Get Dr La Puma's Healthy Bites & Weekly Wows in your inbox to help you feel your best inside and out. Insights, healthy recipes and recommended household, culinary, literary, botanical and natural products to make your life easier, healthier and more fun.
I’ve devoted several blogs to the Mediterranean Diet–its affect on cholesterol, on Alzheimer’s prevention, its red wine and palliation near the end of life, and its easy, rustic preparations. The mechanisms of the Mediterranean diet remain elusive: whether it is because of its [...]
Heart Healthy Diet Plan Most people with heart disease don’t know how to eat after a heart attack. A well-done study from UMass followed 555 patients one year after their angiogram after their heart attack. They were overweight (average BMI of 30, about 30 pounds over), averaged 61 years [...]
Though I’ve written about this in the WSJ and the NY Times before, I thought I’d lay out a more succinct approach to something that millions now struggle with. The fact that the FDA has approved a second new injectable drug to lower very high cholesterol, Amgen’s Repatha, means [...]
Controlling cholesterol is a small part of preventing heart disease. Yet physicians seldom offer the most powerful, least risky weapons we have against it. Instead, we recommend statin medications, and soon can prescribe a just-FDA approved biotech medication called Praluent. For decades, [...]
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 [...]
Good diet foods for high blood pressure include blueberries, flax meal, hibiscus or jamaica tea, and beet juice. But high blood pressure management starts with measuring it accurately: I recommend the Omron Series 7 for home. These foods all have very good peer-reviewed medical research that shows [...]
We’re barely half way in and already it’s apparent: if men have had undue attention to what it means to be a man focused on them in any year in this century, it’s this one. Why? It could be the eruption of the Low T controversy: it might be [...]
Doctors and hospitals, despite the moral underpinnings of the work, are much like other workers: they do more of what they are paid well to do. And less of what they are penalized for doing. This is not a tale of two financial profiles, but instead, of the same [...]
This is Men’s Health Week, not just another Hallmark holiday, and it culminates in Father’s Day. Over the last several years as I tested and wrote REFUEL, I’ve discovered that there is a huge gender gap in health and health understanding, and that there is something to do about [...]
The debate about low T has dramatically accelerated in the 2 weeks since the NYTimes published “Don’t Ask Your Doctor About Low T.” The day after, the NY Times published an editorial of its own, calling on regulators “to strengthen warning labels and find ways to rein in [...]