by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
May, as you may recall, was National Mediterranean Diet Month, celebrated at our house with a helpful Oldways calendar posted on the fridge with 31 daily suggestions on how to introduce more heart-healthy Med Month changes into our regular routine. As threatened promised, here’s how I did: Continue reading “Report card: my month of eating Mediterranean”
Earth to Cleveland Clinic dietitians: please stop sharing your joyless, preachy, pinched-face, finger-wagging lectures about foods you consider to be evil. In a rush to convince the great unwashed out here to improve our daily diet, many so-called “experts” like you seem to believe that nagging and food-shaming are the most effective ways to change behaviour. Trust me, they are not.
Today, I offer two examples of dietary advice, one that I plan to not only ignore but publicly mock, as well as one terrific example (definitely NOT from Cleveland Clinic) that’s already printed and posted on my fridge door. Continue reading “Dear Cleveland Clinic: It’s food, not poison, for crying out loud!”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
Dr. John Henning Schumann, who blogs at the always-intriguing Glass Hospital, is a general internist and medical educator at the University of Oklahoma School of Community Medicine. This year, he made a personal New Year’s resolution to become a vegetarian. Or a ‘mostly vegetarian’, as he calls it.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a long time, but with young children who love meat and don’t have the broadest palates, I think it’s important to feed them protein any way I can get it in them. Having passed 40, I’ve finally realized that I can no longer eat what I want with impunity. Further, as a doctor, I believe in practicing what I preach, and my legs could no longer straddle the gap between action and rhetoric.
“That, and I hit 192 pounds on the gym scale. Continue reading “A doctor discovers the heart-smart joys of eating vegan”
Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days! Drop One Dress Size a Day!
Rapid weight loss can be 
so quick and easy – if you believe all those fad diet advertising claims. A fellow heart attack survivor, for example, tells of losing nine pounds in the past five days. She has accomplished this feat, she explains, thanks to a miracle diet she heard about while watching the Dr. Phil show on television.
Phil is always a font of reliable evidence-based health information. (I’m kidding about that last part, my heart sisters).
She was so inspired by this TV interview with a telegenic, fit and very convincing young author of yet another miracle diet book that she went out and bought the expensive best-seller, and says she is now “thrilled” with her resulting nine-pound weight loss results. She does confess, however, that she’s already had to “cheat” on the strict diet a few times in the past five days, and is “struggling” to stay on it so far, but she still seems thrilled nonetheless.
Trouble is, strict weight loss diets typically result in regaining that lost weight – and more. Continue reading “Here’s your basic heart-smart grocery shopping list”
The well-known Mediterranean Diet recommended for optimal heart health calls for eating very little meat. Here in Canada, although our meat consumption is steadily decreasing according to Statistics Canada, we still average about 23.4 kilograms (about 52 pounds) of red meat per person per year. That puts us well behind the United States, Hungary, and Australia in total meat consumption.
But if you break it down into types of meat, people in Denmark eat more pork than anybody else in the world, Hong Kong leads chicken consumption, and, to nobody’s surprise, the Argentinians eat more beef.
So a heart-smart vegetarian in Buenos Aires might feel quite outnumbered, but elsewhere on earth would be among the majority. An Apple A Day recently took a unique look at international vegetarianism and came up with some widespread religion-based connections. Continue reading “Vegetarian-friendly religions”
Heart Sisters 
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters