India

I will be traveling to India for the month of December, 2009. Although I have mixed emotions about the trip, the overarching feeling is of excitement and gratitude. I'll be traveling with my Aunt Faith and staying at an orphanage in Jharsaguda. My mission is threefold, to bring gifts and offerings to the children, to share my gifts of teaching, yoga, and nurturing, and to soak in some of the culture that has been so influential and dear to me since I began my yoga practice seven years ago. Wish me luck!

In Defense of Food

Food. There's plenty of it around, and we all love to eat it. So why should anyone need to defend it?

Because most of what we're consuming today is not food, and how we're consuming it -- in the car, in front of the TV, and increasingly alone -- is not really eating. Instead of food, we're consuming "edible foodlike substances" -- no longer the products of nature but of food science. Many of them come packaged with health claims that should be our first clue they are anything but healthy. In the so-called Western diet, food has been replaced by nutrients, and common sense by confusion. The result is the more we worry about nutrition, the less healthy we seem to become.

But if real food -- the sort of food our great grandmothers would recognize as food -- stands in need of defense, from whom does it need defending? From the food industry on one side and nutritional science on the other. Both stand to gain much from widespread confusion about what to eat, a question that for most of human history people have been able to answer without expert help. Yet the professionalization of eating has failed to make Americans healthier. Thirty years of official nutritional advice has only made us sicker and fatter while ruining countless numbers of meals.

What we should eat comes down to seven simple but liberating words: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Eat in a way that is informed by the traditions and ecology of real, well-grown, unprocessed food. Our personal health cannot be divorced from the health of the food chains of which we are part.

-Michael Pollan

Alma mater takes steps in disease tracking!

April 21, 2009
Researchers have long understood that having certain diseases, like diabetes, increases your risk for having other diseases, like high blood pressure.

Now a team of researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University has created a map that visually shows these “disease associations” in a sample of more than 30 million people. Built from data included in insurance claims, the map—called the Phenotypic Disease Network—is the largest disease-network database ever built.

The map has been made publicly available at an interactive website (http://hudine.neu.edu), which even allows site visitors to compare the strength of specific disease associations shown by men and women of different ethnicities.

Experts believe that studying linkages like these could greatly expand medical knowledge. According to study co-author Albert-László Barabási, distinguished professor of physics and director of Northeastern’s Center for Complex Network Research, examining disease associations may be “a viable path toward elucidating the origins of specific diseases.”

“Mapping disease networks using digital medical records dramatically changes the way we understand diseases in general,” said César Hidalgo, researcher at Harvard University’s Center for International Development and lead author of the study. “Disease networks can also be used to inform patients of diseases they may be at risk of developing. This opens new potential applications and opportunities for digital medical records.”

The team’s findings have been published in a paper titled “A dynamic network approach for the study of human phenotypes,” which appears in the current issue of the journal “Public Library of Science (PLoS) Computational Biology.”

Among other results, the researchers also found that patients affected by diseases connected to other diseases tend to die sooner than those affected by less-connected diseases.

Endangered Primary Care Docs

The Division of Family Medicine at UCSD is part of the larger Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine -- a group of about 90 faculty whose missions include the delivery of primary health care, the study of population health, social determinants of health, outcomes produced by our health care system, and methods of preventing health problems from occurring in the first place.


Gene Kallenberg
Our Division of Family Medicine operates three offices, cares for about 25,000 patients, teaches medical students, and along with our affiliate programs, is responsible for all the civilian family physician training in San Diego.

From where I sit we seem to be poised on threshold of reforming health care and finding a solution to covering all uninsured Americans. I sincerely hope President Obama and our Congress can accomplish this goal as it continues to be highly embarrassing to be the only developed country -- some would say the most developed country -- without the ability to provide basic health care to all its citizens.

Click on link at top to view full article from voiceofsandiego.org

Associations between self-reported diet and depressive symptoms

This study tests the associations between vegetable/fruit intake, frequency of fast food intake, degree of depressive symptoms, and diagnosed depression among Latina women in South East San Diego. Analyses will control for important covariates such as income, age, acculturation, and marital status. These covariates were chosen because they have been shown to be related to depression. Low income was associated with more depression verses higher income (Lorant et al, 2003), older age groups were shown to have more depression compared to younger ages (NIMH, 2008), the more acculturated to the U.S. are shown to be more likely to be depressed than their less acculturated counter parts (Aldrich & Variyam, 2000), and being single has been shown to be a risk factor for depression (Kessler et al, 2003).
Results soon to come...

Thomas Edison Speaks......

"The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest her or his patients in the care of the human frame, in proper diet, and in the cause and prevention of disease".

Global Benefit

www.globalbenefit.org This is my family's project. Because 1.1 billion people in the world do not have access to clean drinking water. Build a well!