By George Henderson and Grant Schofield Topics covered here Metabolic health and COVID-19 risk Possible roles of HDL in lung disease The microbiome and viral resistance Selenium and COVID-19 Vitamins D and K2, and COVID-19 Bottom line for all of this: Eating whole unprocessed food, especially that low in sugar, refined and processed carbohydrates, is likely to have benefits for your immune system and viral resistance generally. If you are pre-diabetic, diabetic, overweight, or insulin resistant then this effect may be even more important. COVID-19 numbers are falling sharply in NZ and… Read More

Hot off the press is a paper published in the NZ Medical Journal on the problem with the dietary guidelines for a healthy mouth (oral  health) and the evidence they are based on. Its the usual issue, same as for rest of the body really, fat turns out to be protective in the mouth, all fermentable carbs harmful. Poor dental health is an issue for us, especially our kids. So we’ve gone about raising this issue. This work was lead by doctoral candidate Sarah Hancock with me, Dr Simon Thornley, and D… Read More

Some fun media with me….A public health professor believes New Zealand schools should run lunch programmes to reduce the consumption of processed and packaged food. Listen to the interview (4 min and fun – tight here): Schools encouraged to run lunch programmes to promote healthy eating

The other day a new paper modelling a saturated fat tax came out in the journal PlosOne.[1] In order to improve the population’s diet, the World Health Organization has called for the taxation of foods that are high in SFA.  Oh no not this again! There are very strong socio-economic reasons why such a tax makes no sense, and would probably have the opposite effect of a sugar tax, but before we get to discussing that we’ll look at what the authors did, what they got right, and where they went wrong…. Read More

By now you’ve seen these headlines. But what can we learn from the study behind them, and the way it was reported? The UK Biobank study was a prospective epidemiological study, using the following methods to look at several foods and their association with colorectal cancers: We used Cox-regression models to estimate adjusted hazard ratios for colorectal cancer by dietary factors in the UK Biobank study. Men and women aged 40–69 years at recruitment (2006–10) reported their diet on a short food-frequency questionnaire (n = 475 581). Dietary intakes were re-measured in a large sub-sample… Read More

This is well worth the watch. Some NZ twists in here from our team and the battles going on (see the last post for more on the spoiler plays against low carb and diabetes reversal coming out of NZ that were mentioned by Aseem)

We were surprised to hear this Radio New Zealand interview with Jim Mann regarding a Chinese study he co-authored.[1] In it he predicts various terrible things for people eating LCHF diets, which we think is out of line and not supported by the study. In fact, the LCHF and Paleo community have been warning about exactly the type of diet that was used in the study – high in energy from soybean oil, rice, and wheat – for years, and Jim Mann’s crowd have attacked us for that, while the NZ Ministry… Read More