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This may seem super obvious to some of you out there, and I freely admit that I may appear “out there” to a collection of a few of you, too. But I’m just going to go for it, state what makes sense from a purely personal perspective, a point of view that has four years of undergraduate biological sciences, another five for medical school, plus an additional fifteen or so years of living consciously food-wise. Take it or leave it, I have nothing to gain from convincing you in either direction. Instead I get a cathartic release from all the times I experience frustration when I read about some fascinating dietary fad in the world of pop culture media. Be forewarned: this is a dietary diatribe. Digest the following information at your own risk.

A healthy and balanced diet has the potential to make a lot of things happen for those wishing to achieve all sorts of personal health goals. I will personally guarantee it for anyone out there who chooses to mindfully pursue health through the medium of food. When I say diet, I’m implying that the consummation of whole foods, unadulterated by processing or chemicals, is the optimum goal for ingesting. And I don’t need some fandangoed research study to understand the effects of a healthy, well-balanced diet, nor do I need to rely heavily upon my seasoned years of experience with health. In fact, my diet as a kid consisted of fast food specials, and I openly admit that I kept and discretely dined upon Halloween candy throughout the year (some of which was so well hidden that, much to the dismay of my mom, ants had a heyday before I recalled the sweet spots). I am what some would call a born again slow-foodie and proud of it. This is not meant to sound puritanical, far from it. I simply feel that the food facts are glaringly self-evident, and it doesn’t take rocket science to figure it out. If you wish to achieve health, you need to start with you and your diet.

I am absolutely flabbergasted that research is still debating the fresh food factor, despite all the thousands of years successfully living, growing, reproducing off of such unfounded habitual choices. Something needs to be said for all those hedonistic ideas that we adhered to, without question, without research, without some big-hitting renowned organization saying that they figured it out. Why can’t there be a world-wide proclamation that the foundation of health starts with you and the foods you choose to expose yourself to? In order for this to be a true reality as a society, we need to put our money where our mouths are. Let’s start by funding choices that:

Make wholesome foods both more affordable and widely available.

Emphasize foods produced at the local level in order to provide the freshest ingredients possible; this directly supports the community on multiple levels.

Support programs that educate consumers, from kids to adults, about how to prepare meals with whole foods.

Don’t get me wrong, I work for the Helfgott Research Institute, and I’m not against the pursuit of science, the pursuit of figuring out mechanistic actions of how all these various forms of foodstuff and herbal components interact and react with our body chemistry. Discovering the unknown pretty cool. I’m into it. The unknowns are where the foci need to be directed in order to meet the growing concerns with health care, not on the super blatant time-tested years of eating a well-balanced, nutritionally packed meal. Can’t we all just reach a point of understanding and admit that eating healthy can solve a lot of the health misfortunes that we suffer from today? AND support organizations that promote healthy eating habits in our communities? We’re wasting valuable time and energy on these silly debates that never amount to anything higher than a pile of beans on any side of these fad diet equations. Come on guys, let’s really start to impact health and delve deeply into the meat and potatoes of making this dream a reality.

Interested in knowing what you can do? Check out our blogroll, it’s loaded with good info! A great resource to check out first is: Health Taken Seriously

The following is a response to a commentary written by Randy Cohen of the New York Times about nurses using therapeutic touch. You can view the original annotation here.

Dear Ethicist—

In the December 2 New York Times, you suggest that nurses should not use therapeutic or healing touch on patients. You write “These nurses should not perform unproven therapies… To do so is to tell a kind of lie to patients.” What you perhaps don’t realize is that much of medicine lacks an evidence base. In fact, current estimates suggest that 40% of medicine has little or no evidence to support it. Yet these procedures are performed all of the time—and modern medicine would suffer without them. Would you like to tell the 25.6 million Americans with heart disease that they cannot have open heart surgery because no clinical trials have shown that it is effective when compared to placebo?

Secondly, you suggest that supplying facts is more important than the placebo effect. The reality is that while scientific studies try to minimize placebo effect, medicine aims to maximize it. When a patient wants to get well, does it truly matter if the therapy that helps them is a result of an externally applied biochemical reaction or an internal one? Furthermore, there is a substantial body of evidence that supports the placebo effect. So by your own standards, the placebo effect should be used in medicine.

