IMAGINE EATING 12 POUNDS of food a day — and still staying thin and healthy. That may sound crazy, but it’s exactly what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate for millennia! And they didn’t have any obesity or chronic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, or dementia. Of course, I wouldn’t advise anyone today to eat 12 [...]
Archive | June, 2010
GOT MILK? These days, it seems like almost everybody does. Celebrities, athletes, and even former president Clinton’s head of Health and Human Services, Donna Shalala, are all proud to wear the white “milk mustache.” After all, everyone knows that you need milk to be healthy … Dairy is nature’s perfect food — but only if [...]
THERE’S NO DOUBT about it. Artificial sweeteners cause obesity. I always thought it was funny to see a very large person order a Big Mac, large fries — and top it off with a Diet Coke. I also found it peculiar that I rarely saw thin people drinking diet sodas. So I began to wonder [...]
NOW THAT THE WARMER months are here, it’s a good time to discuss a vitamin that has been getting a lot of press lately: vitamin D, also known as the sunshine vitamin. Ironic, because vitamin D is not a vitamin nor a nutrient; it is a hormone produced by the body in the skin from [...]
DESPITE THE COMMON observation that obesity runs in families, genetic research shows that the habits you inherit from your family are more important than the genes you inherit. Obesity genes account for only five percent of all weight problems. Then, we have to wonder, what causes the other 95 percent of weight problems? We are [...]
RECENTLY, I SPOKE on a panel for PBS TV at the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) convention in Boston. The topic was dementia. There was a woman with mild cognitive impairment on the panel. Her condition is sort of like pre-Alzheimer’s disease. Everyone on the panel — including the Harvard neurologist — agreed that [...]
FOR BOTH PRACTITIONER AND PATIENT, the task of identifying the right vitamins and other supplements can be confusing, and even overwhelming. In 20 years of clinical practice in integrative and functional medicine, Mark Hyman, MD has found the best-quality therapeutic-grade nutraceuticals offering maximum bioavailability. He offers them to other practitioners, his own patients, and other [...]
I WAS IN New York City recently at a conference for health care practitioners on Nutrition and Health put on by Columbia University and the University of Arizona. Andrew Weil started this conference highlighting that we need to address the nutritional illiteracy of physicians. I couldn’t agree more. I think that nutrition is the most [...]
YOUR CHILDREN WILL DIE younger than we will. That’s a scary thought — and one that’s going to become a fact if we keep following the same bad habits of the last 30 years. There’s no doubt about it. We’re living in a toxic food environment. But it doesn’t have to be this way. This week, [...]
How 5,000 Year Old Medicine Combined with 21st Century Science Can Help You Live Longer
by Dr Mark HymanWHAT KIND OF DOCTOR are you?” It’s one of the most common questions I get when I lecture or travel. People want to know: Am I an alternative doctor, an integrative doctor, a holistic doctor, a natural doctor? The answer? I’m none of the above! In fact, I trained as a family doctor because I was interested [...]
