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Would You Trust An Unhealthy And Unfit Cardiologist?

There was a very controversial presentation made at a recent meeting of heart doctors in Canada. I’ve been stewing about what to say about it for a week.

The title speaks to its inflammation:

Fat, unfit, unmotivated: Cardiologist, heal thyself

The presenter that made the stir, pediatric cardiologist, and IronPerson, Dr. Brian McCrindle (Toronto) argued that overweight, unfit doctors are doing their patients a disservice. His bottom line: cardiologists are acting like the rest of Western society. They are not living a healthy lifestyle.

He made three major points. (in-depth coverage can be viewed here, on TheHeart.org)

*This blog post was originally published at Dr John M*

Food Truths, Food Lies: Final Nutrition Advice For The Boys & Girls Club’s Fit Family Challenge

Over the past 6 weeks, 5 families (selected by the Boys & Girls Clubs) have been working hard to develop new healthy eating and exercise patterns (part of The Triple Play Fit Family Challenge). Their ultimate goal is to maintain these habits for a lifetime, and teach their peers to follow in their footsteps. Next week I’ll be traveling to Los Angeles to meet the families and participate in the awards ceremony – where the winning family will receive an all expense paid vacation. (Maybe if I play my cards right they’ll take me with them? One can always dream…)

I myself have been challenged to encapsulate all the best nutrition research into simple guidelines for daily living. I gave it my best shot in this blog post, and today I’m going to review some final food philosophy, straight from one of my favorite books, Food Truths, Food Lies.

Food Truths:

  1. Calories matter most – food is like fuel. It is burned for energy, and when we have reached our daily calorie needs, the rest is stored as fat. Some food is more calorie-dense than others, but the bottom line is that to maintain our weight we need to balance calories in (what we eat) with calories out (what we burn through activities of daily living and/or exercise).
  2. You can’t exercise your way to weight loss. In other words, you can’t outrun your mouth. Just think about it Read more »

Do Chronic Diseases Begin In Utero?

Heart disease. Stroke. Diabetes. Asthma. Osteoporosis. These common scourges are often pegged to genes, pollution, or the wear and tear caused by personal choices like a poor diet, smoking, or too little exercise. David Barker, a British physician and epidemiologist, has a different and compelling idea: these and other conditions stem from a developing baby’s environment, mainly the womb and the placenta.

Barker was the invited speaker at this year’s Stare-Hegsted Lecture, which is a big deal at the Harvard School of Public Health. In just over an hour, he covered the basics of what the British Medical Journal used to call the Barker hypothesis. It has since come to be known as the developmental origins of chronic disease. (You can watch the entire talk here.)

It goes like this: During the first thousand days of development, from conception to age 2, the body’s tissues, organs, and systems are exquisitely sensitive to conditions in their environment during various windows of time. A lack of nutrients or an overabundance of them during these windows programs a child’s development and sets the stage for health or disease. Barker and others use low body weight at term birth is a marker for poor fetal nutrition.

When a fetus is faced with a poor food supply, it Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Harvard Health Blog*

A Healthy, Affordable, Home-Cooked Meal In Under Nine Minutes?

In my recent phone chat with the Boys & Girls Clubs participants of the Fit Family Challenge, one of the callers confided in me that she works long hours and struggles to find time to cook healthy meals for her family. This is a very common problem, though there are tricks to make meal preparation fast and affordable. I decided to take the challenge myself, cooking a pork chop dinner for three, with only 9 ingredients in 9 minutes. I took a photo of the starting ingredients here. The total cost of the used portions (I’m not counting all the PAM, and apple sauce that I didn’t use for example) was about $9. That’s only $3 per person, less than most fast food meals! (I served ice water with the meal, but a glass of skim milk would have been fine too.)

My ingredients include:

1. Quick-fry pork chops, seared in a pan coated with PAM cooking spray. I chose pork chops with very little fat, and cooked them for 4 minutes on each side. Read more »

Energy Star Food Rating System: Another Futile Attempt To Promote Healthy Eating?

The Institute of Medicine has just released it’s recommendation that all foods be rated with an ‘energy star’ system: three stars = good, zero stars = bad:

The Energy Star system is a model because it’s simple and easy to use, and also because it’s gained traction with industry, which now develops products with the rating in mind, committee members said.

Except that this rating system hasn’t gained traction with industry:

But the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Food Marketing Institute announced their own front-of-the-pack system, called Facts Up Front, in January. It gives information on calories, saturated fat, sodium and added sugars but doesn’t rate foods according to those components.

In a statement today, the GMA said it has “concerns about Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at Dr. Wes*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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