Since 1990, the population of the United States has undergone a sea change in our weight and our health. In 1992 , according to the CDC, approximately 10-15% of our population was obese. By 2015, approximately 35% of the population was obese. Genetic mutations in a single generation cannot account for this big (no pun intended) change. In the last 100 years we’ve had some huge changes in our environment that I believe are encouraging this push towards obesity: increasing sugar in our diet, antibiotics changing our microbiome, GMO foods, habitual snacking and feasting on high calorie, nutrient poor foods, and what I call “fake foods” – these are foods…

For years saturated fat, eggs, and red meat have gotten a bad rap from both the government and from the medical community. My great uncle Boze had a heart attack in the 1990’s and was placed on an incredibly strict diet that allowed for no eggs and no red meat, though he could have margarine, which we now know is a huge mistake. In 2016, researchers from the NIH and other major institutions published an interesting study in the British Medical Journal. They reviewed previously unpublished data from the Minnesota Coronary Experiment which was  a study that took place in one nursing home and six state mental hospitals in Minnesota…

…weighs in with the blog just below: “Monsanto gets its due”…signed Carolyn. Carolyn Matthews is my late wife’s daughter and she reminds me of Wooz in many ways. Thistle Hill has been the family farm since the 1940s and now Carolyn is the “head honcho”. Unfortunately she is one of those modern women who has to juggle a family with the farm and a demanding career. She has a medical practice to take care of as a cancer surgeon at Baylor Medical Center in Dallas and is also founder and director of Baylor’s integrative medicine center. She also writes and travels widely to make speeches.  And yes she does use…

I began attending integrative and functional medicine conferences in 2007, when I first started attending Andrew Weil’s integrative medicine fellowship program at the University of Arizona. Since then, I’ve attended two to four conferences a year from various nutrition, lifestyle, and environmental organizations; they are “brain candy” for me. I was impressed that from the very beginning of my integrative medicine journey, the speakers stressed the quality of the food we are eating. The traditional medical view at the time was that we should avoid red meat. But at the conferences, not only was red meat in moderation an acceptable part of the diet, it was encouraged- as long as…

Yesterday, a jury awarded Dewayne Johnson, terminally ill with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma,  $289 million in damages. After a trial that lasted a month, the jury decided that Monsanto’s Roundup was the cause of his cancer. Johnson worked as a groundskeeper for a school district north of San Francisco and sprayed Roundup repeatedly throughout the year, sometimes for hours a day. While Monsanto has long argued that Roundup is safe for humans and not linked with cancer development, the World Health Organization in 2015 classified it as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Unfortunately it is ubiquitous now in our environment and when I tested myself (my family can attest to the fact that…