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Oct24

Interview: People’s Pharmacy on NPR and My Research Sources (Accessible!)

Posted in: Food FAQ's, Obesity and Weight Loss, Wellness and Health
I had the privilege of again speaking with Joe and Terry Graedon of People’s Pharmacy for their legendary podcast and national NPR show. It will be broadcast on December 8, but stay online. We covered a lot:

*how and why I think culinary medicine offers real value to people

*what (and how) women can say to men about their health

*healthy eating for healthy holidays (and weight loss thereafter)

*lowering cholesterol with your diet, and

*the top 4 Food and Nutrition Stories of 2012: what you need to remember

I did a lot of research and preparation for it, and I’ll be unpacking it for weeks. Here are a few quickies.

What women can say to men about their health and diet especially is sometimes touchy. Men want to get healthy, be strong and lean, and take care of themselves.

They just do it differently than do women. Actually, some men just do more steps (with the Precor Treadmill– my favorite). Or the Livestrong Elliptical (ditto). And keep track using the Timex Global Trainer Speed and Distance GPS Watch. Which is also awesome.

Women can help men who are reluctant to see the doctor or lose weight: they just need the right language. I’ll cover more of this on http://manlyeating.com, and in my new book, with a revolutionary new approach to men’s health, next year.

Some cholesterol, statin and supplement answers are in my published ChefMD book (about culinary medicine) and my 5-DVD set . My sources are ones you can use too:

1. Latest in Clinical Nutrition, 2012: Volumes 1-10 (12 DVD Set)

2. Food and Nutrients in Disease Management

3. Advancing Medicine with Food and Nutrients, Second Edition (nb: will be released 12.12)

And on the web
1. www.naturaldatabase.com (regularly updated by pharmacologists and other scientists).
2. www.pubmed.gov (all peer-reviewed stories, with good filters)
3. www.lpi.oregonstate.edu (tremendous science, especially about cancer and immunity, part of my Dr Oz Show appearance).
P.S. Thrillingly, the Dr Oz Show put the ChefMD book in the running for the New York Times best-seller list—again! We’ll see shortly: until then, the Honeyed Chinese Chicken recipe he and I prepared is free, if you’d like to receive my Paging Dr. La Puma newsletter, “Healthy Bites“.
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.
May13

Feeding Tube Diet: Unhealthy or Usual Business?

Posted in: Obesity and Weight Loss, Wellness and Health

2 weeks after the New York Times broke this, it’s still here: covered on 20/20 Friday and Forbes still has it front and center (my comments are highlighted): 10 days of fat and protein or just protein, 800 calories, 24/7 insertion, $1500 (not including the “trade secret” formula) and bam- 20# off. Or your money not back.

Only organized medicine seems uninterested, despite documented and numerous side effects (sinusitis, aspiration, misplacement, puncture) of this medical device.

It’s easy to gasp at the expense, at the brazen short-cut, at the lack of interest in getting to the root cause, at the water weight loss, at the disassociation of bare nutrition from flavor (really!) and from legitimate medical uses. (I have taken care of many people with feeding tubes who wish they didn’t have to have them, and certainly did not seek one out).

But it’s also easy to appreciate the pressure people feel to lose weight, to see that they are burning fat and do lose their appetite, to empathize with people who often wish for another life and see this as a way to gain access, to invest in the marketplace of weight loss commerce, to try something new. The diet/exercise as it is often pitched often fails, so if this fails, all you have lost is money, time, a little dignity.

Is this worth standing up to and saying: why not just use a piece of duct tape?

Or is it not worth getting worked up about?
Aug2

Response to Bittman’s “Tax Bad Foods”

Posted in: Aging and Costs of Aging, Diabetes, Food FAQ's, High Cholesterol, Obesity and Weight Loss, Wellness and Health

As a physician and professionally trained chef, I write recipes on prescription slips. I try to practice what Mark Bittman of the New York Times eloquently preaches in Tax Soda, Subsidize Vegetables .

Yet a healthy diet is like penicillin–simple, powerful, and with increasing rates of resistance, from physicians.

Physicians are not trained to speak with patients about diet and nutrition, much less cooking and food shopping.

Physicians are also better paid to prescribe medication and do procedures than to ask patients to switch from soda to water.

Writing recipes on prescription slips changes this dynamic.

Putting foods, recipes and meals in pharmacies and on managed care and hospital formularies might help patients get the food and health care they need, economically.

Healthy hospital food, like that at Planetree’s New Milford Hospital is a good start.
Apr18

Is Sugar Toxic? Gary Taubes’ Lab Reports

Posted in: High Cholesterol, Obesity and Weight Loss, Wellness and Health

Gary Taubes blew the top off the New York Times readership with his carefully researched “What if it’s all been a big fat lie?” about fat and heart disease in 2002 (translation: it’s the type of fat that matters, not total fat).

He’s doing it again with “Is Sugar Toxic? (translation: yes, it’s poisoning you now).

Now he posts his state-of-the-art lipid lab results (which I also order for patients) to prove his minimal heart disease risk. He eats primarily meat and eggs.

Any of my patients would be proud: (except one thing: the CO2 of 19, which is probably because he’s often ketotic, and has to blow off CO2 to normalize his blood pH).

Three questions:

a. What is the effect of sustained ketosis on heart disease risk?.

Ketosis mimics starvation, pushing the body to burn fats rather than carbs (because there are no carbs!) for fuel. Fatty acids and ketones result.

Ketogenic diets work in about 50% of kids with specific seizure conditions. They reduce appetite but are difficult to sustain (Atkins is a modified ketogenic diet). In a small study in kids, there were worrisome cardiac changes: I don’t know of adult cardiac data.

b. What are the other heart disease risk factors? Smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes and pre-diabetes, sedentariness, family history of early heart disease, high waist-to-hip ratio.

Let’s assume these are not a problem for Mr. Taubes. But not so for everyone else. Some of these have to do with food, and some not. Even if sugar is the problem. And it might be.

c. Is it practical?

To eat without most carbs and sugar, especially fructose, is virtually impossible in the U.S. and even more so abroad.

But Taubes’ idea that “we all respond to the carbohydrate/insulin effect differently”, and for weight loss “getting rid of all the grains and much or most of the fruit, and then eating more of whatever foods they happen to eat or like that provide protein and fat” deserve exploration.

People with celiac disease learn to cook, to read labels, to avoid gluten, because it’s toxic to them. Will we see the same for obesity, heart disease and sugar? Let’s hope so.