We Have a Hundred Trillion Little Friends. We Need to Keep Them Sweet if They’re to Keep Us Healthy.
We Have a Hundred Trillion Little Friends We Need to Keep Them Sweet if They’re to Keep Us Healthy In the average person, they weigh one or two kilos, are composed of around four thousand different species, and number a hundred trillion members. They are the bacteria in our guts. Evidence is multiplying that this huge workforce plays a critical role in our health, especially in avoiding obesity and the diseases caused by the needless activation of our immune systems, also known as inflammation. Obesity, associated with “western” diets containing a lot of saturated fat and sugar, and and with…
Eating Well On a Limited Budget Doesn’t Have to Mean Eating Fast Eat well – not fast. It doesn’t cost as much as you think If budgets are tight, and especially if time is even tighter, it’s easy to short-cut on what you eat. It can seem a lot easier to visit the kebab or fried chicken shop on the way home or get a Big Burger in place of the steamed vegetables you suspect you should be eating. And eating healthily – isn’t that something to worry about a few years down the road? Sadly – or perhaps, predictably…
Babies Are Dying in the Developing World for Lack of Breastfeeding. What’s the Effect on Infants in Developed Countries? Figures from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) spell out the terrible toll taken on infants in some poorer countries. Even in a large and rapidly developing country such as Nigeria, more than one in ten babies do not make it to their fifth birthday. Nigeria has halved its child mortality rate since 1990; before that twenty-one percent of children died before they were five. The figures are similar to those for other west African nations such as Chad and the Central…