Mache Seibel MD

Every day, 1 in 4 Americans visits a fast food restaurant. McDonald’s alone feeds nearly 50 million people a day, more than the population of Spain. According to a recent survey by the Technomic food research firm, although 47% of consumers want more healthy restaurant options, only 23% actually order healthy food when dining out. The reason – down deep they already know it isn’t healthy.

Diabetes leads to many health problems. It’s caused when a person’s blood sugar levels are too high because their body does not make or cannot use insulin to keep blood sugar (glucose) levels in the normal range. The Hgb A1C is another blood test and it tells if a persons blood sugar levels have been elevated over the past 3 months. Do you have diabetes or pre-diabetes (your blood sugar or Hgb A1C level is higher than normal but not yet abnormal enough to be diagnosed as having diabetes)? If you find that you have pre diabetes, you can get your blood sugar back to normal just by changing your lifestyle. According to the American Diabetes Association, these are the symptoms of diabetes:

When I hear Louis Armstrong sing What A Wonderful World, my body automatically relaxes. Now studies are proving it’s more than a feeling. Music can be a powerful tool to lower stress and high blood pressure. According to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), 85% of primary care visits are attributed in part to stress. So it’s pretty exciting that stress symptoms such as high blood pressure, pain and maybe even hot flashes can be improved with music.

In the United States, October 31st is a night of costumes and candy. Houses decorate for Halloween, households purchase bags of candy, and neighborhoods across America will be flooded with 41 million trick-or-treaters between ages 5 and 14 according to the US Census Bureau. Costumed children will joyously fill their coiffeurs with “Halloween gold.” Of course I’m talking about candy and at the center of the Halloween excitement is about $6.86 billion worth of purchased decorations, costumes and candy according to a 2011 survey by the National Retail Federation. The same survey estimates that the average American family spends $72.31 on these items and according to MSN Money, about 7 of 10 families will participate.

Most of my menopause patients think bioidentical estrogens are safer, more natural and better in every way than non-bioidentical estrogens. Women in book clubs and boardrooms keep hearing bioidentical estrogens have all the benefits of pharmaceutical estrogen with none of the associated risks.

But is that really true? Read on.

A number of years ago my mother had a group of calcium specks on her mammogram that turned out to be an early breast cancer. We were all very lucky.…

Hunger is no longer a third world problem. Wealthy countries are facing the fact that an ever-growing number of their citizens are food insecure. Imagine opening your refrigerator and finding it empty. Imagine opening your kitchen cabinets and having no food. Sadly, that’s the reality for 50 million United States citizens; they don’t know where their next meal is coming from. That includes over 15 million children and 3 million senior citizens. In Canada, food banks are assisting more people than ever before – 867,948 in March 2010 in a country of roughly 35 million. Thirty-eight percent of these are children.