I must admit that my immediate response to an article linking cynical distrust to dementia hit home. When you read dozens of medical articles every week, a few inevitably apply to you. “Oh, dear,” I thought. “I’m known to be pretty cynical. I’d recently mislaid both my keys and wallet in one day. Maybe I’m […]
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.
My Favorite Herb: St. John’s Wort
It’s really annoying the way the pharmaceutical industry snookered US physicians over the herbal antidepressant St. John’s wort. If only the profession had been just a little skeptical of an article that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) a while back we might not be as up to our bellybuttons in […]
My Favorite Supplement: Magnesium
Along with most things relating to good nutrition, I wasn’t taught much of anything about supplemental magnesium either in medical school or during my internal medicine residency. It was a professional clinical nutritionist I met during a long-ago meeting of the American Holistic Medical Association who first told me, “You’ll never go wrong if you […]
Case Study: Why Is My Hair Falling Out?
Barbara was 30 and what she’d written on her WholeHealth Chicago form certainly didn’t match her appearance. On the first line, “My hair is falling out!” And on the second, “Tired!” Physically she looked healthy, but her face reflected a worried shadow. “I know it looks like I have a lot of hair,” she began, […]
Foods That May Harm Your Brain
Posted 02/03/2014 This intriguing idea is the lead article in this week’s Medscape Internal Medicine, a newsletter directed to internists like myself. It’s genuinely refreshing to read research that doesn’t extol some new pharmaceutical, but rather encourages simple changes in how we eat to prevent and even treat common emotional problems. Before I get to […]
Conventional Medicine Bashes Supplements (Again)
Posted 12/24/2013 The nutritional supplement industry took a few body blows this month from conventional medicine, with several reports published in the Annals of Internal Medicine regarding the effectiveness of daily vitamins and minerals. An accompanying editorial urged physicians to discourage their patients from taking supplements altogether. Moreover, the editorial suggested the government should stop […]
It’s That SAD Time Again
Right now, mid-December, if you happen to be sitting in a room with five of your friends, the odds are strong that one of you has seasonal affective disorder, or SAD. If you’re the one, you’re probably in your 20s or early 30s (the vulnerable years for SAD, though you can have it at any age), you know […]
Fruitcake, Genes, and Exercise: A Spooky Holiday Story
Starting around Thanksgiving and generally ending on January 2, we’re surrounded by too much food. Many of us who spent 2013 really (really!) trying to lose weight and eat healthfully dread the havoc these dark December days can wreak on our bodies. It’s agonizingly easy to add some pounds. Then, come January, we despair at […]
Are You An Accidental Orthorectic? It’s Possible…
I saw a pleasant but very worried 40-something woman a few weeks ago who had written on her intake form “Candida!” “Food allergies!” and “I don’t know what to eat!” To be honest, she didn’t look particularly healthy, likely because she was both poorly nourished and depressed. Her story is provocative. Many months earlier, feeling […]
Diet Drug Controversies
The FDA recently approved two new weight-loss drugs and literally within hours of the drugs being officially released a pharmaceutical rep for one of the companies left his card with me and a patient called wanting a prescription. In the weeks that followed, full-page ads for the drugs began appearing in every medical journal I […]
Death By Restaurant
Fair warning: This is one of those Don’t Shoot the Messenger health tips. Believe me, I’ve eaten in a lot of restaurants over the years, but now, having read a series of articles recently published in medical journals, I’ll be doing more grocery shopping and home cooking. We all get a tremendous proportion of our […]
Mayo Clinic’s Stunning Vitamin D Research
I’m not suggesting you spend a weekend (as I did) reading the historically important and game-changing 30-page article in this month’s Mayo Clinic Proceedings entitled “Vitamin D for Health: A Global Perspective.” The study’s authors have written an exhaustive meta-analysis, which means that although they didn’t perform any original research themselves they reviewed the research […]
How To Make Your Child Smarter
I was at the magazine rack at my local health club, about to grab something from among the tattered copies of Self, Men’s Health, Bazaar, and Modern Bride, when I discovered, peeping from behind its fellows, a pristine and virtually unread copy of Perspectives on Psychological Science, subtitled “A Journal of the Association for Psychological […]
Do Vegetarians Live Longer?
A recent article in JAMA Internal Medicine would certainly make it appear that way. Researchers from Loma Linda University recruited more than 73,000 Seventh Day Adventists (the university is an Adventist-affiliated school) and asked detailed questions about dietary and other lifestyle habits, including tobacco and alcohol use, degree of exercise, income, and education level. Enrollees were divided into non-vegetarians and vegetarians. Then the vegetarians were subdivided into vegans (no […]
Health News Roundup
I have a wire basket on my desk stacked with medical articles that merit my muttering, “This is useful. Might be handy for a future health tip.” On the plus side, they’re all undeniably of interest. On the minus, there’s not enough material in each article to merit a complete health tip. So this week […]
The Care and Feeding of Your Microbiome
If you read the history of alternative medicine in the US, you’ll be as intrigued as I was by its preoccupation with your gastrointestinal system and feces. Diet, digestion, absorption, elimination, and possessing a wondrous “inner hygiene” were recurring themes originating in the late 19th century, when Kellogg’s cereals were the mainstay health food at […]
“Club Med” Diet
Posted 04/15/2013 I was surprised to learn that the much-revered Mediterranean Diet went back nearly 70 years to the work of American physician Ancel Keys, MD, stationed in Italy during World War II. Keys, who died in 2004 at age 100 (!), noted the very low incidence of heart disease and the excellent longevity among […]
Why We Take Nutritional Supplements
I’m pretty confident that you, a reasonably regular reader of these health tips, devote a small portion of your living quarters to nutritional supplements. Your morning ritual of teeth/skin/hair/clothes likely includes some pill-swallowing, an act you regard not necessarily as pleasant, but as necessary, sort of like inserting your contacts or a tampon. Most of […]
How To Make Your Child Smarter
I was at the magazine rack at my local health club, about to grab something from among the tattered copies of Self, Men’s Health, Bazaar, and Modern Bride, when I discovered, peeping from behind its fellows, a pristine and virtually unread copy of Perspectives on Psychological Science, subtitled “A Journal of the Association for Psychological […]
Using Glandular Therapies
Given the comments on our blog following last week’s post on glandular therapies, let me say first that if you’re a vegetarian or vegan, glandular therapies are definitely not for you. But if you’re a veggie or vegan needing digestive enzymes, there are plenty of plant-based products. You’ll also face no compromise if you need […]