Disillusioned and Confused About How To
Eat To Stay Healthy?

If you’re concerned about your immediate and long term health,
-> worried about your families health,
-> anxious about your longevity,
-> uptight about your vitality
-> and maybe distressed about your weight.

Take a couple minutes here to consider the following information.


Nutrition Deficit Disorder (NDD)…

Haven’t seen a commercial for that one yet, have you?

I’d like to take credit for coining the phrase, but I didn’t. It's popped up recently as a spin on Attention Deficit Disorder, (which itself has been renamed to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

Like the myriad of modern maladies we’re deluged with these days, it has a memorable sound bite name.

Ahh, but the difference…
With the other acronym soup syndromes, the “solution” commonly marketed is – just take a pill to counteract a “symptom”. (And then a bunch of other pills for the side effects of the first pill… but I digress).

With NDD, the solution is to solve problems that lead to a whole host of “symptoms”. The side effects: health and vitality. So – feed the body the nutrition it needs and many of our modern day maladies will be nourished out of existence.

It’s easy to dismiss the simplicity of this premise. But in fact, it’s actually the more complicated solution. Let me explain…

Human evolution is far slower than microprocessor evolution. We’re still the same species we were 100 years ago, even 10,000 years ago. The way the skin, bones, organs, glands and systems in your body work and the nutrients needed to fuel optimal health hasn’t changed.

Not since Red Bull. Not since McDonalds. Not since Swansons. Not since the collapse of the Roman Empire. (hmm, didn’t they fall prey to excess, gorging and gluttony?)

In fact, since the introduction of agriculture about 10,000 years ago, a mere 0.005% of human genetic material has changed. That's five - one thousandths percent. In dollars and cents terms - half a penny.

What’s Changed?

Processed food and fast food have only been part of our AD (the past 2,007 years) eating history for 2.49% of the time. In other words, Big Macs and TV dinners were non-existent for 97.51% of modern human eating and for 99.93% of our existence as a species.

(Astonishing at first glance since many of us were born after Swanson's took over the freezer section and after the Golden Arches were erected. It's all we've ever known.)

We’ve seen a parabolic increase in numerous diseases over the past 20 years.

Our response has been to focus on science, “Western” medicine, pharmaceutical and surgical options. Reacting to symptoms rather than the underlying cause.

Marketing one pill to “cure” one symptom and another pill for a different symptom. All these miraculous “cures”… and yet, so few are cured.

But just 100 years ago, nutritious food and a balanced diet were a given in our society. People ate real food grown in soil by people wearing overalls rather than “food products” invented in a lab by people wearing white coats. Then packaged in a container with a label that begs for a degree in chemistry to decipher or even pronounce.

Everything you put in your body – whether it’s prescribed by a doctor or purchased off a grocery store shelf – affects your health. In fact, often in unforeseen ways.

Take for instance “Trans-fats”. Trans–fats are not a food, but a by product of food processing. Our cells don’t have the capacity to digest trans–fats.
Harvard researchers claim that trans–fats cause more than 30,000 American deaths by heart disease a year.

Have You Eaten Yet?

What you might see on a plate is a cheeseburger, bun and pile of French fries. (Better yet, grass fed beef, quinoa and chard). But what happens the moment you take a bite is a complex series of chemical reactions.

The combined action of chewing and saliva begins to break down the food and starts the digestive process. The acids and churning action of enzymes in your stomach breakdown and prepare the food for digestion.

Your liver filters out toxins and digests fats. Your pancreas secretes digestive enzymes. Your small intestines absorb nutrients. Your large intestines and kidneys rid your body of wastes.

The way your body converts food to fuel – fuel for energy, fuel for replenishment, fuel for rebuilding, fuel for growth – is stunningly complex and efficient. We humans – as brilliant and innovative as we are – could not design and build a system even a shadow as extraordinary as the human body.

Recipe For High Performance

Your body thrives with whole, organic foods, herbs and sometimes supplements to restore your metabolic balance. The kind of foods your Grandmother probably ate as child. Not because she had to think about and design them into her diet, but because that was the custom when food was a farm creation rather than a scientific lab creation. It worked… she didn’t think about it.

You see, when you eat well, you feed and nourish your body tissue, bones, glands, organs, skin and hair. And you thrive.

When you eat poorly, you draw down the reserve of nutrients stored in your body. And it shows in your skin, hair and mood. And you feel it with fatigue, aches and pains and lowered energy as well as more serious illnesses such as obesity, asthma, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

You can only extract so much before the reserves are emptied. Just as you can only drive so many miles in your car when the fuel tank gauge points to E.

