Diet

There is a traditional saying, "let food be your medicine, your medicine your food." I like to think I'm an open person, not "anti" anything, but I am anti-inflammation! I have been writing (okay, occasionally ranting) about how our current lifestyle, even (gasp!) pasta and bread, can put a terrible strain on our immune systems, our hormones, and, not least, our fertility. Of course, I'm a bit obsessed with inflammation, because it is a cause of many of my health and fertility problems, plus, on my husband's side of the family, they have virulent terminal cancer and thyroid disease up the wazoo, so I worry about my spouse, and my MAN FERTILITY guinea pig. In the airport the other day, however… [more]

Happy first week of spring (?) . I'm still wearing my scarf over here... Here's an article on a popular site, Babyzone, on food and fertility. It pretty much says many of the same things I've been harping about in earlier columns, about things like the importance of zinc, magnesium, and other trace minerals that our overprocessed diets mean we might not get enough of, so at the very least, taking a good multivitamin isn't a bad idea for "insurance.'' Plus, I'm happy to see how many articles promoting general health are converging with the articles on fertility and health. There's more to fertility than just procreation--if you nurture and care for yourself, your life can bloom as well!… [more]

Aha, there was recently an article in the very mainstream PARADE Magazine about how food can affect your genes. In the future, they think, researchers will be able to just put a drop of your blood on some computer chip and will be able to figure out what diseases you are susceptible to, and suggest nutritional tips from there. I had been talking about with cancer, that "bad" environmental triggers can cause mutations that can result in cancer, while "good" environmental triggers can be protective. While this sci-fi DNA chip will be able to pinpoint specific diseases, the "prescription" is pretty much going to be the same: unprocessed fruits and veggies, the dark, leafy, or colorful kinds that have lots of vitamins… [more]

I've been talking a lot recently about how stress impacts your immune system (and believe me, I'm not done!), which makes you less healthy, more prone to disease, and ultimately, less fertile. So I want to switch to the half-full mode and talk about things that can help your health, wealth (fewer doctor's bills), and fertility--bloom into life, here. I am in a parents' group for children with a severe chronic illness. Most pediatricians have told us we just have to live with our children's pain, digestive upset, etc., that it was just part of that "condition." I even was yelled at by our pediatrics practice when I took my son to a large national hospital to have an endoscopy (looking into the… [more]