– Heather Zwickey
Director of Research
Helfgott Research Institute

I don’t know about you, but as the tone of presidential campaign begins to deteriorate - as it inevitably does, despite early pleas to take the high road - I am finding it more and more difficult to figure out what the candidates’ positions actually are. This election cycle, the state of the health care system in the U.S. is quite the hot topic, and the candidates are busily trying to tear down their opponents’ plans as they tout their own.

Want an unbiased run-down of how our candidates propose to fix our health care system? Click here for a great resource.

The Henry J. Kaiser Foundation gleaned all the data they could from candidates’ websites and speeches, as well as information from debates and news items, and created this handy site that allows you to compare each candidate’s health care proposal (or promises of a proposal) side-by-side with all of the other candidates.

The rest of the site is also chock full of information on the continuing political debate and policy issues surrounding our broken system.

Check it out!

If you aren’t diggin’ honey, you ain’t been paying attention.

Think that diabetes is out of control? How about infections? Well, honey, you should be happy to note that this sweet message is brought to you by your truly, Miss Kimbely Ann. And the way I see it: I put the information into your hands, it’s up to you what you do with it. Challenge yourself to treat yourself better, cause honey child: you deserve it.

PART ONE: Honey, your sweet-tooth is irresistible!

Dr. Bodog Beck, MD has a name just drums its way along your tongue in a honeyed kinda fasion. Dr. Bodog Beck is a dude that got honey and health all figured out back in the 1930s with his book, appropriately titled: Honey and Your Health. This publication is even more mind-boggling considering that current research is just catching on to this age old, healing tradition. His historical accounts and research concludes that honey treats just about everything, from successfully curing diabetes and allergies and asthma, to providing the body with basic materials for optimum health. And that’s not all. Its anti-fungal, anti-viral, anti-bacterial properties make it the ideal topical salve for open and festering wounds, as well as an aid during the sick season. And that’s still not all. Here’s an excerpt from his book Honey and Your Health:

Beyond any doubt, a great error in the present feeding methods for children is to permit them to consume sugar-candy instead of natural sweets. Dr. Seal Harris (New Orleans Med. & Surg. Journal. 81, Sept. 1928) remarks: “The sugar-fed child often becomes rachitic, is prone to acquire colitis and other infections. If he survives infancy he becomes the pale, weak, undernourished child, or the fat flabby indolent and self-indulgent adolescent. Sugar saturated and vitamin-starving America presents a problem…. An ounce of prevention in an infant is worth more than the proverbial pound of cure in an adult. Sugar-fed children will not enjoy milk, eggs, fruit and vegetables to provide them with protein, fats, minerals and vitamins, which are needed for their growth.”

Dr. Harris thinks that the sugar-saturated American children are confirmed sugar habitués. They cover their breakfast cereals with sugar, spread sugar-syrup over their pancakes, cheap jams over the muffins and often even sweeten their milk. They are served sweet desserts (the sweeter the better) for lunch and dinner. Between meals they devour candy and ice cream, and indulge in all kinds of sweet “soft” drinks. Candies contain 40- 60% of some sort of processed sugars. As a result, these children suffer from flatulence, hyperacidity and headaches and become irritable, restless, capricious and undernourished. They are physically underweight or overweight and mentally precocious or retarded; are easily fatigued and unmanageable, suffer from one cold after another. Physicians, instead of conducting the fashionable search for some non-existent endocrine deficiency, should rather be guided by the fruity breath of acetone of these children, which in itself usually reveals the difficult (?) diagnosis. The French Dr. Le Goff contends that about 80,000 children die in France from the direct effect of industrial sugar. Dr. Le Goff would not permit in his practice the minutest quantity of sugar in the food and drink of infants and children. The results are astounding because almost all the new-born grow up to robust childhood. Many pediatricians recognize the existence of so-called “sugar-fever.”

Sound like our current state of affairs is still struggling with the sugar issue? Maybe if we all started supporting the honey industry, give them hard-working busy bees some just due, then perhaps we could see some drastic changes in our overall health care system. We could begin to eliminate those difficult to manage cases such as irritable bowel disorders that affect 30% of all Americans. Just a thought, and it was just too simple to pass up mentioning.

PART TWO: Honey, Give it to me straight!

