I once attended a pharmacology conference at McCormick Place in Chicago. It’s a huge conference centre and navigating its many halls is daunting for someone like me who has no sense of direction. Ambling towards the lecture theatre I wandered through the exhibition hall festooned with donut stands, pretzel stalls, breakfast burritos, waffles and pancakes.Continue reading “Weight loss drugs of a new class”
Category Archives: Food
Is Chocolate Toxic?
It’s rare that governments of the world act in unison and so today goes down in regulatory history as the day the US FDA, the European EMA, the UK MHRA and the Australian TGA have simultaneously issued restrictions on the use of theobromine. I suspect most people are not aware of theobromine or this newContinue reading “Is Chocolate Toxic?”
Death by Liquorice
A blog post for the non-expert The media is reporting a 54-year-old construction worker from Massachusetts has died of liquorice poisoning. Not for the first time when dealing with such issues, the press reports are so similar that they were likely all cloned from the original source, a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine.Continue reading “Death by Liquorice”
Hot stuff
A 34-year-old man has ended up in hospital after eating a Carolina Reaper chilli. I have some sympathy because during my first post-doc, I was working in a laboratory at the University of Glasgow where a researcher was extracting capsaicin and some related compounds from chilli peppers. Capsaicin is the chemical that gives chilli itsContinue reading “Hot stuff”
Graham Lappin 