The newsletter and blog are where I unpack what I’m reading, noticing and rethinking, from health and human behaviour to prevention, performance and the science that sits underneath it.
Serena Williams in a Super Bowl ad for Ro's GLP-1 programme. Yes, really. The company's line is brutally honest and hard to argue with: "The GLP-1 market is highly underserved and it's shaping up to be the largest consumer health market of our lifetimes. The majority of people glued to the Super Bowl will actually be eligible for our product."
The Holy Grail of human health and performance isn’t just about speed or strength. It’s about being a fat-burning machine. It’s about Metabolic Flexibility. In my view, this is a defining characteristic of what makes us human. Think of your metabolism like a hybrid car with two fuel tanks: ⛽ The Gas Tank (Glycogen/Sugar): Small, limited, burns hot and fast.
Good hard when you must, go easy when you can. That's a principle I've lived by for years, and it ties straight into two solid scientific ideas. First, the general adaptation principle: Actual growth and adaptation happen in the recovery phase after stress, not during the stress itself. Second, hormesis – the biological term for antifragility. A bit of stress
How to Be the Best Version of You – and Why Most New Year's Resolutions Fail Most New Year's resolutions fail for one simple reason: the person you are wouldn't do the things you're choosing to do. You set a goal to eat strict for four weeks, hit the gym five days a week, or cut out all treats. It
For years I’ve been banging on about real food, ditching the ultra-processed junk, and rethinking our fear of fats. I’ve written dozens of scientific papers on this, and written several best selling books (the What the fat? series). I’ve co-founded a company (PREKURE). All of these with the goal of closing the gap between what science knows and what health
GLP-1 weight loss drugs – friend or foe? The real question is whether these drugs leave you better or worse off long term (say, over 5 years). The best answer comes from looking at all the trials on weight loss using GLP-1s versus solid behavioural approaches. A major new systematic review just out in the BMJ sums up 37 studies
New years and back to work philosophy post Pretty much true for me on everything, except I could probably not read a book in a single sitting – I’m just too slow, and I lost my beautiful Border collie Bluey a couple of months back (#14} Real Luxuries in Life 1. Living 10 minutes from work 2. Living 5 minutes
Well, I never… Nothing changes for decades, and then all of a sudden it does. Now it's time for New Zealand and Australia to get on board with the new US dietary guidelines. The ADA and Diabetes NZ have been vocally opposed to the actual evidence for a very long time. Here's the specific advice for chronic disease in the
Big news are the new “real food” US dietary guidelines. These are a huge change in the right direction from the debacle, that has been the low fat ultra processed food oriented guidelines of the last 50 years. Finally we are heading in a more sensible direction, one we have writing researching and advocating for most of the last two
Our paper is out today: real-world, multi-practice pre-diabetes and T2D care in primary care in NZ using whole-food carbohydrate-reduction, health coaching, and community support. Great work, team! What a combination of health coaching and behaviour change focus does when combined with power of carb restriction in diabetes and pre-diabetes = reversal Adds to the evidence this is the standard of
I’ve always been a bit jealous of builders. You finish your day’s work and there’s something solid to show for it. At the end of the week, the month, the year, you can drive around town and point: “I built that. And that one too.” For a lot of us now it’s different. The quiet question in the back of
6:30 AM. Sunday, Tairua Beach: 12 young blokes, 2 young women, 1 older bloke (me) and one not-quite-as-old woman (Louise) stood on the sand staring out at the surf. We were about to swim 1.9 km through the break, ride 90 km (Tairua to Pauanui and back, then out to Hikuai (and back), and finish with two laps of town
Stay Connected