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Mar18

3 Foods That Boost Your Sex Drive

Posted in: Obesity and Weight Loss, Wellness and Health

No, it’s not hype. It’s science.

I gave a talk on “Manly Dieting” to the National Wellness Association at #IHRSA in LA on Culinary Medicine and Manly Dieting this week, and was overwhelmed with the response: 10% of the audience spoke with me afterwards, to ask if they could be in my beta test for men (and bring 9 other men), which we plan to run online later this year. I loved it, and plan to include them. Meanwhile:

1. Walnuts (not drive but performance).

Especially after a fatty (read salami and cheese) meal: walnuts keep your arteries from constricting in response and responding abnormally to exercise and exertion. Walnuts are also high in the amino acid arginine, which you need to make nitric oxide, to keep arteries flexible, and improve your blood flow.

Dosage: 8 walnuts, with your meal, 4 hours before sex. Take with Viagra/Cialis/Levitra, or instead.

b. Beans, legumes and seeds, especially kidney beans, peanuts, sunflower and pumpkin seeds.

These foods are richest in arginine, an amino acid which precedes nitric oxide in the body. And nitric oxide allow vessels to dilate.

An excellent study showed that a supplement high in arginine improved female desire, satisfaction and frequency of sex, regardless of menopausal status. Note: watermelon, which generates arginine indirectly, probably only makes you pee more.

c. Mediterranean foods, if you have a big belly and metabolic syndrome. The diet works to help you burn belly (visceral) fat…which blocks insulin so you store more fat, squeeze your kidney and poison your liver. If you’re a guy, you should know that belly fat turns the testosterone your testes make into estrogen. And drops your ability to make muscle, get lean and strong, and other drops.

The Mediterranean diet as a whole helps women with metabolic syndrome have better sex: better overall desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, satisfaction, pain.

It also helps men overcome erectile dysfunction (ED), also known as impotence. One-third of obese men with ED cure their disease after 2 years of a Mediterranean-style diet and exercise.

Dosage: It’s a meal! Three times daily.
May7

What Can I Eat to Heal and Recover from Surgery?

Posted in: Aging and Costs of Aging, Arthritis, Obesity and Weight Loss, Vitamins and Supplements, Wellness and Health

Last year, my Mom had her first operation: a total knee replacement.

Active and curious, and having recently celebrated her 29th birthday again, her mother was turning 100 shortly and needed assistance. Mom wasn’t able to get around well enough to help, with her osteoarthritis and pain.

A month before the operation she asked me, “What can I eat to heal and recover from the surgery?”

It turns out that there’s a good answer to this. It can be divided into wound healing, building bone, rebuilding muscle and guarding against weight gain.

A blog is too short to cover each category in depth, but fortunately, there is a largely untapped literature about nutrition and post-operative care.

The key: wounds heal from the inside out. Many patients need additional arginine and vitamin C, just to name two nutrients, pre-operatively and post operatively. Lowering oxidative stress improves healing. The peri-operative period is the most critical.

Building bone is a function of vitamin D, calcium and magnesium, and the right hormones. Smoking prevents bone from being built. And food can facilitate it.

Rebuilding muscle is something that has nutrition, and dietary protein, at the center. I often encourage my patients to have a little protein-rich food at every meal, especially breakfast. Omega-3 fatty acids, especially DHA (almost solely from fish and from algae, which is where fish get their DHA) improve muscle building post-op. My Mom took them.

Recent data have shown that total knee patients gain an average of 14 pounds post-op, and it’s not all muscle. Gaining that much weight post-op delays recovery and increases instability.

Post-op patients need satisfying, lower calorie recipes written on prescription slips: high calorie, high sugar foods that are highly processed should never appear, and would never be reimbursed. But strategic nutrition can improve strength, healing, flexibility and stamina. And should.

Although my grandmother passed away just after reaching 100, my Mom has recently returned from Hawaii, Carmel, New York City and points unknown, without a cane or a pain pill, nearly as good as new. In fact, better.
Mar22

Nutrition and the Eye

Posted in: Aging and Costs of Aging, Common Conditions, Obesity and Weight Loss, Wellness and Health

Acute macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in people over age 55, and in Western countries. The macula is part of the retina, and allows central vision.

If you smoke, have had previous cataract surgery, or have a family history of AMD, your risk is high. If you are overweight or obese, have heart disease or high blood pressure, ditto.

But it’s one of the conditions that is preventable with what you eat, and may actually be improved with nutrition. In fact, the commonly prescribed medications Visivite and Ocuvite (excellent comparison chart here) are formulations of dietary supplements that work for preventing AMD progression.

In this Harvard nurses’ study of over 38000 women (average age 54) without AMD, eating at least 1 serving of fish versus eating 1 serving per month lowered risk by 40%. The fish eaten? mostly canned tuna fish and dark-meat fish.

I have the chance to speak with ophthamologists and other clinicians soon about nutrition and the eye, and I’ve started to do some research.

There’s a treasure trove of information about what you can eat to prevent and treat eye disease–glaucoma, retinopathy (glycemic levels predict), AMD. You just have to look, hard, at what’s there.

And taste it too: they’re going to serve my recipe for kale chips for glaucoma prevention!
Jan27

What Doctors Should Say to Patients Who Want to Lose Weight

Posted in: Child Obesity, Obesity and Weight Loss, Wellness and Health

I was interviewed recently by the American College of Physicians about best practices for physicians who find it uncomfortable to speak with their patients who want to lose weight.

The resulting article focused on “motivational interviewing”: I just think about it as how to speak with patients.

Here is a video on motivational interviewing about weight loss. The actors are clumsy and the advice is imperfect (artificial sweeteners are not the solution, there is no motivation elicited, the patient probably feels deprived, and the doctor is still directing instead of listening well). But this type of conversation is a first step.

The real problem is that people don’t know how to do what physicians (may) tell them to do.

The lack of training for physicians about what to say and how to say it doesn’t help. I got 4 hours of nutrition in medical school, and 2 hours in cooking school. None were about obesity.

Finally, most physicians aren’t paid to have these conversations. They need to code a visit about weight management as something else, so they can be paid. I hope this changes with health reform. And it may.

Motivational interviewing is a good tool–with enough time, compensation, evidence-based content and practice it will help. We can do it: POLST has done it for care near the end of life. Obesity could actually be easier.
Jan4

The brain in your gut | TED Video

Posted in: Wellness and Health

In this TED video, a food scientist makes the case for cooking as an evolutionary tool.

He believes (and the data show) there are functioning neurons (we think of them as brain cells) in your intestines — about a hundred million of them.

Heribert Watzke tells us about the “hidden brain” in our gut and the surprising things it makes us feel.

Because so many of the questions nutrition clients ask me are about food and the GI tract, it’s helpful to know that it’s more than a tube. It holds immune cells, a neurologic system, and creates hormones.

Maybe it’s true–the key to a person’s heart is through his or her stomach…and intestine.