Dr. Chet’s Health Memos

If it’s in the health news today, I’ll be writing about it as soon as I read the research, both old and new. With my email Health Memos, you’ll know more about making lifestyle choices that will help you get and keep good health. These free, concise updates on health are emailed to subscribers twice a week. Subscribe today and get a free MP3, in English or Spanish, of Dr. Chet’s Top Ten Tips—Small Changes for a Healthier Life.

ScienceBattle

The Weight Loss Battle: Carbs vs Calories

As a member of the American Society of Nutrition, I get a news feed that lets me know what’s being published in their journals. A recent article talked about the carbohydrate-insulin model (CIM) as a cause of the obesity pandemic. The debate surrounded the question of whether the energy balance model (EBM) that says calories […]

Sucralose

The Actual Effects of Sucralose

Continuing the examination of the study on diet drinks and appetite, let’s get into the details of the study. The MRI portion of the study is difficult to interpret for the layperson. The researchers seemed to think that based on the brain response, obese women would be more susceptible to overeating after consuming a drink […]

DietSoda

Does Diet Soda Increase Appetite?

“Diet soda may prompt food cravings.” If you regularly drink diet soda with non-nutritive sweeteners such as sucralose, that headline would give you pause. Could drinking drinks with artificial sweeteners cause you to compensate later for being cheated out of calories? That’s what researchers attempted to find out in a very complex study conducted at […]

SupplementList

The Supplementation Sweet Spot, Part Two

We’ve got the beginning of our sweet spot for supplementation started with a multivitamin-multimineral and probiotics; today I’ll finish it up with two more—depending. Omega-3 Fatty Acids Recommendations on the type of omega-3s seem to be in flux with disagreements over docosahexaenoic acid (DHA). The cause for concern seems to be the potential relationship between […]

SweetSpot

Identifying the Supplementation Sweet Spot

I believe everyone should add a foundation of supplements to their diet, but there’s no reason to take supplements you don’t need. The last two weeks, I’ve written about the sweet spot for nutrition and exercise as I see it, so it just seems logical to do the same thing for dietary supplements. While supplementation […]

ExerciseSweetSpot

Getting to the Exercise Sweet Spot

Do you realize that five minutes is only 0.3% of a day? Can you really say you can’t at least begin to exercise? “Five minutes isn’t the issue—it’s the 45 minutes a day!” Yes, although 45 minutes is only a whopping 3% of your day, I know it can be hard to work it into […]

SweetSpot

Finding the Exercise Sweet Spot

After last week’s Memos on a sweet spot for food intake, Paula asked if I could do the same thing for exercise. The sweet spot for exercise isn’t so much between not enough movement and too much movement—it’s really between not enough movement and too much time, because most of us never have enough time […]

FriesAndVeggies

Found: The Dietary Sweet Spot

Did you have any hot dogs this week after considering the minutes you might lose? How about eating some salmon for what you might gain? If it at least gave you pause, that’s good. The researchers did this study because “research shows that the overconsumption of food detrimental to health and underconsumption of food beneficial […]

SweetSpot

In Search of the Sweet Spot for What You Eat

After studying nutrition and exercise for so many years, the one thing I’ve tried to find is the “sweet spot” when it comes to what we should eat. I don’t mean how much sugar or sugary foods can we eat; I mean what do we have to eat to be healthy, reduce our risk of […]

DoctorDog

The Dog Will See You Now

The Memo title is from Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast about canine screening of disease, and I would urge you to listen to it. While the focus is on prostate cancer, the logical question comes up: could dogs be used to screen people for COVID-19? The answer is yes. No one knows for certain whether they can […]