A New Model Every Year

Our bodies are constantly rebuilding and regenerating. In fact, 98% of the atoms in your body (not including brain cells which do not regenerate) are renewed in a 12 month period. The cells of your stomach lining – new every 4 days. Your skin – new every month. The cells in your liver – replenished every 6 weeks. Your skeleton – new every 3 months.

When you don’t supply your body with quality building materials (nutrients), it’ll make do. To constantly rebuild is a survival mechanism hard wired in. However – when poorly nourished – instead of building a Sistene Chapel, you build a straw shack. And it doesn’t take much huffin and puffin (stress) to blow down a straw shack.

Whole, nutrient dense foods provide stable, deep and persistent energy. Refined and processed foods give you a short burst of superficial energy then drain you.

You probably didn’t grow up on a farm and you may not know the difference between wheat in the field and wheat in your bowl of cereal. Basically, food processing takes whole food and strips out components.
It sounds good in theory, but in stripping away things we lose vital nutrients. And whole foods contain within themselves the components needed for optimal digestion.

“In the last 50 years, the extent of processing has increased so much that prepared breakfast cereals-even without added sugar-act exactly like sugar itself. As far as our hormones and metabolism are concerned, there’s no difference between a bowl of unsweetened corn flakes and a bowl of table sugar. Starch is 100 percent glucose (table sugar is half glucose, half fructose) and our bodies can digest it into sugar instantly.”
   –David Ludwig, Pediatrics specialist

The Express Elevator To Misery Land

Life is so fast and jam packed these days. We’re constantly compromising. Constantly chasing the clock. Looking for an edge just to keep up. In the race, we’ve become a society that has traded health for convenience.

I’m not advocating you give up innovations and conveniences and return to a Paleolithic lifestyle (although there is the "Paleo diet" book if you're interested).

BUT based on current trends according to Dr. John Foreyt, director of the Nutrition Research Clinic and Professor, Department of Medicine, at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, “by 2040, 100 percent of American adults will be overweight and it may happen more quickly.”

In fact, “This may be the first generation of children who will die before their parents”

It’s certainly not for a lack of diet books. (5,684 listings for that search term on Amazon).

Really – think about that for a minute (or 30 seconds if you're in a hurry).

Deceptive Fact: Average life span is increasing.

Illuminated Fact: Fewer 70 year olds today will celebrate their 90th birthday than did 40 years ago. The increase in AVERAGE life span today is due to better sanitation and a reduction of infant mortality.
What that means is, if you celebrated your 70th birthday in 2007, you’re less likely to live until 90 than if you celebrated your 70th birthday in 1967. If you were born in 2007, you’re more likely to celebrate your 1st birthday than if you were born in 1967.
  ( Source: Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon with Mary G. Enig, Ph.D.)

The Whole Is Greater Than The Sum Of The Parts

Technology and research have opened up a vast amount of information. To keep up with the quantity of information, Doctors have to specialize and sub– specialize and even sub–sub–specialize. They know ever more details about one small piece of the whole.
The thing is, your “parts” are not independently operating in isolation.

Through this ultra–specialization, medical science tends to not see “the forest through the trees”. Heck, in many instances they don't even see the branch through the leaves.

Ring, ring. Hello!
   Oh, it’s for you: Diabetes calling
… will you answer it or SLAM the receiver down

Your body is not a passive organism. It's constantly defending against, warding off and resolving pathogens. Disease happens when the pathogens over power your defenses.

The nutrition and lifestyle choices you make can either strengthen your defenses or weaken them.

What about genetics?
Genetics does play a role. It provides a tendency – but not a certainty:
“You control more than 70% of how well and how long you live. By the time you reach fifty, your lifestyle dictates 80% of how you age; the rest is controlled by inherited genetics.”
(You The Owner's Manual, Michael F. Roizen, M.D., Mehmet C. Oz, M.D.)

If our genetics haven't changed, why is disease rising so fast…

• Obesity: “… we know that over the last 20 years, the rates of obesity and overweight in this country have soared astronomically. … 65% of adults are overweight, and about 30% of adults overall meet the criteria for obesity. … 16% of the children in this country are obese. That number has increased by at least two times over the last 20 years” (Dr. Gerberding, Director, Center For Disease Control June 2, 2005)

• Diabetes: From 1997 through 2003, the number of new cases of diagnosed diabetes increased by 52%. Diabetes can cause blindness, kidney failure, strokes and heart disease and is estimated to shorten a person’s life by 10 to 15 years.
The CDC estimates that one American in three, born in 2000, will develop Type 2 diabetes.

• Asthma: According to the 2001 National Health Interview Survey, approximately 31.3 million Americans have been diagnosed with asthma. Nature Magazine (October, 2000) notes that the prevalence of asthma increased 75% between 1980 and 1994. And if you’re one in four kids going to school in the South Bronx, New Yorker Magazine reveals that while you may have forgotten your homework, you didn’t forget your inhaler.

