Number of words: 312 Variety is one of the great promises of today’s food culture. After all, you wouldn’t want to get bored while nourishing yourself. The food options on supermarket shelves have increased exponentially in past decades, particularly where fat-rich, sugary, high-novelty, low-nutrition items are concerned. And while it is true that a spectrum … Read more

Number of words: 181 But eating while harried or preoccupied does us no good. Our natural response to stress is good old fight or flight, rather than fill-your-face. The body sends blood to our muscles so that we’re ready for action, rather than to the stomach in preparation for digestion. It’s hardly a recipe for … Read more

Number of words: 635 It’s like continually dining out with the infamous Pere Gaurier. a wealthy 18th century French land owner with a gargantuan appetite who murdered people for fun by persuading them to feast with him on vast, rich dishes until they died from over-undulgence. Each of le Diable Gourmand’s victims were taken to … Read more

Number of words: 561 We should now know enough about our ingestive instincts to treat them with extreme caution. In the 1990, scientists discovered why eating is such a compelling pleasure: when we scoff something sweet or fatty, the brain rewards itself with heroin-like chemicals called endogenous opioids. This means that snacks such as sweet … Read more

Number of words: 230. Step forward the Old Testament God who, as the Book of Numbers explains, got into a right biblical fury over the Israelites nagging food demands. His chosen people had just absconded en masse from bondage in Egypt and were holed up, under a kind of holy witness protection programme, somewhere in … Read more

Number of words: 114 As the twentieth century progressed and food became cheaper, the regal sport of binge-eating became steadily democratised, to the point where it wrote off the white trash king of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley. The 25-stone Elvis ate himself to death by midnight-snacking on a pair of 42,000-calorie baguettes containing a jar of … Read more

Number of words: 230 Humans are born with hardly any pre-set taste preferences. But we don’t remain blank slates for long; our appetites are rapidly moulded by the flavours around us. Nowadays that can mean trouble because our taste-tastic culture radically amplifies our inbuilt urge to consume food whenever it appears before us. Experiments show … Read more

Number of words: 90 It takes about four minutes to recover from an electronic interruption and regain your train of thought. So if you have 30 e-mails a day and look up 30 times, that’s 120 minutes of recovery time. Try setting up your computer system to receive mail every 90 minutes. That way you … Read more

Number of words: 199 Mass-communications technology has proliferated so rapidly that we haven’t had a chance to develop healthy protocols about when and how to use it. Now’s the time to change that To develop sustainable and rewarding relationships, it is always best to communicate in the most brain-friendly ways possible. Human contact fosters warmth … Read more

Number of words: 656 Young human brains are so uniquely adaptable that they may easily get bent out of shape by frenetic virtual stimulation: ‘What human beings do better than any other species is to learn. But it also means that whatever happens in the environment will leave its mark on your brain, she argues. … Read more