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The Foodbank of Santa Barbara work I’ve been privileged to participate in has taught me a lot: especially that food insecurity is actually an undiagnosed but treatable medical problem. Why haven’t I recognized it as such until recently? Maybe because so much of what clinicians see has [...]
Clinical research in culinary medicine: by my count there are thousands of peer-reviewed articles, though a search of PubMed doesn’t yet find the keyword phrase. Up until late 2007 I catalogued them for 40 different conditions and 50 foods in ChefMD’s Big Book of Culinary Medicine; [...]
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Healthy Heart Foods When I worked at the great Chicago restaurant Topolobampo, one of the other volunteers in the kitchen loaded up on Peptobismol and Lipitor (a statin now off patent) before our annual trip to a great culinary region in Mexico. “One for the gut and one for [...]
Reliable nutrition tools, new or old, are hard to come by. This is one of my primary fields, and *I’m* getting confused: one day whole grains are good for you, the next day they are bad, gluten is the cause of all evil or is it GMOs? And now [...]
1. Pharma companies will make a mint on cholesterol drugs, now that 25% of Americans are supposed to be on them, up from 12%. Au contraire, and trick question. Nearly all statins are generic, and generics are not where pharma has placed its future bets: only Crestor is not generic, [...]
In nutrition, there are three concerns to address: information, money/resources, and time. Information, though not easy, is usually the least difficult problem to solve. People want to know which foods lower cholesterol or blood sugar; which nutrients interact with their medications; whether olive [...]
I participated in a diabetes twitter chat with Dr Sanjay Gupta and Everyday Health earlier this week, and the phrase that seemed to strike a RT chord was “Education Before Prescription.” Since I spend much of my time teaching *patients and families how to make the best personal [...]
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Two views of why heart disease prevention does not work well: one, personal responsibility is not given the attention it deserves. And two, physicians are not trained or incentivized to advise patients to stop smoking, improve their diet and become fit…maybe because people don’t [...]