Mark is a physician and widely acclaimed book author. He is Chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine and serves on the Board of Directors of The Center for Mind-Body Medicine. He is the founder and Medical Director of The Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Mass. 
Healthy Dining in Restaurants
Eating out comes at a high price, not only in terms of the money we spend in restaurants and fast food places but also at a later date due to hidden healthcare costs. Ingredients not fit for consumption even in moderate quantities lurk in generous amounts in restaurant meals. I travel a lot and have become a master at scoping out the good from the bad. Unfortunately, my experiences have shown me mostly what not to eat.
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Why Cooking Can Save Your Life
In the twenty-first century, our eating habits have been hijacked by the food industry. The food-like substances proffered by the industrial food system trick our taste buds into momentary pleasure. But our biology rejects them. Our tongues can be fooled and our brains can become addicted to the fat, sugar and salt that is pumped into factory-made foods, but our biochemistry cannot handle them. The result is the disaster we have in America today. 70 percent of Americans are overweight. One in two has either pre-diabetes or diabetes. It is time to take back our kitchens and our homes.
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Is Coffee Good Or Bad For Your Health?
Coffee is the magic elixir that keeps America humming. Before the coffee bean was discovered in the 1800s, Americans drank beer for breakfast and all through the day, resulting in a slow start to our nation’s prosperity. Then coffee replaced alcohol and the industrial revolution was off to a great start. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the Internet boom and technology revolution started at the same time as Starbucks. It helped America focus.
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Are You a Skinny Fat Person?
The common wisdom is that if you are overweight you are unhealthy, and if you are thin, you are healthy. But new research points to just how dangerous being skinny can be – if you are a “skinny fat” person that is. It means you are under-lean but over-fat – not enough muscle and too much fat (especially belly fat.) It seems it is better to be fat and fit than thin and out of shape.
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Why Falling Off the Wagon Can Benefit You
If you are like me, summer is a great time to catch up with friends and family, which usually involves a fair amount of travel. I have always enjoyed travelling, but not until I ventured deeper into healing myself with Functional Medicine did my body return this affection for the road.
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The Last Diet You Will Ever Need
Why is it that we believe we can feed our bodies industrial, nutrient-depleted, food-like substances, empty of life – and be healthy? How did we come to believe that food chemicals and processing could replace nature-made foods? A hundred years ago, all food was organic, local, seasonal, fresh or naturally preserved by ancient methods. All food was food. Now less than three percent of our agricultural land is used to grow fruits and vegetables, which should make up 80 percent of our diet.
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How Malnutrition Causes Obesity
Americans are overfed and undernourished. That’s right, the most obese children and adults in the country are also the most nutritionally deficient! How can those two things possibly co-exist? The mistake is to think that if you eat an abundance of calories, your diet automatically delivers all the nutrients your body needs. But the opposite is true. The more processed food you eat, the more vitamins you need.
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Why the Latest Hype Over Surgical Cure of Diabetes Is Misplaced
Two seemingly groundbreaking studies, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that type 2 diabetes, or “diabesity,” could be cured with gastric bypass surgery. The flurry of media attention and medical commentary hail this as a great advancement in the fight against diabetes. The cure was finally discovered for what was always thought to be a progressive incurable disease. But is this really a step backwards? Yes, and here’s why.
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How to Rewire Your Brain to End Food Cravings
I’m a food addict. We all are. Our brains are biologically driven to seek and devour high-calorie, fatty foods. The difference is that I have learned how to control those primitive parts of my brain. Anyone can do this if they know how. In this article, I will share three steps to help you counteract those primitive parts of your brain that have you chasing high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods. But before you can update your brain’s biological software, you’ve got to understand why it developed in the first place.
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A Conversation with Mark Hyman, MD
Correcting a blood sugar imbalance is not only the secret to losing weight but will also prevent heart disease, stroke, dementia and cancer. Blood sugar imbalance is the root of diabesity, the term I use to describe the continuum of health problems ranging from mild insulin resistance and overweight to obesity and diabetes, which is the single biggest global health epidemic of our time and is at the root of most chronic diseases.
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Overcoming Obstacles on Your Path to Health
Dealing with challenges in life is like surfing. You get on the wave, and all is great … and then the wave drops out from under you, or it grows into a huge wave and pummels you into the ground. When that happens, you paddle back out, get back up on the board, and keep surfing.
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Eat Your Medicine – Food as Pharmacology
What you put at the end of your fork is more powerful medicine than anything you will find at the bottom of a pill bottle. Food is the most powerful medicine available to heal chronic diseases, which will account for over 50 million deaths and cost the global economy $47 trillion by 2030. All you need to do is eat your medicine and think of your grocery store as your pharmacy.
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How to Raise Healthier, Smarter and Fitter Children
Schools have become hazardous zones for our kids’ health, full of empty calories, junk food, and stripped-down physical education programs that are cultivating a nation of fatter, dumber, and more aggressive kids. In the film, “The Social Network,” Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) tells his friend that there are more geniuses in China than there are people in the United States. The Cold War gave us the missile gap, but now we have something much more threatening to our future and our children’s future – the achievement gap.
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Sweet Dreams: How to Sleep Better, Lose Weight and Live Longer
You can lose weight without changing what you eat or doing one minute of exercise! It’s a bold claim. And don’t get me wrong: Nutrition and exercise are important! But there’s another key to weight loss – and most people don’t even know about it. It’s sleep. In fact, besides eating whole foods and moving your body, getting enough sleep is the most important thing you can do for your health.
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How Diabetes and Obesity Are Ravaging America Today
Do you feel exhausted all the time? Are you overweight? Do you have too much belly fat? Do you suffer from diabetes, have serious blood sugar and insulin imbalances, monitor your blood sugar all the time, or have elevated cholesterol, blood pressure, and triglyceride levels? Do you fear for your health? If so, you may find this remarkable story of one of my patient’s very interesting.
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How Eating at Home Can Save Your Life
The slow insidious displacement of home cooked and communally shared family meals by the industrial food system has fattened our nation and weakened our family ties. In 1900, 2 percent of meals were eaten outside the home. In 2010, 50 percent were eaten away from home and one in five breakfasts is from MacDonald’s. Most family meals happen about three times a week, last less than 20 minutes and are spent watching television or texting while each family member eats a different microwaved “food.”
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The articles written by guest contributors are the sole responsibility of the individual writers in terms of factual accuracy and opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher of this blog.
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