5 August 2024
Recently I was listening to the Inner Cosmos podcast, which explores the human brain from a neuroscience perspective. One of the episodes was about intuition, and the host was interviewing an Australian scientist, Joel Pearson, about intuition. During the interview, the scientist mentioned Intuitive Eating. This was a new term for me, so I thought I'd look it up and see what it was all about.
21 August 2016
Superfoods are foods that are touted as having high levels of one or more nutrients, with claims made that these nutrients can heal the body. These superfoods, such as kale, goji berries and chia seeds, are often sold at very high prices.
1 November 2015
The internet is a seething pool of 'stuff ', and one of the challenges faced by those using it is to distinguish useful information from foolish fantasy. And there surely is a lot of the latter! Thus we find that...
1 November 2010
Alison Campbell finds some claims about raw foods hard to swallow.
1 August 2009
Presenting numbers with excessive and artifical precision in product labels, newspaper articles and report tables does nothing for scientific credibility and sows confusion in the mind of the reader.
1 February 2005
A Christchurch mother who fed her five-year-old son raw beans was surprised when he fell ill. Because they had not been sprayed, she reasoned they should be a natural, healthy snack. But natural, as Jay Mann makes clear in this highly entertaining guide to the contents of your dinner plate, doesn't necessarily mean safe. Beans for example contain lectins, which have no bad taste to warn unwary consumers, but destroy the lining of your small intestine. Alfalfa contains canavanine, which disrupts DNA and RNA metabolism, though you would need to eat a lot of alfalfa to be poisoned by it. Lots of common foods are laden with poisons, all perfectly natural of course, but best consumed in small doses only.
1 August 2002
John Riddell learns about some dangerous chemicals
1 May 2002
Owen McShane examines last year's Great Soya Sauce Scare
1 November 2001
Scientific studies suggest "organic" foods are neither healthier nor safer than genetically modified products or those grown conventionally.
1 May 2001
Howard Bezar and Denis Curtain
1 November 1999
There are three types of people in this country. Those that can count and those that can't. It is common to blame the education system for this.
1 May 1991
Despite recent claims that "natural" foods are safer, there is evidence that "natural" pesticides can be present at much higher concentrations than residues from synthetic pesticides. These "natural" chemicals are often untested and of unknown toxicity, with little evidence of health benefits.
1 November 1990
(From the London Sunday Times Supplement)