Category Archives: nutrition

Meet Chef Lois Ellen Frank, Ph.D. We had the pleasure of talking with her about food history, health, and culture. Read on and enjoy her recipe for Three Sisters Stew. Tell us a little about your work. Chef Walter Whitewater and I are based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at Red Mesa Cuisine, a catering company specializing in theContinue reading “Explore Native American Cuisine with Chef Lois Ellen Frank”

Studies show that many doctors either tend to overestimate the amount of weight that can be lost with obesity drugs or are simply clueless.  Current options for weight-loss medications include the ridiculously named Qsymia, a combination of phentermine (the phen in fen-phen) and topiramate, a drug that can cause seizures if you stop it abruptly.Continue reading “Can You Lose Weight with Pills? “

Why don’t more people take the weight-loss medications currently on the market?  Despite the myriad menus of FDA-approved medications for weight loss, they’ve only been prescribed for about 1 in 50 patients with obesity. We tend to worship medical magic bullets in the United States, so what gives? As I discuss in my video FridayContinue reading “Is It Safe to Take Weight-Loss Pills? “

There are disinfection byproducts in tap water. What happened when Brita, PUR, ZeroWater, and refrigerator water filters were put to the test?  Though many distrust the safety of tap water, a study of 35 brands of bottled water did not find them to be necessarily safer, cleaner, or of a higher quality than water straightContinue reading “Tap, Filtered, or Bottled Water? “

Advisories telling pregnant women to cut down on fish consumption may be too late for certain persistent pollutants.  If you intentionally expose people to mercury by feeding them fish (like tuna) for 14 weeks, the level of mercury in their bloodstream goes up, as you can see in the graph below and at 0:14 inContinue reading “Say No to Fish for Five Years Before Pregnancy “

What are the effects of chewing gum on hunger and appetite?   “Horace Fletcher,” proclaimed one of his obituaries in 1919, “taught the world to chew.” Also known as the “Great Masticator,” Fletcher was a health reformer who popularized the idea of chewing each mouthful more than 32 times—“once for every tooth.” It wasn’t put toContinue reading “Does Chewing Gum Burn Calories?”

Pregnant and breastfeeding women should probably be advised to either decrease or, when possible, cease cannabis use entirely, and couples trying to conceive may also want to consider cutting down.  Approximately one in six couples “are unable to conceive after a year and are labeled infertile, with a male factor identified in up to halfContinue reading “Cannabis on Fertility and Pregnancy”

If extra chewing is effective in suppressing your appetite when it comes to food, what about chewing gum as a weight-loss strategy?  As I discuss in my video Does Chewing Gum Help with Weight Loss?, chewing gum may only burn about three calories an hour, but the calorie expenditure isn’t only working your little jawContinue reading “Chewing Gum for Weight Loss? “

Plant-based diets are the single most important—yet underutilized—opportunity to reverse the pending obesity and diabetes-induced epidemic of disease and death.  Dr. Kim Williams, immediate past president of the American College of Cardiology, started out an editorial on plant-based diets with the classic Schopenhauer quote: “All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second,Continue reading “Diabetes Associations Recognize Plant-Based Diets “

If sugar consumption is considered to be the one and only cause of cavities, can we have any sugar? How much is too much?  Dental cavities may be humanity’s most prevalent disease, affecting 35 percent of the global population. The average number of decayed, missing, and filled teeth has been estimated at more than twoContinue reading “Can We Stop Tooth Decay? “