The best medicine doctors don’t tell you about | USA Today
February 24, 2017
By Shilpa Ravella
Food choices are the most important cause of poor health in the United States. But food-as-medicine is still fringe medicine, a practice more likely to be found at a few specialized clinics rather than in the halls of academic medical institutions.
(more...)Food doesn’t have to wear makeup | Slate
July 7, 2016
By Shilpa Ravella
When it comes to food coloring, why should we have to prove just exactly how and why the substance causes a negative effect on the people who consume it before we can ban it? If this were a necessary or meaningful food ingredient in any way, sure, that would be a reasonable standard. But food coloring has no nutritional value. Why are we risking it?
(more...)When the hospital serves McDonald’s | The Atlantic
February 9, 2016
By Shilpa Ravella
There was a time when doctors walked through hospital wards with a cigarette in one hand and a stethoscope in the other. Once the health dangers of smoking became apparent, though, hospitals were some of the first institutions to ban smoking in public spaces, and other places followed suit. Less than a century ago, it was unheard of to forbid smoking on hospital grounds; today, it’s unheard of to find cigarettes for sale in a hospital gift shop. As Lesser wrote in a 2013 editorial for the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics, “offsets from selling foods that clearly damage human health would, likewise, be indefensible … Serving definitively unhealthful food items to patients, visitors, and staff is simply unethical.”
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