• Archives

  • Aug22

    MiniVan Medicine Chest: When the Boonies Call

    Posted in: Media, Wellness and Health, Wine and Tea

    The movement towards self-care is heating up, along with the rest of the country.

    To help keep you cool, here is my short list of common summer time foods that can act as medicine if you’re in the boonies and away from a medicine chest. You should also travel with one: here is a well-stocked, inexpensive medicine cabinet.

    But travel food-as-medicine is becoming popular. The New York Times has just described it in “Sick on the Road? Try the Grocery Store” (I’m quoted).  Five Ideas:

    1. black tea and citrus peel, drunk regularly act as a natural effective sunscreen: 2 cups daily, recorded published data in elderly folks in the southwest. It’s probably the catechins in black tea and citrus both that block UV light.

    2. 7 walnuts before or during a junk food/fast food meal for blood flow: they allow the major arteries to stay dilated instead of spasming from the starch, sugar and bad fats. It’s probably nitric oxide release which dilates the arteries.

    3. olive oil as a sexual lubricant: it also works! You don’t need a reference for this one: the link shows what to look for in an olive oil label. (Check out the Paso Robles Olive Oil fest this month!)

    4. Ripe avocados make an emergency sunburn treatment: it’s the fatty acids which neutralize pain, apparently.

    5. Honey is an excellent emergency antimicrobial and analgesic. Honey’s acidity, hydrogen peroxide content and immune system stimulation are likely responsible. I’d assume unfiltered, raw, wildflower honey is better than pasteurized: Manuka Honey (MediHoney) is FDA approved for wound healing.

     

  • Aug11

    Basic Food as Medicine

    Posted in: Food FAQ's, High Cholesterol, Media, Wellness and Health

    I had the privilege of speaking with Joe and Terry Graedon, founders of The People’s Pharmacy, on their syndicated NPR show (free podcast here) broadcast today)!, about how we’re trying to make your health and health care awesome with the right food.

    Their questions made me think about why it’s so important to help people wherever they are starting.

    For example, I love farmer’s markets. I give market tours, I know many farmers personally, I created a PBS DVD library on how to eat healthy (available for a donation to PBS, which I support) and I love to cook locally grown foods.

    But most people buy food shipped into supermarkets, and are worried and time-pressed about cooking.

    So it’s become more important to me to show how to buy and cook any broccoli, even bad broccoli (as Mark Bittman writes) than to search out the most pristine, tight head. Or to explore the wonders of the youngest broccosprouts (highest in sulforphane, and patented by Johns Hopkins).

    Getting people to cook more–and people are catching up and catching on–is the key to helping them lose weight. Especially men.

    Thousands of people (according to my Dear ChefMD e-mail!) want  to change their cholesterol, blood pressure, back pain, constipation, irritable bowel, heart disease and diabetes.  And those who have have great stories.

    So if you were going to stock a kitchen medicine chest, like the one I describe in the ChefMD book, and you wanted just 10 foods instead of the 50 I name, what would they be and why? Here are mine:

    Broccoli: detoxify carcinogens, reduce estrogen levels

    Chilies: faster metabolism, better control of diabetes

    Dark Chocolate: lower blood pressure, improve insulin sensitivity

    Cinnamon: lower LDL cholesterol, improve insulin sensitivity

    Fish: fewer heart attacks, fewer strokes

    Garlic: less stomach, colon and rectal cancer; lower blood pressure

    Nuts: lower cholesterol, improve satiety

    Walnuts: protect brain cells, protect interior arterial linings against junk food

    Wine (sensibly): raise HDL (healthy) cholesterol, reduce risk of heart attack, peptic ulcer disease

    Yogurt: lower risk of antibiotic related diarrhea; reduce irritable bowel syndrome symptoms

     

  • Jul14

    Food as Medicine as a Movement

    Posted in: Wellness and Health

    When Johns Hopkins Medicine happily and positively publishes “Take Two Carrots and Call Me in the Morning” and Hopkins Public Health researchers pen a NPR-covered pilot study of better-for-you hospital food—within 2 months of one another–you know something is changing in mediicne.

