When John S Yudkin wrote Pure, White and Deadly in 1972, the book was met with great criticism from the food industry in general. His views, they said, were unsubstantiated and misleading, targeting a fairly innocuous substance used by millions in their daily lives. The substance he was referring to is, of course, sugar. Fast forward to the 21st Century and, it appears, we are paying…
It isn’t every day you have a book published. Writing tends to be a lonely business, with the poor, unfortunate writer holed up in his garret room (yes, I know I’ve used that one before), dreaming of success while breaking up items of furniture for the fire to stop him freezing to death. Saturday’s thump on the mat sounded heavier…
After health problems stopped me running for almost two years, I decided to start up again. My first forays out onto the open road (or gravel track) were tentative to say the least. All I could manage to begin with were short bursts of a few minutes, follwed by a period of walking to recover. My chest burned the whole…
The general population can be divided, roughly, into three categories: the fit, the unfit and the soon to stop breathing. Given that most of us fall into the last two, I thought it prudent to ask why. Many centuries ago we were a labour intensive society. Men ploughed fields and gathered crops. Women baked bread and swept the hearth, constantly on…
