Last year was tough on all of us.

I was bound to start my penultimate year as a medical student, finally stepping feet into the exciting trenches of the clinical scene and getting a feel of what I signed up for almost half a decade back. Instead, I saw the academic schedule halt indefinitely by mid-March, and by a matter of weeks, the impact of the pandemic came into full swing.

Medical training screeched to a standstill, and I was forced to retreat into physical isolation.

Life in isolation was very uninspiring. With the absence of social company and interesting things to do, my creativity bar was at an all-time low. I found looking for new things to write about an onerous task. Every article and every video seemed to be about the pandemic and I thought the world didn’t need another one. …

The vegan diet has gained major popularity in recent times. The diet, often deemed as the healthiest diet in the world, has shown to be able to promote heart health and reduce cancer risk. But some people see beyond the health reasons and instead owe it upon ethical concerns for their dietary preferences.

I first came across the concept of weganism through Tim Ferriss’ Five Bullet Fridays newsletter, who also wrote New York Times bestsellers 4-Hour Workweek and 4-Hour Chef. Here’s how he defines weganism, quoting from his blog post verbatim.

Wegan /ˈwēɡən/ noun. Someone who follows a vegan diet, omitting all animal products except for wild-harvested meats. Put another way, a wegan diet is a vegan diet modified to include only wild-harvested meats. This term was coined by Kuʻulani Muise of Maui Nui Venison, as she, her husband Jake, and their three young children all enjoy a “wegan” diet but struggled to find a simple term to encapsulate it. …

Since I started incorporating intermittent fasting into my daily routine late last year, I began to observe patterns and reactions that would otherwise have not been brought to my conscious attention.

One rather interesting observation I noticed had to do with meal timing and hunger patterns throughout the day. To my surprise, the longer I held myself off of food, the more comfortable I became with hunger. It seemed paradoxical that the longer I chose to stay away from food, the less my body wanted it.

While that sensation is intuitive with the practice of intermittent fasting, as most long-term fasters can attest to, I noticed that the opposite was also true. The more I surrounded myself with food (as in snacking), the quicker I tend to be hungry again, therefore significantly increasing my total caloric intake. …

While this may seem obvious, I sometimes marvel at the sheer prevalence of conventional thinking in communities, organisations, and businesses. Conventional is at the surface, a safe bet. It rarely offends, but great things are almost never squeezed out of conventional thinking. Conventional thinking is like ordering a vanilla ice cream. It’s predictable; you can’t really go wrong with vanilla.

With an unconventional mindset, you’re more likely to order a chocolate chilli ice cream (which is amazing, by the way). Or study two majors at once. …

Granted, the word ‘unhealthy’ does not convey any sort of objective truth. Scientists and researchers have been documenting the effects of food and diets on weight loss and diseases for centuries, but studies are never concluded in terms of healthy and unhealthy. Scientific papers are excellent at conveying their objective findings, but they are often difficult to translate to daily English.

The field of nutritional sciences strives to constantly improve dietary guidelines and recommendations. It is their duty to deliver accurate information to help us navigate through the cacophonous dieting scene and identify which foods to incorporate into our diet and which ones to leave out. …

Although human beings have evolved over many centuries to become omnivores that can subsist on a vast array of foods, the ideal diet for health remains an area of hot debate. Scientific evidence has so far shunned the far extremes, for essential micronutrients are oftentimes only present in a subset of specific sources (e.g vitamin B12 in animal protein and folate in leafy green vegetables), and are kinder towards more balanced diets, such as the Mediterranean diet.

Earlier this year, cardiologist James O’Keefe and colleagues published an interesting article on the pesco-Mediterranean diet in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. This diet, which some think could be the healthiest diet science has yet identified, is based on striking a healthy balance of plant foods (vegetables, fruits, legumes, nuts, and olives), fish/seafood, along with moderate amounts of dairy and eggs. The evidence is strong for this particular diet. …

When it comes to diets, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The fact that there is an ever-increasing number of dietary regimens circulating within society only comes to show how ineffective they all are.

Most of us traverse our way through diets by identifying food groups to avoid and then work our way through the rest of the list to try to strike our personal dietary balance. This involves leaving out and incorporating certain foods based on our biological makeup and lifestyle, and of course, may differ from one individual to another.

In order to achieve this, most dieticians suggest to leave out plain unhealthy foods that serve no benefit to your diet. These include deep-fried foods, potato chips, processed meat, and alcohol, just to name a few. Quite noticeably, one food group that trumps the list is added sugars, and for very good reason. …

Many of us think of emotions as reactions. A thief knocks down your door and you are flooded with fear. Your baby smiles up at you and you are filled with love. It feels like this is how emotions work: something happens, and we instinctively respond.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this action-reaction phenomenon makes sense. It would explain the basic constructs of survival, and distinguishes those who hold out from those who do not. When an early caveman discerns a low pitched growl — unmistakable of a hungry predator’s snarl, fear ensues, which triggers the sympathetic fight-or-flight response. …