ChefMD: John La Puma, MD

I just came across the website of Dr. John La Puma, also known as ChefMD. He is an internal medicine physician and a professionally trained chef who has a weekly show on Lifetime TV. He also has written a cookbook called ChefMD's Big Book of Culinary Medicine and has a comprehensive website featuring healthy recipes for the most common health conditions. Here is an excerpt from the website:

• Use a full fat salad dressing, not a low-fat/no-fat dressing. A bit of healthy fat (avocado, walnuts, almonds, olives) in your salad lets you absorb 7 times more lutein than with a no or low-fat dressing. Lutein helps to prevent macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in people over age 65.
• Buy organic when it really matters: when the skin is thin. Over 80% of apples, pears, peaches, potatoes and berries sampled contain artificial chemical pesticides. On the thick side, less than 8 percent of avocados, mangos, pineapples and frozen sweet corn contain them—and onions contain none! Exposure to pesticides worsens asthma and damages the immune system.
• Drink coffee and be happy, as long as you're drinking filtered coffee. Two cups of filtered coffee daily can reduce colon cancer by 25%, diabetes risk by 30%, gallstone risk by 40%, and liver cirrhosis risk by 80%. But espresso and French Press can raise your LDL cholesterol by 8% in a month, because the coffee's chemical cafestol stays inside.

I love a doc who touts the benefits of eating fat and drinking coffee! Check out his gluten-free quiz to see if you have symptoms that may warrant further testing for celiac disease, or just if you should avoid gluten. Reading the recipes on the site, I'm hoping he opens a chain of restaurants!

www.drjohnlapuma.com/
Gluten-free quiz