Focused articles on specific nutrition and health topics. Each one is evidence-based, direct, and designed to be read in around 5 minutes. New articles added as we write them.
One in four adults across the industrialised world has fatty liver disease. Eighty percent have no idea. This is not a disease of the reckless. It is a disease of the ordinary — the daily routine, the meal deal, the statin prescription — and the food supply that shaped all of it.
Philip Morris. RJ Reynolds. A fraction of a penny per unit. Sixty years of reformulation, buried research, and a regulator that proposed to promote the industry it was built to oversee. This is who did it, how it was done, and when it started.
You cleaned up the food. Now look at the container it came in, the water you cooked it with, and the 168 chemicals applied to your body before you left the house. The contamination was never only in the food — and there is more you can do about it than you have been told.
The FSA was created after BSE because MAFF was captured by industry. Within a decade, the same capture happened again. Traffic light labelling made voluntary after £1bn of lobbying. Threshold for "high sugar" set by the industry it was supposed to oversee. The question of who was supposed to be looking after you has a clear answer — and that answer explains everything else.
For the first time in recorded medical history, children are developing diseases that used to require decades of adult eating to produce. Fatty liver disease in ten-year-olds. Type 2 diabetes in teenagers. Hypertension in primary school children. This did not happen by accident.
The OXO cube. Greek yogurt. Dairy Milk. A tomato that lasted all summer. A quiz to see how aware you are of what has been done to the food you grew up trusting — followed by the investigation that explains your score.
Fatty liver disease used to take decades of adult eating to produce. Some of the children being diagnosed today are eight years old. What is happening to their livers, why, and what can be done before the damage becomes permanent.
In 1961, a laboratory in Hertfordshire reduced bread-making from 48 hours to under four hours. Around 80% of British bread is still made the same way today. The fermentation time it eliminated was removing phytic acid, reducing FODMAPs, and partially pre-digesting gluten. Nobody announced what was removed in the doing of it.
You are carrying roughly 100 trillion microorganisms in your gut. They regulate your immune system, influence your mood, produce vitamins, and determine how you respond to the food you eat. They are not passengers — they are participants. And what you feed them matters enormously.
Around 1 in 5 people in the UK has low vitamin D levels. Between October and March, the sun is too low in the sky to produce any vitamin D at all. This is not a minor deficiency — it regulates over 200 genes, controls immune function, maintains bone density, and influences mood.
Iron, magnesium, zinc, calcium, selenium, iodine — your body cannot synthesise a single one. They build bones, carry oxygen, power enzymes, regulate heartbeat, and protect DNA. Here is what each one does, which ones most people run short on, and why preparation matters as much as what you eat.
Eight vitamins, one letter. B vitamins are the engine room of human metabolism — converting food into energy, building DNA, maintaining the nervous system. Run short on any one and something significant stops working. Including the one that plant-based eaters cannot get from food alone.
The colour in a blueberry, a red pepper, a turmeric root, a bunch of kale — these are not decorative. They are the plant's defence system, built over millions of years to handle UV radiation, infection, and oxidative damage. When you eat them, you borrow that system.
Most people in the UK eat around half the fibre they need. The consequences go far beyond digestion — your immune system, your mood, your bowel cancer risk, and your blood sugar all depend on it. Here is what fibre actually does, and why diversity matters as much as quantity.
For thirty years we were told fat was the problem. So we removed it from food — and replaced it with sugar. Here is what fatty acids actually are, why the omega-3:6 ratio matters more than most people know, and which fats your body genuinely cannot do without.
Your body makes tens of thousands of different proteins. Every single one is built from just 20 amino acids — delivered by food. What specific amino acids do, why the complete protein debate was settled decades ago, and where to find all nine essential ones reliably.
You eat. Your body takes what it needs and puts it to work. But what does "putting it to work" actually mean? Energy, structure, signals, defence, communication — here is what happens on the other side of digestion, and why every category of nutrient has a job that nothing else can cover.
Supplements compete with each other for absorption, accumulate in fat tissue if you can't flush them out, need genetic conversion that 40% of people can't do efficiently, and arrive in a chemical manufacturing matrix that has nothing to do with nutrition. Five things that actually happen after you swallow the pill.
Most of the pill isn't the nutrient. High-dose minerals crowd each other out. Synthetic vitamins aren't the same as food vitamins. And the genuine use cases are narrower than the industry wants you to think.
A soft-boned childhood disease of the 1800s still surfaces in modern paediatric wards — not because food is scarce, but because sunlight, skin and a single missed supplement conspire against growing bones. The real UK epidemiology, the vitamin D activation cascade, the obesity paradox, and how a wholefood plate keeps it in the past.
GI tells you how fast. GL tells you how much. Use both together and you have a genuinely practical tool for managing blood glucose, insulin and sustained energy — especially if you live with diabetes or insulin resistance.
The one genuine advantage is convenience. Everything else is a cost — and the costs compound quietly over years before they announce themselves as a diagnosis. What the research actually shows.
Next up: Antioxidants — what the word actually means. Vitamin C — beyond the cold remedy. Blood sugar — how the body manages it and why it matters.