Health & Wellness Investigations

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...

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...