For at least 20 years I drank a diet Coke at about 3:30 in the afternoon. I acquired this questionable habit as a young college grad, newly hired in Clinical Virology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to a team of other ambitious, young women. Every day at 3:30, anyone who wasn’t titrating virus or infecting cell lines on a deadline would tromp down a few stairs to get themselves a Diet Coke. We’d stand around chatting, enjoying a break in the almost nonstop action, and consulting with one other about boyfriends, graduate school, snafus in the lab, or whatever else mattered at the moment. I loved the break and would occasionally get anxious if it looked like I might have to miss it that day. Continue reading →

Have you ever thought about why we might call potatoes “organic,” oats “old-fashioned,” cereal “whole-grain,” flour “whole-wheat,” or strawberries “pesticide-free”? What about “wild salmon,” “free-range chicken,” “pastured lamb,” and “hormone-free milk”? Our food supply has undergone any number of unprecedented changes in the past 100 years, and one of them is the words we use to describe that food. Basically since words that once meant food staples now refer to corresponding inventions of the 20th century, we’ve had to come up with new ones to describe the things those words once meant. Continue reading →

Let’s take another look at an important subject:

Have you ever heard anyone say that all you need to do to eat a more nutritious diet is to get rid of the white flour and sugar? That seems pretty radical to most people. What’s the point? What’s wrong with white flour and sugar? And what would such a change accomplish?

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