Ketogenic diet

keto diet for runners

A few weeks back, I advised a healthy dose of scepticism when faced with the fad diets of the new year. In fact, many of my blogs from last year carried a barely-hidden negativity towards ‘dieting’, so you could be forgiven for wondering whether dietitians have anything to do with ‘diets’ at all. So, just to clarify a few points… The ‘anti-dieting’ thing is really just my response to the standard media message that ‘diets’ are a short-term, quick-fix towards health goals, as implied by the phrase ‘going on a diet’. Of course the true meaning of the word ‘diet’, […]

Continue Reading

Dry January

Many of you may be enjoying / enduring your very own ‘Dry January’ right now, so I just thought I would pen a few thoughts on this, as it seems to be attract more media attention every year – both positive and negative. What? Dry January seems to have originated as a concept by Alcohol Concern, but has a couple of other guises too, perhaps most notably ‘Dryathlon’, by Cancer Research. As far as I am aware, the challenge involves first abstaining from alcohol for the whole of the month of January, and then trying not to bore your friends and colleagues […]

Continue Reading

New year…new fad diets

I hope you’ve all had a lovely Christmas break. As I write this, I am still very much in that hazy, blissful state of purgatory between Christmas and New Year where days of the week have become utterly meaningless. However, I know that thoughts will soon turn to January, and with that, the inevitable deluge of resolutions. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with this – a new year can be a new start, and it also presents us with the perfect opportunity to assess how things have gone over the past 12 months. So, racked with post-festive gluttony […]

Continue Reading

Be smart and look beyond the headlines!

Visitors to the BBC website this week may well have spotted an article with the following heading: ‘Any diet will do, say researchers, if you stick to it’. The article (which you can read here) was in fact a summary of work published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which itself was a meta-analysis (statistical combination of studies) of 48 individual trials. The primary finding, as the headline suggests, was that the specifics of any diet being followed is less important than the act of actually sticking to that diet. They go on to state that this is down to […]

Continue Reading