Brussels sprouts. You either love them or hate them. My goal today is to provide support to those who already enjoy them and change the minds of the many who don’t. My reason is simple: eating more vegetables from the Brassica family, which includes bok choi, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, kale and mustard greens, can assist you in achieving many health goals. How they do so is no mystery. Simply put, they yield a broad array of potent nutrients and phytochemicals that are often lacking in modern diets.
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Each day we are challenged to live up to our highest potential. These tests can be as basic as the thoughts upon which we choose to focus or as profound as life and death decisions such as whether or not to quit smoking. One of the issues that I’ve tried to work on over the years is to refrain from comparing myself to others. I’d like to say that I came to this realization after years of careful contemplation and devout study of the most sacred spiritual texts. But, in reality, I attribute this shift of thinking to a rerun of an old television sitcom. Many years ago, I fell asleep watching TV. I awoke at about 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and I recall seeing a few moments from an episode of M*A*S*H. The scene involved an older, wiser character (Colonel Potter, played by Harry Morgan) giving some sage advice to a younger, wilder surgeon under his command (“Hawkeye” Pierce, played by Alan Alda): “The only person you need to compare yourself to is who you have been. And the only person you need be better than is who you are now”. To this day, I don’t know whether I actually heard that wisdom or conjured it up in the fog of my sleepy head. Read more »

A startling report was just presented at the 2009 American Heart Association’s Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention. The implications of that presentation will hopefully have a widespread impact on the future health of teenagers in the USA and worldwide. Read more »