This morning's publication of DEFRA's new guidelines is welcome in that it discourages the use of 'display until' and 'sell by' marks on food – of no value to the consumer, merely designed to help the retailer with their stock control. But does it really help the befuddled …
Food/health policy
100 years on and is bread still making you ill?
I have just been alerted by a post on Micki's Truly Gluten Free site of an excellent article by Alex Renton in today's Mail about the vicissitudes of bread during the 20th century. From all but poisonous to nutritious and now back to, if not poisonous, sufficiently unhealthy to …
Fashions in Health
I felt, as I read the headline 'Eating less salt does not cut heart risks, study says...' my mother's ghost hovering over me, finger wagging. 'You health nuts,' she accused me, back in the 1990s when the Mediterranean diet had just become all the rage, 'Ten years ago you all …
Proposed EU Herbal Regulation Built on a Fallacy
A lengthy article on the Alliance for Natural Health site urging us all to keep up the good fight against the risible (if they were not also so threatening) proposed EU restrictions on the sale of herbal medicines, includes an astonishing piece by Chris Dhaenens of the European …
The Pitfalls of ‘Advising’
It is really not easy being a government health agency. Whatever you say, you will be wrong in someone's eyes (sometimes wrong in almost everybody's eyes) but the purpose of your existence is to advise, so advise you must, even when there really is no advice to give. (The …