Moving Towards Better Joint Health
12 October: World Arthritis Day Walking to the shops, climbing stairs or opening a jar can become difficult when joints are painful or stiff. For people living with arthritis, these everyday challenges can affect their independence, their work and their ability to take part in family and community life. World Arthritis Day, observed on 12 […]
WORLD OSTEOPOROSIS DAY: Strong Bones Are About More Than Calcium
Bones rarely complain. They don’t ache to announce they are becoming fragile, and for many people, the first unmistakable sign of a problem is a fracture. By then, the conversation about bone health is long overdue. Calcium usually gets all the airtime. It matters, of course, but one of the more surprising findings in bone […]
WORLD MENOPAUSE DAY: Menopause Hurts More Than We Talk About
Hot flushes have an excellent publicist. Joint pain tends to sneak in quietly. One morning, a shoulder objects to getting dressed. Then the knees start having opinions about stairs. Before long, getting out of bed involves a few more sound effects than it used to. It is tempting to file all of this under getting […]
WORLD MENTAL HEALTH DAY: We Ask About Sleep. We Ask About Stress. But Why Not Food?
Imagine describing months of poor sleep, low mood, and difficulty getting through the day. There are questions about symptoms and stress, perhaps a discussion about therapy or medication. The appointment ends. And at no point did anyone ask what has been on the dinner table. There is no doubt that both therapy and medication are […]
Reclaiming Metabolic Health Through Everyday Choices
“Eat better.” It sounds simple… until you’re feeding a family on a tight budget and wondering what will keep everyone full until tomorrow. National Nutrition Week, observed from 9-15 October, is an opportunity to ask how we can make nourishing food a realistic part of daily life. Across South Africa, obesity, diabetes, and childhood stunting […]
Broken Food Systems Break Health Too
A supermarket aisle can look abundant. Shelves stacked high, colours shouting for attention, promotions promising more for less. Yet behind the display is a quieter truth: people still go hungry while enormous quantities of food are wasted. UNEP estimates that households worldwide wasted more than one billion meals a day in 2022 (1). Full shelves […]
Stroke Is Sudden. The Risk Often Isn’t.
A stroke can interrupt an ordinary afternoon without warning. Someone is talking across the table, reaching for a cup, finishing a story, and then their face changes, their arm weakens, or the words no longer come out as they should. The urgency is real, which is why World Stroke Day, marked on 29 October, asks […]
Your Heart Would Like You to Pick Up Something Heavy
Why strength training deserves a place in the conversation about cardiovascular and metabolic health When we think about exercise for heart health, most of us picture running shoes, bicycles, or someone walking very determinedly on a treadmill. We rarely picture a set of dumbbells. Or a resistance band. Or ourselves repeatedly standing up from a […]
Eye Health Myths That Could Cost You Your Vision
When we wrote about eye health for World Optometry Day, we looked at how changes in blood sugar can temporarily affect the lens and blur your vision. For World Retina Week, we’re looking further back in the eye. The retina can be damaged long before you notice a change in your sight, particularly if you […]
Before the injection, let’s talk about food
There’s no shortage of conversations around starting a GLP-1 injection. What happens when someone stops taking one, however, gets far less attention. A study published in BMJ Medicine examined health records from more than 333,000 US veterans with type 2 diabetes. Among those prescribed GLP-1 drugs, people who stopped treatment had a higher risk of […]