Is it time to rethink our dietary advice?

It turns out that the more we understand how nutrition works and how complicated it is, the simpler the dietary advice we need to follow. In theory, any number of changes might make your diet healthier, but in practice diet is too complicated for us to be able to micromanage it. Too much is unknown about how the elements of diet interact for us to be able to change the variables to achieve the result we desire.

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How gloomy should we be?

“All of existence is pestiferous, my own self most of all.” So wrote the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard in his journal, a week after his 26th birthday. We may not envy Kierkegaard his gloom but it certainly did his reputation for profundity no harm. It is as though there is a law that states what is deep must also be dark…

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Do we need hobbies?

A hobby is an activity that doesn’t go anywhere, like the child’s hobby horse from which it takes its name. Little wonder, then, that hobbies have been considered trivial pastimes, diverting adjuncts to the serious business of life, best confined to our spare time. Perhaps this hierarchy of importance needs to be reversed…

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