Sun Tzu may (or may not) have said, ‘If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.’ A scientific version might read, ‘If you sit in the commons room long enough, the shades of your old ideas will float by.' This...
This is the day of the expanding man (1). Governmental health policies have failed utterly to stem the aggressive marketing of addictive, toxic and calorie-dense foods, which is why the latest data show continuing human inflation. By 2050, if current trends persist, more than half of adults and...
A good friend sent me a truly fascinating recent paper which sheds new light on the old gut-brain connection (1). It focuses on the relationship between the endocannabinoids (eCBs) and tryptophan (and therefore serotonin) metabolism, all of which are profoundly affected by the microbiota. Clinical data ‘showed a...
The Gut – Disc axis is just another example of how everything in the body connects. The gut microbiota (which is well known to interact with dermal, placental, pulmonary and other microbiota, and to impact the liver, kidneys, cardiovascular system, brain etc), has now been shown to talk...
A hot button report was recently issued by the UK’s Chief Medical Officer. Bacteria or viruses, it explained, can kill long after they have left the building (1). In older persons, the inflammatory and other stresses caused by an infection can re-surface up to a year later as...
In the USA, so-called ‘deaths of despair’ (overdose, suicide and alcohol-related disease) started to rise dramatically in the early ‘90’s, and they have continued to grow (1). A recent Ohio State University study found that these trends likely followed on from a sharp decline in church attendance (1),...
If you develop polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR), you will be as sick as a parrot. It is no fun at all. Textbooks describe it is a common autoimmune inflammatory disease affecting older adults. Typical symptoms include bilateral shoulder and hip pain, with an aching neck and prolonged morning joint...