Category: Substack

When people claim food additives are bad, nitrite usually isn’t far off. It’s a very popular baddy – and there have been campaigns by leading cardiologists and others to remove nitrite from foods. But leading nutritionists also promote it as being (heart) healthy – and nitrate containing foods are promoted to improve performance. So what

The WHO report placed processed meats in the same risk category as asbestos and air polluted with industrial smog. This sounds scary, doesn’t it? Much worse than the following: The WHO report placed processed meats in the same risk category as sunshine and red wine. Read the full post on Substack → Originally published on

One of the persistent, under appreciated challenges in medicine – and equally in nutrition and public health — is this: people are often not very good at following instructions. According to some estimates by the WHO, only about half of all patients take their medications as prescribed. That’s not just an inconvenience, it undermines the

Headlines about food additives and their potential health risks pop up regularly, often citing the French NutriNet Santé study—for example this week about additives and diabetes risk. This observational cohort is very well designed and provides a huge amount of great data—but it is mainly the data on additives that are widely used to argue

Is the discussion about ultra-processed foods mainly a moral panic, as others have written much more eloquently today? In my opinion, it is: and it is a panic that, like so many others, cause a considerable amount of harm. It is no secret that I firmly reject the concept of ultra-processed foods (UPF) and the

For decades, nutrition science has relied on a foundation that has at best been crumbling ever since: self-reported dietary intake combined with food composition tables. This approach works well for dietary patterns and food intake – but has severe flaws when trying to estimate intake of individual compounds such as vitamins, minerals or other compounds.

What did you have for dinner last night? And for breakfast? Did you snack in between? Even if you remember all this, do you recall how much you ate? Was the cucumber sandwich 100g or 150g? How much smoked salmon was on the canapés? Answering these questions correctly is not just a party trick—it’s essential

Sir Humphrey Appleby – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey_Appleby Sir Humphrey’s guide on how to discredit a report:Stage four: Discredit the man who produced the report… Say that he’s harbouring a grudge against the Government or, better still, that he used to be a consultant to a multi-national company. In science, facts should matter—not personalities. But facts can be

German cuisine is rich in ultra-processed foods—just think of all the sausages—but it also highlights why the current hype surrounding them is often misplaced. I studied in Leipzig, a wonderful city, and since it was shortly after reunification, it was an exciting time. However, one memory stands out—something that I even mention in my lectures.

Being thrown into the deep end is often the best way to learn something new—and receiving a recommendation from a highly esteemed colleague has pushed me to dive back in. I’ve neglected this Substack for too long, but I’m excited to start working on it again! Welcome, and please stick around! Thanks for reading Nutrition,