PSA screening leads to unnecessary treatment… and suffering
Are you a male over 50? Has your GP advised you to have a PSA (prostate specific antigen) test, “Just as a routine check”? Ready for a shock? There are very good reasons NOT to! The Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia (PCFA) recommends annual screening, through PSA testing and digital rectal examination (DRE) to all…
5 reasons to think twice before taking calcium pills
Calcium supplements are widely promoted in popular media, and routinely prescribed by both medical doctors and naturopaths to postmenopausal women, particularly those who have been diagnosed with low bone density. Many vegans consume calcium supplements and/or calcium-fortified foods because they worry that their dietary intake of calcium may be inadequate. Because calcium is a mineral…
What Bill Clinton’s cardiologist didn’t know (and why you need to know it)
“High cholesterol runs in my family. My doctor says I can’t lower it with diet; I have to take drugs.” “I have high blood pressure because of my age.” “I have 4 blocked coronary arteries so I have to have a bypass or I’ll die.” If only I had a dollar for every time I’ve…
Rumination inflammation
“Don’t dwell on what has passed away, or what is yet to be”, rasps Leonard Cohen in what I consider to be one of his finest songs, ‘Anthem’. But for many people, that’s easier said (or sung) than done! If you’ve ever found yourself running through a past conversation over and over in your mind,…
Depression: bringing your black dog to heel
Antidepressant drugs are only marginally effective for most people, and come with a laundry list of side-effects (see my article, 5 reasons to think twice before taking antidepressants). But when the black dog (as Winston Churchill famously referred to his gloomy spells) is nipping at your heels, you’re obviously going to want relief. Fortunately, there…
Want to feel happier? Change what’s on your plate!
Google the search terms ‘happiness’ + ‘research’ and you’ll retrieve about 56,300,000 results. Yet, as economists David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, and Professor of Public Health, Sarah Stewart-Brown, pointed out in a recent study, of the many thousands of scientific papers published on the various determinants of people’s happiness and psychological health, virtually none have…
5 reasons to think twice before taking diabetes drugs
Australia is facing an avalanche of newly-diagnosed type 2 diabetes cases, brought on by our increasingly toxic food environment and burgeoning obesity epidemic. Depending on the severity of their condition at diagnosis, newly-diagnosed diabetics may either be given a trial of dietary management (which usually fails, because the standard dietary recommendations made to diabetics are…
Eating meat: the fast track to diabesity
With all those popular diet books and personal trainers out there pushing animal protein and vilifying ‘carbs’ as the cause of overweight and diabetes, the average person could be forgiven for assuming that there’s some hard science behind this carbophobia and protein worship. Nothing could be further from the truth. Two large and well-conducted studies…
“I don’t want that in my healthy body!”
These words came straight out of the mouth of a client whom I’ll call Sandra, as we were discussing an amazing experience she’d had that week. Sandra and I had been working for several months on her self-esteem, body image, eating behaviour and weight. Like so many women, Sandra had experienced the benefits of looking…
Does fruit make you fat?
Back when I was a naturopathy student in the early 1990s, no one I was acquainted with would have taken this question seriously. At that time, everybody ‘knew’ that being overweight was due to eating too much fat. End of story. But then the Atkins diet – which exonerates fat, and vilifies carbohydrates as the…