Have you ever heard the term “food is medicine”? The first time I heard it my gut reaction was positive…of course that makes sense plus it’s snappy and easy to remember. Turns out I was wrong. Real food is so much more important than medicine and eating what’s good for us can stop us from needing medicine. Read on for more

I’m in the second half of a century well lived and suffer from age-related muscle loss. This is natural and easily managed by eating enough bioavailable protein and exercising properly. I recently read a great paper about how to get enough bioavailable protein to retain and build back muscles and strength. I describe it here.

What happens when many people around the world don’t get enough of an essential micronutrient? It turns out that blood tests for magnesium aren’t very useful and we may be able to correct for a lack of magnesium in the short-term at the expense of our long-term health. The good news is that there are things that can be done to correct a deficiency. Read on if you want to learn more.

One of the great achievements of modern agriculture has been the increase in yields since the 1960s that have allowed us to feed a growing population. However, this increase in yield has come at a price. The micronutrient content of many fruits, veg, meats and dairy has decreased considerably since our grandparents’ days. This decline is as high as 50% for certain micronutrients and it affects product from much of Europe and USA. We need to take care to consume a diverse range of real foods in order to satisfy our short- and long-term nutritional needs.

Ever wondered why a stroll in the woods, running on a beach or cooling off your feet in a river just make you feel better about life? Could it be that being in nature connects us sub-consciously to our real world and not some manufactured “new normal”? For me that is the case and I’ve described here how I make those connections. Maybe they apply to you too.

Three books about the ancient pinewoods of Scotland and temperate rainforests of Great Britain and Ireland. I find that time in nature is regenerative for me. I’ve used these books to identify places to hike and mountain bike through some of the most spectacular landscapes of the United Kingdom

When I was diagnosed with heart disease despite following contemporary nutrition guidelines and my doctor’s advice for years I decided to change my lifestyle. That included eliminating two major food ingredients, namely seed oils and simple carbohydrates. In this post I describe why I eliminated seed oils and how they likely contributed to my disease.

I listen to many podcasts and I love it when a long-form discussion changes my mind about something. This podcast “What your GP doesn’t tell you” is one of my favourites because the host is smart, engaging and asks intelligent follow-up questions of her guests. Her discussion with surgeon James Kinross is one of the most illuminating I’ve encountered on the subject of the human microbiome and how it interacts with our environment to affect human health from start to finish, quite literally.

The latest addition to my cumulative book list is the collection that I used to inform my first post entitled “Is my heart disease a symptom of modern malnutrition?”. There is a total of 10 books describing how what we eat can cause and often cure chronic diseases

Have you ever tried to figure out how much sugar is represented by certain types of food? It can be difficult but I’ve found a series of infographics that helped me to eliminate ingredients that may have contributed to my heart disease.

The latest addition to my cumulative book list is the excellent book by Christopher Palmer, MD, in which he makes the case for mental health as a form of metabolic dysfunction, not a chemical imbalance. He describes how a range of mental health disorders may be improved through food and nutrition. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did.

Are you interested in reading books that might inform your lifestyle choices? This list of books will be regularly updated. I hope you find it interesting.

Are you interested in finding out more about human nutrition but don’t have the time or patience to search the academic literature? I am interested and find that when I translate that literature into simpler language, it helps me to understand and retain what is being said. This is the first in what may be a series of simple summaries of articles that interest me.

A review of The Story of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman

Have you ever suffered from a lack of certain things like vitamins in your body? I have and I realised decades ago that when I supplemented with lysine, magnesium, vitamin D3, and quercetin, to name a few, I felt much better. After I started to believe that my health is largely driven by the nature of what I eat, it wasn’t long before I started to consider cutting down on the supplements I take every day and trying to get them from a more natural source. This post describes what I’ve discovered.

Did you have an opportunity to read what I found out about the currently popular Diet Heart Hypothesis of what causes heart disease? If so, were you surprised by what I discovered? I was blown away, and I have to say disappointed, by what I learned. In this post I’ve tried to describe the other, less popular, Thrombogenic Hypothesis. If you read on you’ll read of a simpler theory about how a natural blood clotting repair mechanism may be hijacked and distorted by our poor lifestyle choices to cause heart disease. You’ll also learn about the positive steps I’ve taken to fix my heart disease.

Do you or does someone close to you suffer from heart disease? Are you trying to understand the cause and what you can do to stop and maybe even reverse the damage? I found myself asking those questions and decided to delve into what is known about the causes of heart disease. This is the first of a two-part description of what I discovered. In this post you’ll learn what I discovered about the currently popular Diet Heart Hypothesis.

Are you intrigued by the current popularity of certain fermented foods such as kefir and kimchi and interested in understanding if they really are beneficial? I consume fermented food every day and can describe some of their benefits. Fermented foods offer rare nutritional benefit to our bodies and our gut microbiota in a single package. Luckily, fermented food is easy to make at home because their full health benefits are delivered unpasteurized, and because home fermenting allows us to eat real seasonal food produced locally.

If, like me, you shy away from food guidelines for various reasons, you may be surprised by what I present here. A group of academics have raised concerns about prominent international food guidelines and their relation to good published science. This is important because in the absence of transparent evidence-based health metrics, people can make poor decisions about sources of nutrient-dense food. Children and the elderly are especially at risk from food that lacks the most important vitamins and minerals

Understanding how our metabolism works is important because it explains why an outwardly healthy athlete following conventional dietary and medical advice (me) can still contract a serious chronic disease.