KICK-OFF!

“Alcohol more harmful than heroin”

“Top London restaurant launches collagen beauty menu”

“Coffee halts multiple sclerosis”

“Using mobile phones for 10 years doubles brain cancer risk”

A quick glance across any newsagent’s shelf ensures a bombardment of health-related headlines – scares and cures, advice and warnings - all loudly vying for our attention. As a predominantly non-expert audience, we undoubtedly lap it up. Health clearly sells.

Why so? In an increasingly self-aware and consumerist society, perhaps our own body is the ultimate possession. But with conflicting messages and sensationalist reporting, the human body has become a battleground. To combat the attritional efforts of dodgy doctorate-touting health experts, fitness gurus and snake-oil salesmen, shouldn’t we arm ourselves with actual data and reclaim our bodies? Stripping back their claims to the raw, unabashed scientific facts: bodies laid bare.

Personally, I care about the latest breakthrough in the fight against cancer, but I also care about staving off cellulite or finding the perfect anti-aging cream (to replace the twenty pots currently languishing on my bathroom shelf).

I care about what we put on and into ourselves. The human body is a phenomenal consumer of environmental influences and it is clear that those inputs, such as food, drugs and chemicals, can have a huge impact on how we function. They affect how we look and feel, how we battle disease and how long before we’re pushing up daisies.

I want to highlight some of the scientific research that is helping to explain the amazing entity that is the human body. Actual research, not the made-up, pseudo-stuff.

I hope you'll find it interesting. Here goes…