Category Archives: Strategies

Nourishing Yourself With Joy

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Joy has been in the news lately, and that’s what I want to talk about today. 

Eating is meant to be a source of joy, as satisfying as the sunrise. Like listening to music. Talking with friends, or sitting together on a bench at the park. The wind at your back. Trading backrubs. Dancing. Stretching. A hot shower. A book that transports you to the other side of the universe. Walking along the shore. 

Eating is deeply satisfying. It speaks to your soul. Eating is sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, umami. Crunchy, soft, toothy, smooth, sticky. Beautiful, colorful, warm, cool, icy, bubbly. Expressive, imaginative. Fun, chaotic, quiet, or peaceful. Continue reading →

There Is So Much You Can Do To Make It Better

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Sometimes I think this blog should have a category called “It’s worse than you think” or “I’m really not exaggerating,” or maybe just “More scary news.” Sometimes I even get the feeling that people think I may be overstating the urgency of the diabetes epidemic. So I gathered together a few statistics for you. Continue reading →

My TEDx Talk

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It’s been about ten years since I gave this talk at Ursuline College in Cleveland, Ohio. That’s quite a long time. I remember there weren’t enough spaces for the whole title, so it was changed from Your Health to Our Health. That also works. There’s a lot here that I still use, Continue reading →

Fake Fruit Names for Your Breakfast Cereal

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A while back I wrote a post about the high profit-margin-to-cost of the breakfast cereal business. Today I have more to say on breakfast cereal, not about the manufacturing process or profit margins, but about the pervasive use of fruit-related words in the naming of these products.

If I had just ten seconds to share advice on improving your nutrition, I suspect you already know exactly what I would say: Eat more fruits and vegetables. And I don’t think that would surprise anyone. We all know that fruits and vegetables are nutritional powerhouses, and we also know that everyone should be eating more of them, especially since most of us don’t eat enough produce to begin with.  Continue reading →

And the Winner is Real Food

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Years ago, the article Can We Say What Diet is Best for Health?, by David Katz and Stephanie Meller from Yale University School of Public Health, was published in the Annual Review of Public Health. A related essay by James Hamblin, Science Compared Every Diet, and the Winner is Real Food, was subsequently published in the Atlantic.  

Katz and Meller compared low-carb, low-fat, low-glycemic, Mediterranean, DASH, Paleolithic, and vegan diets, concluding that “A diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention.”  Michael Pollan said, “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” More recent research continues to confirm these findings. Continue reading →

Walking With Wellness

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Some time ago, I received my first pedometer with which to track my daily steps, and I could not have been more thrilled. Attached unobtrusively to an elastic wrist band, it ventured forth with me every day as I plotted my path, set my course, stepped up, or took a hike. Continue reading →

The Effects of Lifestyle on Function

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Recently I wrote about a patient I met many years ago. Like most people, he spent a fair amount of time thinking about medical expenses. That was understandable, as his elevated blood pressure required treatment with four medications.

I explained to him that if he could make a couple of lifestyle changes, there was a good chance that he would be able to reduce the number of blood pressure medications he took. Could he take a short walk when possible? Could he cut back on ultraprocessed food items, like Ritz crackers and cheese whiz, and substitute homemade popcorn and a slice of Jarlsberg or cheddar on wasa crackers? What about more fresh fruit and vegetables? Maybe, but he was worried about the cost. Continue reading →

With Years Come Wisdom, Guest Post by Joe Gardewin

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Our recent guest post on aging inspired yet another guest post, this one by long-term reader Joe Gardewin. I hope his words inspire you as much as they inspired me!

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Dear Doc Roxanne, 

I may not be an expert on aging but, at 78, I do consider myself aged or, as my friend, Tom Isern, says, “seasoned.” In other words, most of my life is in my rearview mirror. Ha! That is not a bad thing, because I’ve had a pretty full life. But I do hope to live for a while yet and, in all honesty, I think I will. I think that, in part, because I have a good family doc who has now followed me for 20 years. In her words I am “… not the patient I worry about most.” 

These are my thoughts on [hopefully] living a long, healthy life:  Continue reading →

A Nation of Sugar Addicts

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A few years ago I wrote a piece on cravings for the Sam’s Club newsletter. In the process of writing it, I became further convinced that sugar is a recreational drug to which a great many Americans are addicted. Today I’m going to discuss my impressions. But we’re going to start not with sugar, but with alcohol. Continue reading →

Making Your Kitchen Fruit-Friendly

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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 →