We devote around seven to eight hours to sleep each night in adulthood and ten to 12 hours in childhood. This amounts to around 200,000 hours in our first 60 years of life. Not getting enough sleep does a disservice to our brain and physical health. But how can we improve our chances of getting a good night’s rest?

In the middle of the last century, popular nutrition author Adelle Davis advised people to eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper. Her advice stuck. Recent examination of the merits of adults eating breakfast has raised the question of whether we should indeed eat like kings at breakfast or just skip it all together.

Today most people do not get enough sleep. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has called insufficient sleep an epidemic. While we are finally paying attention to the importance of sleep, the need for dark is still mostly ignored.

Water is essential for human life. It accounts for for 50-70% of our body weight and is crucial for most bodily functions. Any deficit in normal body water – through dehydration, sickness, exercise or heat stress – can make us feel rotten. First we feel thirsty and fatigued, and may develop a mild headache. This eventually gives way to grumpiness, and mental and physical decline.

After a busy and stressful year, I recently found myself physically and mentally exhausted with a very real need to relax. A last-minute holiday felt like a perfect solution and I returned feeling refreshed and recharged. What was it that helped me to relieve my physical tension and restore my inner calm? Was it exploring somewhere new, swimming in the sea, spending time with family – or just lying on the beach, touching the sand and completely switching off?

Few things are so deeply infected by fads, frauds and quackery as nutrition. As such, it is through a lens of healthy scepticism that we should view any new diet. The latest to make headlines is the Sirtfood diet which, if we are to take claims at face value, will assist with weight loss as well as offering other benefits such as “stimulating rejuvenation and cellular repair”.

Your thoughts, moods and behaviours are the product of your brain – an exquisite spider’s web of neuronal connections and witch’s brew of neurochemicals. It is this brew that is prone to change, and when “unbalanced” can cause dramatically altered behaviour. And your diet may have more to do with how you think than you would first suspect.

There is a growing demand for fruit and vegetables across the Western world, thanks to increased awareness of their nutritional and health benefits. But we’ve always been taught they might not be safe to eat straight out of the supermarket, and they have to be washed first. Is this the case? And what might happen if we don’t?

Today rates of allergic, autoimmune and other inflammatory diseases are rising dramatically in Western societies. If that weren’t bad enough, we are beginning to understand that many psychiatric disorders, including depression, migraine headaches and anxiety disorders, are associated with inflammation. Perhaps the most startling observation is that our children are afflicted with the same inflammatory problems, contributing to the fact that over 40 percent of US children are on medications for some chronic condition.

It may come as little surprise that taking exercise is a way to lose weight. However, a debate about the best type of exercise for weight loss is likely to divide opinion.