Category Archives: Primer

Is That Soup Healthy? Or is it Nourishing?

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Today I’d like to talk about just one thing, and that is the difference between healthy and nourishing. In 2017, Michael Ruhlman, the noted chef and writer, published a book called Grocery*, in which he reflected on a great many aspects of supermarkets and grocery stores. As part of his endeavor, he asked me to meet with him and share my perspective. He wanted to know what I saw when I was in the grocery store. So I spent some time touring a local supermarket with him. Basically, he conducted an interview as we walked the aisles, collecting my thoughts on interests we share — on food itself, of course, but also on the words that are used throughout Western society to describe those foods. 

He quoted me in Grocery as saying that “Healthy is a bankrupt word. Our food isn’t healthy. We are healthy. Our food is nutritious…Words are the key to giving people the tools they need to figure out what to eat…” While my understanding of mechanisms of metabolism and digestion has evolved since Ruhlman’s book was published, my thoughts have not changed on one particular aspect: clarity of communication. The more precisely I am able to share what I see, the more empowered you become to make consequent and beneficial choices on your own behalf. The soup is not healthy; the soup is nourishing. The ingredients are not healthy; you are. 

*Ruhlman, M. Grocery: The Buying and Selling of Food in America. 2017. Abrams Books. NY, NY.

My Favorite Topic: Real Food

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Almost all diets have one particular strategy in common, which is to increase the amount of real food that people are eating while simultaneously decreasing the amount of manufactured calories, including both stripped carbohydrates and the ultraprocessed oils invented in the 20th century.

Stripped carbohydrates are processed to remove the most nourishing parts, including the bran and germ. Other stripped carbohydrates include white rice, corn starch, corn syrup, and sugar. It is not a coincidence that white flour, corn starch and powdered sugar look exactly the same. We’ve removed the original identities of these products, so all that is left is a pile of white powder. Continue reading →

Strategies for Improving Your Blood Sugars

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This week I’d like to talk about the concept of diet-controlled diabetes. Sometimes, when a patient’s most recent bloodwork demonstrates a mild elevation in their blood sugars, their doctor offers them an opportunity to try to improve their sugars without medication. If the patient is able to bring their blood sugars into the normal range through changes in the way they eat, perhaps along with increasing their activity levels to some extent, the doctor diagnoses this patient with what they term “diet-controlled diabetes.”  Continue reading →

Food for Thought

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I once saw a post that said “Eat organic food, or, as your grandparents called it, food.” Only a century ago, nourishing food did not require prefixes like real, whole-grain, pastured, free-range, wild, or grass-fed. That’s what food was. What is happening to the food supply? As you have probably surmised by now, I spend lots of time thinking about the differences between real food and manufactured calories.

One strategy I use is to avoid products invented in the 20th century, like cottonseed oil, or high-fructose corn syrup. Also, I stay away from products that tell me when to use them, like breakfast cereals, lunch meats, and TV dinners. No one needs to tell you when to eat a banana, or scrambled eggs, or oatmeal, or guacamole, or chicken noodle soup. Continue reading →

Returning to the Beginning: Two Core Messages

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Today I want to focus on two of the core messages to which I continue to return time and time again: First, there is an enormous difference between real food and manufactured calories. And, second, as we have been discussing at length in recent weeks, manufactured calories have been associated with an epidemic of chronic diseases, including not only diabetes, coronary artery disease, and obesity, but also depression, dementia, and other brain diseases. Continue reading →