• Heart Disease: Heart disease and stroke – the principal components of cardiovascular disease – are the first and third leading causes of death in the United States, accounting for more than 40% of all deaths. (CDC)

• Cancer: The second leading cause of death among Americans, is responsible for one of every four deaths in the United States. In 2005, more than 570,000 Americans – or more than 1,500 people a day – will die of cancer. (CDC)

• Autism: In 1995 the incidence of autism was between two and five individuals per 10,000. 10 years later in 2005, the incidence is one in 166. That is an increase of 2,912%. (CDC)

• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Currently estimated at 3–7% of the population by the American Psychiatric Association. Per the CDC, prescriptions for ADHD medications have increased dramatically, in many states more than quadrupling.
cigarette ad

Are You A Steward Of Your Health
Or A “Consumer” Following The Herd

TV, radio, banner ads, spam, magazines, billboards… one pharmaceutical ad after another. All painting a picture of how idyllic your life will be with their product. Eat whatever you want, then mop up the consequences with a pill.

It reminds me a bit of the cigarette companies.

We know how that turned out.


When It Comes To Your Health
Is Average Good Enough For You?

If you want to escape the typical cycle of poor health and dramatic increases in disease that are now defining the average American, quite simply – at minimum – you need to stop eating the 2008 version of the average American diet.

Depending on when you were born and how you grew up, maybe this way of eating is all you’ve known. But let’s take a moment and put it in perspective.

Fast food and frozen TV dinners were introduced to the mass market in the 1950’s and didn’t become a dominant factor in our diets until the 1980’s. For instance, in 1970 fast food sales were $6 billion. In 2000 they were $110 billion – a 1,733% increase.

20-25% of Americans EACH DAY eat in some kind of fast food restaurant. And spend 49 cents of every food dollar on food eaten outside the home.

Eat To Heal
Eat To Live… Better

What is holistic nutrition? A simplified way of understanding it is: eating more like your Great–Grandmother did as a child, than today’s 12 year old does.

Her generation ate a diverse, balanced, nutritionally dense diet. Local, fresh, seasonal food.

That diversity, balance and nutritional density has been declining precipitously for the past 30 years. And today we’re realizing – through disease, through obesity, through decreased vitality – the exponential health consequences of an abused food supply and poor diet choices. The foods we choose to eat are increasingly being tagged as the cause or contributing factor to scores of maladies from arthritis to wrinkles.

There’s More To Nutrition Than A Simple Pyramid

In 2003 the Princeton Review surveyed every US accredited medical school (122) and accredited osteopathic school (19) about nutrition education in their curriculum.
40% of the schools had a nutrition requirement. The average amount of nutritional training at the schools that required any was 2.5 credit units – about 38 hours.

What that means is, if your doctor went to one of the 4 in 10 medical schools that actually has a nutritional requirement in the curriculum, she probably got a total of 38 hours of nutritional training. But if your doctor went to one of the 6 in 10 medical schools that has no nutritional requirement, he could have as little as zero hours of nutritional training.

In their book “The Real Age Diet”, Drs. Michael F. Roizen and John La Puma revealed, “The two of us combined received fewer than eight hours of education on nutrition in more than six thousand lecture hours in medical schools”

Doctors of Western medicine simply aren’t trained or focused on nutrition. The depth of science they must study and keep current on is overwhelming as it is. Doctors are trained to TREAT, not PREVENT.

“What’s really tragic about this is that we were so busy learning how to fix broken arms, deliver babies and do all of those ‘doctor’ things in medical school that we considered nutrition to be boring. But after we get into practice, we spend most of the day treating people with diseases that have huge nutritional components that have long been essentially ignored.”
  –Dr. Michael A. Klaper, Director of the Institute of Nutritional Education and Research

I’m a certified Nutrition Consultant. I’ve had over 700 hours of formal nutrition education from Bauman College. I also have a Bachelor’s degree in Food Science from the University of California, Davis. And I have 18+ years of experience as a professional chef.

But do understand – I’m NOT a medical doctor and I do not practice medicine. Nor do I believe the world should be ridded of medical doctors or all of “Western” medicine.

I practice Holistic nutrition and health education. I’m not dogmatic. I don’t believe that all you need is an organic apple a day and your life will be bliss. I simply believe that nutrition is a part – all be it, a quintessential and crucial part – of the well lived life.

Where’s The Secret Decoder Ring?

For your Great-Grandmother, it was easy. She just ate what was there. For you, the grocery store is a furrowed brow experience.
The popular press screams of one fad after another, giving you just one layer of the onion… fat is bad, cholesterol is bad, carbs are bad. In fact, all of those are vital nutrients… but there are good fats and bad fats, good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, good carbs and bad carbs.

The front of the label says “real fruit”. Flip it over and the number one ingredient is genetically modified sugar (high fructose corn syrup) – loads of it. That real fruit… there may be a whiff of it in there.
Front side: “Lowers cholesterol”… back side: trans fats (hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils such as vegetable, cottonseed, soy).

It’s estimated that 90% of the foods we consume are processed. When you learn just a little bit of food label–speak translation, you’ll quickly see that promise of nirvana on the front of the label becomes the emperor with no clothes on the back of the label.

Are You Ready To Let Go Of The Worry Beads

So maybe you're thinking… unless I give it all up, move to a commune and become my own farmer, baker and chef, I’m doomed. NOT at all so. You can – in 2008, in the place where you live – make some not terribly difficult changes, and reap some very desirable health rewards, now and for years to come.
Or you can continue in the path of the “average American” and be an average American statistic.

My role is to evaluate where you are now, where you want to be, how motivated you are.
Work with you to design an ideal nutrition and lifestyle program for you. A program that provides the amounts and variety of nutrients that will support you in your fast–paced, stress–filled life.
And then help you implement it.

Certainly there are actions in life that yield an immediate and obvious result. But there are many actions – like the repeated crash of a wave on the shore – that make a small, but not individually noticeable impact over and over. We don’t detect any erosion from one wave. But we do from a year of waves.

And we generally don’t note the impact on our bodies from one fast food or highly processed meal. But over time, the toll it takes on us is oh so painfully regrettable.

Most folks come to me because less–than–good nutrition has caused or contributed to undesirable symptoms or maladies. And the dissatisfaction of their present state is their motivation.

The Choice Of Your Health Can Be Yours…
Or A Mega Food Conglomerates

Health is not a binary state… it’s a continuum. You can choose right now to improve yours. You can take drastic measures or you can take small steps. What’s most important is that you take at least one step. That instead of continuing down the path of the average American, you take a turn for the path above.

Yes results matter. That’s one of our cultural themes these days, isn’t it? But I submit to you that real effort matters more.

Because it takes effort to start. And effort to continue. And it’s that continue that produces results. Hey, what did you get when you first tried to walk? Not a lot of results, right. Where would you be now if you just gave it three attempts and stopped… for lack of results.

Sure for most of us, change is uncomfortable. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth pushing through a little discomfort. Taking it one small – or large – step at a time.

Will better nutrition give you washboard abs – certainly not by itself. That will take some targeted exercise as well.
Will you lose weight – that’s entirely possible and if that’s your priority, I’ll work with you to make that happen.
Will better nutrition make you look 20 years younger? It’s possible – a body properly fueled has energy and vitality and for some people feeding their body with real food does make them feel 20 years younger.

What is comes down to is: every BODY is individual and each person has different goals and different levels of motivation. If you've had years – or even decades – of poor nutrition, a week of “eating right”, isn’t going to magically transform you.

Hey I’m not perfect – even though I KNOW better. But if you’re willing to implement one small change and then another and then another…
You don’t need to become a food saint or a paranoid freak. The ultimate – and doable – goal is to be eating well 80% of the time. Of course I welcome those over–achievers who strive for 100%.

All of your decisions and indecisions, your actions and inactions, have added up to create the life and health you know now. If you want things to be different in the future, you’ll have to start making them different in the present. When they say the future is now – it is. What you eat NOW effects how you’ll feel to–morrow… and next month… and next year.

Sure we all get up in the morning and go about our day with the possibility we’ll get hit by that metaphorical bus. Nonetheless, what we hope is that not only will we live a long life, but that we’ll also be “blessed” with good health.

You don’t have control over the bus, but RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW, you can take the first step to ensure your health is not a roll of the dice, a card from the deck, a random set of numbers on a lottery ticket… or a contribution to the profitability of the pharmaceutical, fast food and overly processed food industries.

How do you want to feel when you blow out the candles on your next birthday cake?

Think about it.

"Thoughts are the threads that bind us to deeds.
Deeds are the ropes that bind us to habits.
Habits are the chains that bind us to destiny."
  –inscription carved on the West Wall at the palace in Maygassa

CALL NOW… get a little education, make some simple changes, form some new habits.
Then, instead of spending your time in the doctor's office waiting room with average Americans, you can spend time living well.

510.816.6931

Eat like your life depends on it – it does

NOTICE: According to State Law I am not authorized to practice medicine or to undertake the diagnosis, prevention, treatment, or cure of any disease, pain, deformity, injury or mental or physical condition.