…and not enough actual support. Almost 5 months ago I gave birth to a tiny human. To me she is just perfect, but when she was born we didn’t know that she had a minor issue with her tongue that would make it incredibly hard for her to breastfeed. This week is world breastfeeding week…
These days I have been thinking a lot about identity. My PhD explored how ethnicity affects physical activity and identity and ethnicity is something that I have been confronted with throughout my life. Donald Trump’s decision to stop whole swathes of people from entering the United States based on a single aspect of their identity…
Yesterday, controversy over the funding of an HIV drug was headline news in the UK. Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis or’PrEP’ is a drug that has been shown to reduce the risk of HIV infection by 86%. It works by stopping the virus from multiplying once in the body. It is taken daily and costs £400 per month per person…
Last week Professor Sir David Mackay died from stomach cancer aged just 48. He was a physicist who was famous for his work on clarifying the energy debate. My husband alerted me to Prof MacKay’s work. As an undergrad at Cambridge he was lectured by the Professor and he told me how Prof MacKay seemed to genuinely…
My recommended #publichealth films, documentaries and TV programmes
What we know about the physical activity of South Asians Research combining all the available literature has shown that South Asians living in South Asia are not very active. This is also true for South Asians living in the UK, and is particularly true for women. In fact, South Asians are some of the least active people…
Yesterday I read an article on the BBC News website entitled ‘Dawn of the Nanny State?’ It talked about supervised gym sessions for people at risk of type 2 diabetes, alcohol legislation and the new sugar tax all being introduced by the UK’s Conservative government. The article suggests that these policies are being put in…
You can read the introduction to this series of posts here. I have been updating this blog on a weekly basis with photos to show why it is so hard to give up sugar in our current environment. This is the final post – the previous ones are on the introductory post. Technically my lent sugar fast ends…
For the British Heart Foundation, we write reports showing who has the largest burden of heart disease in the UK, and where this burden lies. We use existing national datasets to produce graphs and tables. We have also written a research paper describing the burden of heart disease in the United Kingdom. The maps below…
You can read the introduction to this series of posts here. I am updating this blog on a weekly basis with photos to show why it is so hard to give up sugar in our current environment. The introductory post has all the latest updates. 34 days in, 11 days to go Amazingly, I only…
You can read the introduction to this series of posts here. I am updating this blog on a weekly basis with photos to show why it is so hard to give up sugar in our current environment. The introductory post has all the latest updates. 28 days in, 17 days to go It has felt like…
You can read the introduction to this series of posts here. I am updating this blog on a weekly basis with photos to show why it is so hard to give up sugar in our current environment. The introductory post has all the latest updates. 21 days in, 24 days to go So I’ve successfully…
You can read the introduction to this series of posts here. I am updating this blog on a weekly basis with photos to show why it is so hard to give up sugar in our current environment. The introductory post has all the latest updates. 14 days in, 31 days to go. This week has been…
You can read the introduction to this series of posts here. I am updating this blog on a weekly basis with photos to show why it is so hard to give up sugar in our current environment. The introductory post has all the latest updates. 7 days in, 38 days to go. 1 week of being…
So today the Action on Sugar campaign group have released their findings on how much sugar is in some hot drinks sold at coffee shops and the like. I follow a lot of public health people on twitter and I thought I would share with you a few of the most interesting posts I have seen.…
Pondering Public Health 