Each week I read well over 100 medical articles, summaries, and abstracts of studies sifted from the thousands that are published. Most have nothing to do with nutritional medicine, but there are always a few. Here are some recent highlights:
Category: Nutrition, Nutritional Supplements, Vitamins, & Herbal Remedies
Nutritional counseling focuses on helping clients understanding foods and their role in preventive nutrition. Nutrition, supplements, vitamins and herbal remedies help achieve and maintain healthy body composition, (lean muscle-to-fat ratio) in order to improve health, manage disease, feel better, and reduce the risk of serious conditions.
Can You Lower Cholesterol with Supplements?
The answer, like many of my courageous medical comments, is a firm “It depends…”
Most of my patients aren’t thrilled when I reach for a prescription pad, especially when it’s for a drug they might have to take for the rest of their lives. Consider also the dollar signs that appear in the eyes of pharmaceutical industry executives if you are, say, 40 years old and your doctor writes you a Lipitor prescription to lower your bad cholesterol. If you live to be 80, over your life span you’ll be spending about $50,000 on this drug.
The Most Important Supplement
It’s magnesium. In fact, if you wake up one morning and say, “I’m not taking another supplement in my life” (not that I’m recommending this), don’t toss your magnesium.
Q&A: Herbs Control PMS Palpitations
Q: In a health tip on hormones, you wrote that virtually any cyclical symptom is probably caused by hormone fluctuations. You described a patient who got such severe heart palpitations that her cardiologist considered heart surgery before one herb managed to get her hormones under control. Could you tell me which herb was used and how it worked?
Benefits of a Whole Food Diet
In my last health tip we discussed the damaging effects of all the sugar we’re eating. I urged you to boost your intake of whole foods–real fruits and vegetables that are so readily available now in the farmers markets of our northern hemisphere.
Sugar
Okay, I am going to start in on sugar. And by sugar, I mean not only granulated cane sugar but also high fructose corn syrup, which seems to be added to just about everything except anchovies these days.
Eat Food as Nouns, Not Adjectives
As we enter the peak growing season in North America, it’s a perfect time to renew your efforts to eat a fresh, plant-based diet of mostly vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and nuts. If you can eat locally grown produce, so much the better.
Diets
Regular readers know I’m not a big fan of diets. In a recent Journal of the American Medical Association article, researchers from Stanford University Medical School worked with about 300 overweight women, ages 27-50, who hadn’t gone through menopause to see what diet worked best. They divided the women into four groups, according to diet.
Q&A: Red Meat
Q: My fiance eats red meat once a week, and I feel it’s terrible for his body. Am I right that our bodies aren’t made to eat it that often, that it doesn’t break it down?
Organic Milk
Click here for the original post. Personally, if it weren’t for cheese pizza, I’m for dropping dairy from our lives altogether. Cow’s milk is for nourishing calves, period. We’ve been sold an amazing bill of goods from the National Dairy Council, variations of (remember this?) “you’ll never outgrow your need for milk.” I clearly recall […]
Don’t Forget Your Selenium
And, in point of fact, if you do forget your selenium, you might start forgetting other things as well.
That’s what some epidemiologists from Indiana University recently reported. They selected a fairly obscure village of 2,000 people in China where the people had lived their entire lives and eaten largely the same food. After analyzing hair and fingernail samples for selenium levels, the researchers ran psychological tests on intellectual function.
Fast Food Favorites: Spinach
What kind of fast food could I ever recommend? The kind that will make your hair shine and your complexion glow.
You can make easy and enormously healthful choices every day that will make a real difference in the way you feel and look. Yes, your appearance, mood, and stamina are directly tied to the nutrients you take in.
Q&A: Supplements for Recovering Alcoholic
Q: I have a friend who is a recovering alcoholic. She’s gone through detox and is doing well managing her disease, but she wants to know if there are supplements (like milk thistle?) to support the liver that she should take to help her body recover and stay healthy.
Breaking the Fast with Breakfast
Breakfast breaks the fasting period our bodies undergo while we’re sleeping. You can quickly see why breakfast is essential: your body has just gone through hours with no nutrients. When you awake and begin your day, you need fuel.
Importance of Magnesium
People who schedule visits with nutritionists are usually surprised to find themselves almost always walking out with a bottle of magnesium tablets along with some suitable vitamins and a healthful eating program.
Q&A: Vitamin D
Q: You’ve written a lot about the value of vitamin D, especially for women living in overcast places. I live in Minneapolis and I’m wondering how much I should take every day. Also, I read that vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin and there are risks if you take too much. How much is too much?
Vitamin Graveyard
Do you have a “vitamin graveyard?” You probably do but just never called it that. You’ll find it on your kitchen countertop or along a shelf in your medicine cabinet. Maybe it’s your bathroom window ledge.
Q&A: Bromelain Dose for Anti-Inflammatory Effect
Q: Ever since you wrote about bromelain I’ve wanted to try it, as you suggested, instead of aspirin or ibuprofen. I’m managing my heel spur pain well with the help of my physical therapist, but she encourages me to take an anti-inflammatory when I have pain. Would you tell me what dose of bromelain I should use? Also, does it work for arthritis?
Another Reason You Need Vitamins
During my now rather lengthy professional career, I’ve been hearing the same song-and-dance from conventional physicians about vitamins. It’s a variation on the theme “our food is plenty nutritious by itself” (now proven untrue) or “you just end up having nutritious urine” (the B vitamin riboflavin colors urine a dazzling yellow).
Ginkgo Biloba
Ginkgo biloba has the longest life span of any tree, with some ginkgo trees
estimated to be more than 1,000 years old. Even more astonishing is that
ginkgo, as a survivor of the Ice Age, has been around for more than 200
million years.