Can your Choice of Chardonnay or Sauvignon Blanc Cause Skin Cancer?
In Greek mythology, Daedalus was an inventor. His inventions—in various iterations from Homer to Pliny—include the axe, plumbline (architectural tool to measure how “plumb” or vertical a line was), glue (fish glue or isinglass, from the floating bladders of fish like sturgeon), and even a colourful dance floor (for Princess Ariadne). However his creative genius […]
Food Interactions: Why some Foods are Best Eaten Separately
The gastronomic science of the gut is always interesting. Full of science—and sometimes—pseudoscience. Like I was told—when I was in Hong Kong to deliver a lecture a few years ago—that beef and chestnut, two foods considered “warm” in traditional Chinese medicine, could be harmful in summer due to hot body temperatures. I was told that […]
How to take Vitamins to Avoid Death by Cancer
Five centuries before Christ, Greece was in its elements. Athens, emboldened after defeating the Persians, was particularly prosperous. With economic comfort, art and literature flourished. But so did philosophy. It was the era of Greek thinkers whose ideas shaped Western civilizations. Patients who have been to my consulting room often comment on my degree certificates—apart […]
Why Saving the Planet may Save Your Prostate!
Why Saving the Planet may Save Your Prostate! The link between vegan diets and prostate cancer (Image from National Cancer Institute via Unsplash) Prostate cancer has affected celebrities like Rod Stewart and Robert De Niro, both of whom made complete recoveries. Prostate cancer is somewhat unusual because these tumours do not rapidly invade other parts […]
Wrinkles and Aging: Chicken and Egg?
Photo by Ravi Patel from Unsplash Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. ~ Douglas MacArthur People who know me have heard me say in several media interviews, “One cannot have bad health and good skin.” As a skin doctor, I have a personal, clinical and research interest […]
How to Achieve Your New Year’s Resolutions in 2024
The period before a new year –following the Xmas holidays–is often a time of relaxation, reflection, and for some people, a time to make resolutions. As this blog is about giving you evidence-based advice, the topic of my first blog for 2024 is all about how you can achieve what you set out to do […]
Nudge, Nudge, Fudge, Wink, Wink: The “Science” of Human Behaviour and Economics
I have been thinking about New Zealand’s Covid-19 strategy because it has been in the news for a variety of reasons, not least of all the court case that is being reported on daily — University of Auckland v. Siouxsie Wiles – where the latter is suing her employer for failure to protect her against […]
The Neuroscience of Handwriting: What Writing says about your Thinking Ability
Our planet Earth has existed for 4.5 billion years. It is sobering to consider that our species, modern Homo sapiens, has only been around for 200,000 years and left Africa around 100,000 years ago. As I said in my TED talk, The Myth of Race, our brain is nothing but a computer and with all […]
Not a Morning Person? Exercise and Your Health.
When you exercise may have more to say about your health. George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch (1): “It’s an uncommonly dangerous thing to be left without any padding against the shafts of disease.” In those days diseases such as tuberculosis caused weight loss, so there was a viewpoint that one needed to be voluptuous to […]
The Hidden Cancer Risks of Some Occupations
New cancer research reveals unknown facts about hairdressing and accounting! As someone who works in cutaneous oncology i.e., skin cancer, and has an interest in genomics and how our lifestyles affect our genes (my book, The Genetics of Health, is now translated into German, Italian and several other languages) we know that cancer risk is […]