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The Microbiome II: Every Microbiome Is Happy in Its Own Way
In the first post of this microbiome series I covered the beginnings of microbiology. The realisation that we were surrounded by microorganisms, the development of germ theory and the first stirrings of the idea that microbes, apart from destroying our health, could also be contributing to our well-being. We left the story in the early Continue reading
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The Microbiome I: A New World is Discovered
For anyone with an even cursory interest in health and nutrition it has become very hard to avoid the gut microbiota. The collection of bacteria, and other microbes, that we all carry around in our gastrointestinal tract is proving to have an influence on our health and well-being unimaginable even twenty short years ago. Our Continue reading
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Genes, Gluttony and Gout
As a young man, and even into his forties, Henry VIII was a charismatic, athletic and highly attractive individual. He stood, for his times, a towering six feet two inches and he was renown for his prowess on the jousting field and for excelling at hunting, wrestling, tennis, and archery. But, by the time he Continue reading
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Quick Bite: New research lets us know who to thank for our chocolate
It is a truism in science that the more you learn about something the more you know you don’t know. This can make talking to a scientist frustrating. A scientist will rarely tell you something without immediately telling you why it is probably wrong and that more work is needed. A good example of this Continue reading
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Quick Bite: New research shows what was on the menu 2 million years ago
The Ship of Theseus is the name given to a thought experiment first related by Plutarch around the beginning of the second century. In this story the ship Theseus rescued the children of Athens with was kept by the people of Athens and used every year in a pilgrimage to Delos. Over time, and many Continue reading
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Hunger games: Why we get hungry and why we overeat
Imagine you are driving down a long and lonely highway. You are late but also conscientious, so you want to stick as closely to the speed limit of 100 km/h as you can. For the purposes of this story your cruise control is broken or you don’t don’t trust Tesla’s self driving function so you Continue reading
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Quick Bite: Ultra-processed foods give you lung cancer? Maybe not
In the past I’ve been critical of both observational studies and the reporting of these studies in the media and yesterday the Independent published an article called “Food that makes up more than half of western diets linked to lung cancer” which really pushed my buttons. The title is clearly link-bait and it had me Continue reading
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Saffron: The duplicitous golden spice
Humans have always displayed enormous ingenuity when it comes to short-changing their fellow man. Modern tech companies, with their opaque terms of service and relentless data farming, are a great recent example of this but to capture the eternal nature of man’s duplicity we need look no further than our daily repast. Since antiquity we Continue reading
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Vitamin D and human individuality
In a world that seems hell bent on pigeon-holing us into convenient advertising demographics it is worth remembering that almost every single one of us is completely unique. Thanks to sexual reproduction and genetic recombination each of us is an experiment in what can be achieved with the raw clay of the human gene pool. Continue reading
The Science of Food 