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Spend Time in Nature for Your Health? 

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For perhaps 99.99 percent of our time as a species on Earth, we lived outdoors in the natural environment. Might there be a health benefit to returning now and again, and surrounding ourselves with nature? That’s a question that urban planners have asked . “Are people living in greener areas healthier than people living in less green areas?” Should we put it in a park or another car park? “In a greener environment, people report fewer symptoms of illness and have better perceived general health. Also, people’s mental health appears to be better”—and by a considerable amount. Indeed, “assuming a causal relation between greenspace and health, 10% more greenspace in the living environment leads to a decrease in the number of symptoms that is comparable with a decrease in age by 5 years.” That is a big assumption, though. Still, you could imagine some potential mechanisms of why it could be. It could mean less air pollution, and air pollution is no joke. It is the fifth leading cause o
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Exploring Mexican Cuisine with Alexa Soto

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We had the pleasure of talking with Alexa Soto about her work, food, Mexican cuisine, and Hispanic Heritage Month. We hope you enjoy this interview and her Vegan Calabacitas con Crema recipe.   As an expert in Mexican cuisine with a plant-based twist, how have you found food to be an important part of your culture and how you share your culture with others? The way I approach my passion for cooking is by going back to the indigenous roots of Mexican cooking, which is rooted in plants. Mexican cuisine at its core is abundant in nuts, seeds, legumes, vegetables, and fruits. I really enjoy highlighting ingredients that come from the earth through traditional dishes that celebrate my culture that is rich in joy, celebration, and pride.   When did you start cooking and developing your own recipes? How do you educate people about making beautiful Mexican dishes using plant-based ingredients? Are people ever surprised to learn your recipes are plant-based? When I first explored a
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The Largest Study on Fasting in the World 

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The Buchinger-modified fasting program is put to the test. A century ago, fasting—“starvation, as a therapeutic measure”—was described as “the ideal measure for the human hog…” (Fat shaming is not a new invention in the medical literature.) I’ve covered fasting for weight loss extensively in a nine-video series, but what about all the other purported benefits? I also have a video series on fasting for hypertension, but what about psoriasis, eczema, type 2 diabetes, lupus, metabolic disorder, rheumatoid arthritis, other autoimmune disorders, depression, and anxiety? Why hasn’t it been tested more? One difficulty with fasting research is: What do you mean by fasting? When I think of fasting, I think of water-only fasting, but, in Europe, they tend to practice “modified therapeutic fasting,” also known as Buchinger fasting, which is more like a very low-calorie juice fasting with some vegetable broth. Some forms of fasting may not even cut calories at all. As you can see below and a
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Can Fasting Be Healing? 

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Where did the idea of therapeutic fasting come from? The story of life on Earth is a story of starvation. Ash from massive volcanoes and asteroids blocked out the sun, which killed the plants, which then killed almost everything else. As Darwin pointed out: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving” arose—namely, us. “Among apes, humans are particularly well adapted to prolonged fasting.” Evolving in a context of scarcity is believed to have shaped “our exceptional ability to store large amounts of energy [calories] when food is available.” Of course, nowadays, our ability to easily pack on pounds is leading to modern diseases, like obesity and type 2 diabetes. But, without the ability to store so much body fat, we may not have made it to tell the tale. Scarcity wasn’t just caused by the asteroids millions of years ago. “All of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger,” reads an inscription on an Egyptian tomb from ab
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What’s the Best Weight-Loss and Disease-Prevention Diet? 

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The most effective diet for weight loss may also be the most healthful.  Why are vegetarian diets so effective in preventing and treating diabetes? Maybe it is because of the weight loss. As I discuss in my video The Best Diet for Weight Loss and Disease Prevention , those eating more plant-based tend to be significantly slimmer. That isn’t based on looking at a cross-section of the population either. You can perform an interventional trial and put it to the test in a randomized, controlled community-based trial of a whole food, plant-based diet. “The key difference between this trial [of plant-based nutrition] and other approaches to weight loss was that participants were informed to eat the WFPB [whole food, plant-based] diet ad libitum and to focus efforts on diet, rather than increasing exercise.” Ad libitum means they could eat as much as they want; there was no calorie counting or portion control. They just ate. It was about improving the quality of the food rather tha
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Can We Safely Use Melamine Dishes and Polyamide Plastic Utensils?

I recommend glass, ceramic, porcelain, or stainless steel tableware and wooden or stainless steel cooking utensils.  Melamine is used to make a variety of hard plastic “food contact items such as cups, plates, bowls, and utensils because they are dishwasher safe, inexpensive, and durable.” If that word sounds familiar, it may be because melamine has also been added illegally to protein products to game the system to make it appear that “food commodities” like pet food contain more protein than they actually do. By 2007, more than a thousand potentially contaminated pet food products were recalled after “the chemical was found to be a contaminant in wheat gluten used in those products,” but not before it caused disease and death in pets throughout North America.  “It is presumed that melamine was intentionally added by suppliers in China to falsely elevate the measured protein content and, hence, the monetary value of these products.” The pet food scandal was just the writing on th
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Is Stainless Steel or Cast Iron Cookware Best? Is Teflon Safe?

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What is the best type of pots and pans to use? In my last video , I expressed concerns about the use of aluminum cookware. So, what’s the best type of pots and pans to use? As I discuss in my video Stainless Steel or Cast Iron: Which Cookware Is Best? Is Teflon Safe? , stainless steel is an excellent option. It’s the metal chosen for use “in applications where safety and hygiene are considered to be of the utmost importance, such as kitchenware.” But what about studies showing that the nickel and chromium in stainless steel, which keeps the iron in stainless unstained by rust, can leach into foods during cooking? The leaching only seems to occur when the cookware is brand new. “Metal leaching decreases with sequential cooking cycles and stabilizes after the sixth cooking cycle,” after the sixth time you cook with it. Under more common day-to-day conditions, the use of stainless steel pots is considered to be safe even for most people who are acutely sensitive to those metals.  A l
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