Health & Wellness Investigations

Whew! I've been super busy lately with an insane amount of yardwork (and training people at work, where I usually do these things), so things have been a little slow on the medical-research front. However, since my jalapeno plant is currently producing an insane number of jalapenos, I did take a break to make some absolutely delightful salsa, which I will share the recipe for! Ingredients: ~4 small-medium, fully ripe tomatoes, sliced (large slices fine) 3 jalapeno peppers, with seeds, cut in large chunks*. 1/2 medium sweet onion**, diced (large chunks fine) Cilantro - I used about 2/3 of a bunch from the grocery store, but use to taste Salt & Pepper to taste - I added about 1/2 tsp salt and 1 tsp pepper but do to your own taste!! *I left the seeds in to create medium-spice salsa. You can remove the seeds for a more mild version, or use a hotter pepper - like an habanero - for a hot version. **you can use Vidalia onions instead, but don't use red, yellow, or cooki

Today at work, in my daily scroll through health-related news articles, I came across this article in Time magazine, which claimed that they had found a cure for peanut allergies. This is huge. I can’t imagine life without peanut butter and I’ve often joked that if I ever had a kid with a deadly peanut allergy I’d have to give up the kid. Okay, that’s a joke. I would never give up my kid for anything short of chocolate (okay, okay, I’ll stop). But peanut allergies suck, and they are becoming increasingly common ...as are other allergies. According the magazine article, a group of Australian researchers found great success in administering a probiotic supplement to kids with peanut allergies, that contained tiny amounts of peanuts. Four years later, 67% of the children treated with the probiotic + peanuts were able to eat peanuts comfortably. Time magazine is usually pretty good about reporting objectively on science studies, and author is conscientious about cautionin

In the spirit of the recent posts about eggs, I thought I’d share some things that you can do with the egg shells . My mom always kept a container in her kitchen for used eggshells, and now I do the same thing. Saving the shells takes about two seconds, and it doesn’t cost anything - win win. In my house, the shells have two main uses… Plant Food: This is my most common use for the shells. I crush them and put them in the soil of my houseplants and herbs - the shells contain a lot of calcium which is good for the soil. My mom always swore by them for tomatoes especially - a lot of the time blossom end rot is caused by a lack of calcium in the soil, and eggshells can help with that. I don’t have tomato plants (yet), but I figure the shells can’t hurt my soil! People Food: When I make stock, I’ll sometimes grind up a few shells in my coffee grinder until they make a fine powder and add them to the stock. This extra calcium is important in my diet because I don’t get a lot of d

When I was a kid, my older sister was obsessed with the TV Show Dr. Quinn: Medicine Women in which a Bostonian, female doctor came out west to practice medicine in the frontier. In addition to dealing with widespread sexism, lack of medical supplies and technology, and budding romance, Dr. Quinn was forced to recognize the validity in some of the Native American herbal remedies that were used in the frontier, contrary to what she’d been taught in medical school. I remember watching one particular episode where Sully, the hot frontiersman who liked Dr. Quinn, saved her from influenza using a tea made out of flowers that he got from the tribal medicine man. Wow , I thought, he’s fixing her using flowers! That’s so cool!!! I want to learn how to do that! (I also thought wow, I hope if I get married someday it’s to somebody like Sully who can throw a tomahawk and has an awesome wolf-dog . Not all dreams come true, clearly). Whole turmeric Now I’ll admit that this was a fi

A family member has a stellar  honey lime dressing recipe that uses mayonnaise, and - since I had a butt ton of lime and lots of fresh salad ingredients, I decided that I wanted to make it. One problem: I threw out my mayonnaise because traditional mayo is basically vegetable oil in a jar, mixed with a few egg yolks. And remember, I quit using vegetable oil. Now, yes, there are mayo brands that use olive oil, and if you really like to use mayo, you should totally buy some ! But I have, like, three recipes that call for mayo. In fact, the nearly full jar of mayo that I threw out for containing soybean oil was also over six months expired. Whoops. Sidebar: Just because it says it's made with olive oil doesn't mean it doesn't have vegetable oil - Hellman's Olive Oil Mayo and Kraft Olive Oil Mayo, for example, are still mostly soybean oil. Read your labels. My point is that I didn't buy the vegetable-oil-free mayo because I use mayo so seldom. But of co

Happy 4 th of July! In the spirit of the relaxing holiday (whole week off of work! Whoo!), I want to share a news article…it’s a few years old, but still as disturbing as it was on 2010 when it was published. http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/04/15/insurance.fast.food.stock/index.html Read it? Good. Now does anyone else think it’s odd that the people who make money when people are sick, also own stock in companies that make people sick, I mean, make fast food? “Food” for thought (please pardon the pun!). Take a stand today, please, and enjoy your burgers and ‘dogs…but limit your sugar and avoid those unhealthy oils!

High-fructose corn syrup - you’re probably heard people talk about how bad it is for you, and you’ve probably seen products that advertise “no high-fructose corn syrup!” on their labels. You may have also see articles from the “nutritional authorities” that it’s NOT bad for you, but has been over-hyped. So...who should you believe? Is high fructose corn syrup going to kill you? Or is that all a media scare? Well, obviously, I think you should believe me. Keep reading. The Short Answer: It’s not really much worse than table sugar. However, you should absolutely try to avoid products that contain it because, yes, it will kill you (well, make you sick). What it is: High fructose corn syrup was first introduced in the 1970s as an alternative to sugar (sucrose). The food industry loved this, because corn was everywhere in the United States, making HFCS easy and cheap to get. Plus, it was a syrup instead of a granular substance so it didn’t need to be dissolved in water be