To make the situation even more interesting, our honey resources are rapidly declining, as our honeybee populations are decreasing due to an umbrella term call the Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). There are many theories about the decline of the honey bees, and I have my own thoughts to add fuel to the debate: it’s the classic bait-and-switcheroo. Commercialized honey farmers extract more honey than the hive is capable of providing, to compensate: the farmer substitutes a corn-syrup substitute for the bees to eat instead. Well, here’s the catch: honey contains substantial mineral components from the soil, these minerals are vital to the structural integrity and proper metabolic functioning of the honeybee. Honeybee diets that are based upon the sugar substitutes may not provide our winged workforce with essential vitamins, minerals, and nutrients typically found in honey and most importantly essential to proper immune function. No wonder these little buggers keep getting sick. These mineral components are also, coincidently, missing from the diet of a typical American (instead consuming an interesting hodge-podge of sweetener alternatives) thereby lacking those essential components for our body and immune system.

Years ago, Western nutritionists discounted the minerals in honey, on the assumption that their quantity was too small to make them important. Now it is known, however, that numerous minerals are needed by the human body in very small amounts to keep the body in mineral balance. Honey contains minerals, in about the right quantity, to serve the needs of the normal individual. (Great resource)

Perhaps the same corn syrup/honey substitute craze found in our food sources is to blame for our lack of structural integrity. What components are found in honey and how does the body use each item, you ask? Iron, copper, chlorine, manganese, silica, potassium, sodium, phosphorus, calcium, aluminum, melanin, and magnesium are typically found in the darker varieties of honey. To learn more about minerals, what purpose each serves in the body, and what happens when the body does not have enough of it, click here or here. You will be startled to know about the multitude of unmanageable diseases that can be managed if honey was used instead of the refined and artificial counterparts typically used in today’s food industry.

Still hungry for more, Honey?

An essential guide to help you understand the health benefits of honey can be found here.

To learn more about refined sugar foods, current trends on sweet-toothed consumption, and tips to reduce your intake of honey substitutes, click here.

To understand the properties of honey and it’s wound healing properties, click here.

For a comprehensive look at honey’s healing properties, click here.

For those pesky STAPH infections, want a truly viable solution? Click here.

Honey: Nature’s Perfect Food by Tariq Sawandi, MH, has more than enough information to satiate your appetite about the stats of honey and treatment options.

Dr. Bodgog Beck should be a household name, his reference, unabridged is: Beck, Bodog F, MD. Honey and Your Health. Robert M. McBride and Company: New York, 1938.

There’s no doubt that a nutritious diet is crucial to a person’s overall health. Even a cursory PubMed or Google search will yield numerous examples of studies that show that a healthy diet is a primary factor in preventing both acute and chronic disease. People know this. Popular culture is full of messages to lose weight, eat right, and exercise more. Just look at a few magazine covers the next time you’re in a grocery store. Chances are there’s a diet article on at least one of them.

With all of the information on weight loss, healthy eating, and prevention out there, why is obesity rising along with its close cousin diabetes? Is it culture? Is it lack of time? Is it behavioral? Is it hormonal?

 

 

 

Here’s another possibility – no-nonsense economic incentives.

For many people, the costs of nutritious foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and lean meats can be prohibitive. Adam Drewnowski, a University of Washington economist, found that energy-dense foods, or those that contain refined grains, and added sugar and fats, cost less than energy-dilute foods such as fresh vegetable and fish. He theorized that consumers make a rational choice to purchase foods that offer the most energy for the lowest cost and in doing so, choose obesity-promoting foods. This theory could explain why obesity is higher in low-income populations in the United States.

To illustrate this concept, the Oregon Food Bank organizes a stunningly effective event every year called the Food Stamp Challenge. The concept is simple – try to buy food for a week for $21 dollars per person, the same amount as a person on basic food stamps would have available. My co-worker participated this year, and quickly found out that the cheapest, most filling food was, for the most part, rather unhealthy. For a week, his diet consisted of mostly potatoes, tortillas and cereal, with absolutely no fresh fruit because that’s what he could afford on his budget. He wasn’t hungry, but his daily nutrient intake was seriously out of whack.

The problem seems overwhelming. Michael Pollen’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” perfectly illustrates the entrenched agricultural policies and eye-on-the-bottom-line incentives that make a nutrient-free bottle of Coke or a refined sugar-laden brand of bread the cheapest option.

If this is the case, what can we do about it?

Drewnowski suggests that economic incentives may prove to be more useful than strictly behavioral interventions to improve nutrition and reduce obesity and metabolic diseases.

What do you think? Would economic incentives help? If so, should these economic incentives be targeted at the consumer or the supplier? How do we ensure that all people can afford and can access fresh, healthy food?

-Erin C