Just yesterday, I copied a smoothie recipe from an online source. One of the ingredients was coconut oil; I asked; “Why would I add this to my smoothie?” A week or two before that I was in a conversation with a young woman who is studying nutrition at a holistic health establishment and she shared […]

I’ve written quite a bit about the drawbacks and undesirability of processed foods; I’ve often used the words highly processed but a newly released study has amplified the term “ultra-processed” and has shown how harmful it is, and brought me back to the subject. The new study is published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) […]

As I’ve written before, Waste not, Want not was a concept that I heard more than once from my maternal grandmother, who raised five children during the Great Depression. The concept was fairly simple then. Now the wise aphorism is being used as the title for a broad, comprehensive group of concepts and practices that […]

When we’re young and before we are confronted with much of real life, we often see things in black and white. It’s good or bad; right or wrong; desirable or not; beautiful or ugly, to name a few. Actually, there’s something very alluring about a black and white perspective. It makes things easy. Easy is […]

The term “Hedonic Hunger” gives a name to a very powerful concept in understanding why we overeat certain foods; and why we can’t stop ourselves once we start eating them. Hedonism is from the Greek, and it means seeking pleasure. Hunger is normally not out of control; it is regulated by our bodies in a […]

Another five years have gone by and thus the new 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines have been released jointly by the Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). You may think that the guidelines don’t really have much to do with you; but by understanding them, your own diet can be improved. […]

You’ve prepared holiday meals many times before and have been safe. But sometimes perhaps, you haven’t been exactly sure whether the family got the “flu” or if their gastric distress was due to food poisoning. Food poisoning is certainly not a happy holiday event. To significantly reduce the risk of food poisoning there are procedures […]

Which is blacker, the pot or the kettle? They have figured it out between the two industries, and the blackest one probably got some money from the slightly less black one. But they won’t tell us which one it was. You have to wonder who was advising the sugar/high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) producers. Certainly it […]

When a famous movie star (in this case Gwyneth Paltrow) takes a Food Stamp Challenge, and fails to eat for 7 days on the $29 food stamps provides, it makes the news. But I’m not sure if many of you missed a story about Leanne Brown, a Canadian masters student at New York University who […]

Last week when I wrote about the “Blue Zones” – the longevity zones of earth, I mentioned that I usually am writing something about the harvest this time of year. Yes, last week’s article did talk about produce. But this week, I couldn’t resist any longer. Technically today’s subject, pumpkin is a fruit (develops from […]