Across America, food "scraps" are often trimmings, skins and seeds tossed in the garbage. But as I started investigating these "waste products," I quickly found many of these actually serve as edible food parts with robust nutrition. In fact, many ancient cultures, including Chinese medicine and Native American remedies, tapped the healthy compounds in some of…
The vast majority of adults have been "on a diet" at some point in their lives, usually with the hopes of losing extra weight. One look into the plethora of diet advice and dietary plans available today, and it's easy to feel instantly overwhelmed by information, much of which is contradictory. From diet pills to…
Your skin is a very complex organ and its appearance has the power to express a lot about your overall health. In fact, your skin is the biggest and heaviest organ of your entire body. It provides protection and structure for your veins, tissue, other organs and bones. It’s not only those of us who…
Esophagitis is inflammation of the esophagus (the muscular tube connecting your mouth to your stomach). It causes pain or difficulty swallowing food and pills, and can make eating very uncomfortable. When it goes untreated, esophagitis can lead to changes in the esophagus that can make it hard to swallow food without choking. (1) There are…
Have you ever heard of lactation cookies? Maybe you've seen them for sale in the baby food aisle and were curious about how a cookie can possibly improve your milk production. It turns out, many women turn to foods and herbs to help increase their milk supply. Fenugreek and blessed thistle are two of the…
I had been a professional food writer — as in, it was literally my job to eat my way around the world, reporting on the most delicious foods for magazines — for half a decade, and a bona fide food lover for 25 years before my “iron stomach” began to fail me. It started with…
Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma (sometimes called NHL, or simply lymphoma) is a group of diseases that actually includes more than 20 different disorders. How common is non-Hodgkin's lymphoma? Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is currently the seventh most common cancer in men and women in the United States. (1) In the U.S. alone more than 66,000 new cases of NHL…
Many of us will recall those itchy, red blisters we suffered as children. Chicken pox is the common name for the varicella-zoster virus, which causes a very itchy, highly-contagious skin rash. The virus most commonly affects children between the ages of 4–10, but chicken pox can also affect adults who have never had the virus…
Even though chicken pox is one of the most common viruses that children between 4 and 12 years old experience, many people are still not sure exactly why the virus occurs, how it spreads or how to manage chicken pox symptoms. What is chicken pox and what does it look like? Chicken pox (also called varicella)…
