YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Winter Dinner with Apples & Sauerkraut

The holidays are over. The days are short. The sun is almost nonexistent. The cloud cover is thick. No one feels much like cooking, and just about everyone feels like they have had enough treats, at least for now. So what’s for dinner? Here’s something perfect for January. It’s a tiny bit sweet, and involves almost no prep, unless you count cutting up one onion, two apples, and a cake of tofu. Most of the actual cooking is accomplished while you go do something else. It’s the ultimate comfort food, but without any grains, which is pretty unusual as comfort foods go. These kinds of recipes fall under the category of post-holiday, recovery, post-celebration, reset meals. It’s not just about going back to work. It’s also about getting back to life.  Continue reading


Making Your Kitchen Fruit-Friendly

For the record, I do not want you to think that I have always eaten the way I do now. It has been a process. There have been important milestones and realizations along the way such as, for example, the day I realized that there was absolutely no high-fructose corn syrup in my refrigerator. Or the time I decided that we were going to begin diluting the boxes of marginally nutritious “breakfast cereals” with dried fruit, nuts, seeds (e.g., sesame, pumpkin, sunflower), and rolled (steamed) oats until they contained essentially none of the original agents. 

And then there was the time I realized that we had inadvertently made an important change in the way we unpacked the groceries. This change, though virtually invisible, was to have a significant effect on the way we ate.  Continue reading



YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: A Summer Creamsicle Smoothie

It’s summertime, and even though the weather this week has been a bit on the cool side, it was boiling hot last week and the week before. So you never know. Anyway, summer calls for something a little different. I recommend that you try blending up this smoothie in your high-speed blender. Then sit back and relax while you drink it nice and slow…

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Can I Eat Fruit?

On many occasions, patients have asked me whether it’s okay to eat fruit. They’re worried about whether they should eat a food that they know is rich in sugar. Let’s think about this for a minute. Does anyone really believe that fruit is what’s causing the epidemics of diabetes and obesity? You can rest assured that the obesity and diabetes epidemics are not being caused by fruit. I think of fruit as “nature’s candy” and while it’s true that some fruits contain a lot of sugar, it is always accompanied by a large amount of fiber. Continue reading


Self-Care Resolutions

Late last year I had an interview with a major news network on the topic of New Years’ Resolutions. I decided not to talk about the popular though self-defeating goals that are nearly impossible to sustain and end up making people feel badly about themselves and their efforts. I didn’t discuss limiting calories, denying yourself things that bring you joy, joining a gym, or signing up for a yoga class. Instead I decided to talk about being kind to yourself.  Continue reading


YOUR HEALTHY PLATE: Red Lentil Soup for Rosh Hashanah

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight at sundown. High Holiday foods tend toward the sweet and the circular: sweet to represent our wishes for a sweet new year, and circular to symbolize the seasons that run one into the next, round and round, year after year.

So it is traditional to eat many different kinds of fruits, especially apples, prunes, pomegranates, dates and apricots; and sweet vegetables such as beets, carrots, sweet potatoes, and leeks (sliced into rounds, of course), as well as black-eyed peas and lentils. And lots of honey, especially for dipping bread and apples. Continue reading



The Illusion of Variety

Like many people who have been holed up in their homes for the past 15 months or so, this past week I entered a supermarket for the first time in more than a year. Omg. I left with one package of granola bites (treat), one cabbage (food), two kinds of beer (treat), and tonic water (treat–Fever Tree, the best!). Hopefully, I’ll do better next time. The whole experience got me thinking once again about what a supermarket really is, and I decided to share something I first posted a very long time ago. Continue reading


YOUR HEALTH PLATE: Coffee Nice Cream

Inasmuch as it’s going to be around 90F out there tomorrow, I am sharing a recipe that will be perfect for the weather. It’s like a smoothie but a lot thicker. You can eat it as is, or as the base for a smoothie bowl. It’s not ice cream; it’s “nice cream.” And it is delicious. Continue reading