    When the Harvard School of Medicine/CIA 5th Healthy Kitchens, Healthy Lives conference is oversubscribed, and Touro University asks me for a proposal to teach online cooking classes to students in three of its medical schools, something is cooking.

    When media luminaries like Drs Oz and Roizen proclaim on Oprah! that “food is medicine” (full disclosure: they are my friends), and Dr Hyman’s, Dr Mercola’s and Dr Weil’s HuffPo columns on the relative virtues of nutritional components and their affect on your health are among the most popular on the site, you know that the health-conscious public wants to support doctors who are on the same page.

    And when the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports becomes the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition, and the First Lady invites pediatricians and chefs to the White House to talk about swapping out fryers for salad bars in schools, you know practicing physicians are going to get it.  And just maybe, lead it.

    Not every doctor has to write recipes on prescription slips. But the more we know about what our patients eat, and what they could eat and drink to help themselves look and feel better, the better we’ll serve.

     

  • Jun7

    Personal Food Revolution #7: Reverse Diabetes with What You Eat…Out

    Posted in: Common Conditions, Wellness and Health

    One of the best ways to help people transform their lives and create their own food revolution is to write my patients’ stories: this is #7 of 7.*

    Carol has diabetes. She is 48 years old, the mother of two and a successful Washington litigator. She does not know what to eat at the dinner she must attend tonight.

    She eats out ten times weekly, usually orders chicken Caesar salad, and snacks on cheese, chocolate and energy bars. She often eats the last of her Taco Bell in the front seat of her car before going in for the night.

    I tell her that she can beat insulin resistance, which is causing her out of control diabetes. But she has to treat her disease like her best client–conscientiously.

    She is to avoid red and processed meat for 12 weeks: the heme iron increases diabetes risk. Ditto, any food with the words High Fructose or Enriched Flour or Sugar or Rice or Corn Syrup on the package.

    Tonight, like every night out, she should have two dinner salads with good vinaigrette over 20 minutes with good fish or lean poultry, and drink hot cinnamon tea afterwards. She should pack almonds, high protein cereal, tea bags and string cheese when she travels.

    Carol liked knowing what to eat, and practiced it, a lot, with coaching. She now teaches water aerobics in Virginia.

    *adapted from ChefMD’s Big Book of Culinary Medicine.

     

  • May17

    Personal Food Revolution #4: Tired, Gassy and Moody? Could It Be Gluten?

    Posted in: Common Conditions, Wellness and Health

    One of the best ways to help people transform their lives and create their own food revolution is to write my patients’ stories: this is #4 of 7.*

    Terri is a 38 year old who traces her tummy problems back to high school. She has had off and on again fatigue, cramping, gas, bloating and mood swings. She has seen 11 doctors, and been told she is a “diagnostic dilemma” and has “atypical bowel syndrome.”

    Terry has celiac disease, an auto-immune reaction to gluten. Celiac is caused by—and can be cured by—what you eat.

    Gluten is a protein in wheat, rye and barley but is often hidden. Spelt and triticale have wheat, millet does not. Most blue cheese and soy sauce are off limits.

    The medicine? Savory, gorgeous gluten-free pasta, nuts, vegetables, meats, seasonings and even beer. They can heal and reverse insomnia, depression and osteoporosis in people with celiac disease.

    Terri re-discovered cooking and began to cure herself.

    She filled herself with the best ingredients—for her. Food became a joy, because she tasted it fully and didn’t overeat. And it changed her life.

    Off gluten, she felt better than she had in 40 years. She gained muscle strength, dropping to a size 8.

    Terri’s case inspired Gluten Free Quiz (www.glutenfreequiz.com) a free self-assessment of your risk for celiac disease.

    *adapted from my ChefMD’s Big Book of Culinary Medicine.

     
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