Have you ever had to work with someone whose actions caused you to hear your mom’s voice inside your head saying things like “everyone gets a turn,” or even “let’s be nice”? When my friend, Dee, heard her kids complain repeatedly about the particularly frustrating behavior of certain adults in their lives, she used to tell her kids to think of them as “negative role models.” She said that just as it’s important to have good examples of how you would like to behave, it’s also valuable to have examples of how you would NOT like to behave. Continue reading
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Where the Lucky Cows Live
Many years ago my husband and I, in different fields, nevertheless found ourselves at the same conference in San Francisco. Afterward, we rented a car and took a lazy drive up the coast. The Pacific backdrop was beyond spectacular; we had never seen anything like it. From time to time we drove past small herds of contented, unimpressed cattle resting on bright green grassy knolls. “Lucky cows,” muttered my husband. Continue reading
Nutrition in a Nutshell
Here’s my elevator speech about nutrition, what I choose to say to the patient with just 10 seconds for some advice. “Can you fit it into 10 seconds, doc?” You bet! “Eat more fruits and vegetables.”
Marion Nestle says it like this: 1) Aspire to variety (the more colors the better), 2) avoid partaking heavily of any single food category (notably meat, dairy, sugar and white flour), and 3) moderate your portions. That works.
Pesticide Levels: The Dirty Dozen & the Clean Fifteen
While preparing my upcoming talk on organic vs. nonorganic fruits and vegetables for Dr Roizen’s Preventive & Integrative Medicine Conference in Las Vegas, I came upon an interesting couple of lists called the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen. [Don’t bother to count; the lists I found contained sixteen “dirty” entries and seventeen “clean” entries. Crazy, huh? Don’t worry; as far as this story is concerned, the more the merrier.] Continue reading
Humans Have a Short Memory
In a couple of weeks I’ll be heading for Las Vegas, where I’ll be speaking at Dr Roizen’s Preventive & Integrative Medicine Conference on two subjects: 1) differences between omega-3s and omega-6s, and their impact on inflammation in the body, and 2) organic vs. nonorganic fruits and vegetables. Continue reading
Use It or Lose It
I have two personal aphorisms to share with you. The first is “I’ll pay any price to keep you mobile.” The second is “I’ll pay any price to keep your blood sugars in the normal range.”
These are high priorities — the highest, in my book. When my kids were in high school, and they were in a mood (I’m cranky; I don’t feel well; I’m bored; I have too much homework), I would always say, “Go for a walk!” It got to be a joke in our house. They, of course, took it to the next level. Fever? Go for a walk! Migraine? Take a hike! Appendicitis? Walk it off! Broken leg? Very funny, I said. Continue reading
Diet Coke: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bubbles
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
What’s So Wild About Salmon?
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
On White Flour and Sugar
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?
Food with a Capital F
Let’s take another look at one of my favorites:
I’ve been thinking for a while about how better to talk about, refer to, differentiate or invoke real food, as opposed to the “not-food” that is driving the epidemic of chronic disease we doctors see in our offices day after day.