About ten weeks ago, after watching the above videocast, I stopped consuming peanut butter. Ever since my discharge from the service in 1972, I’ve been eating a peanut butter sandwich for lunch 5 or 6 times a week.

I’ve known for 16 years that too much omega-6 can hammer ones immune system. I used to consume quite a bit of mayonnaise and cold pressed soy oil in the form of vegetable dip and salad dressing. A skin ulcer on my shin eventually persuaded me to abandon those sources of omega-6.

While eliminating those sources of omega-6 was helpful, I still must have been consuming too much because over the past decade I’ve gradually lost strength and flexibility in my limbs. In addition, I’ve experienced considerable pain in my shoulders and legs. However, since deleting peanut butter from my daily regimen, there’s been dramatic improvement. I can now get up from a chair without thinking about it. If progress continues, I should be able to run freely in a month or so.

What is so complicated about: Eat fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains and small servings of lean meat if you want to?

Who needs an algorithm for that? Who does not have access to that information if he or she wants to know? I am not discounting the problems of “food deserts” and such, but I think the First Lady is on the right path with the idea of providing support to harried parents as a part of the mix.

If someone needs NuVal to decide what to eat, we have a long way to go in basic education.

I am glad to hear that you appear to run an honorable practice, but I get the same advice from my MD and insurance covers it. I think ND’s can be of help to people who are reluctant to seek medical treatment by steering them there when necessary. If you are able to get people with borderline bp to dump the supplements and adopt healthy food in proper amounts, I applaud you and you are probably ahead of the MD’s on that.

Thanks for the response.

I am a pretty good amateur carpenter, and have a lot of very good tools- but no one tool is right for every job. I would say the tools for helping people eat better are like that. NuVal, for instance, will very reliably guide you to the most nutritious loaf of bread, or box of cereal, or pasta sauce…or whatever, but won’t tell you how much of each to eat, or how best to combine them. That task is addressed by MyPyramid, and the Dietary Guidelines (and by Dr. Nestle, among others), with which NuVal is fully compatible. Also, the NuVal program- in stores (note: it is posted on supermarket shelves, so is NOT dependent on the manufacturers who sell junk food- we score their products with no need for their involvement or consent) and on the web comes with education about how to use the tool- including what it DOESN’T do. It would be the height of folly to think that any one tool could do every part of a complex job, and getting people to eat better proves to be a complex job.

That said, researchers at Harvard will soon be publishing research that shows when NuVal scores are aggregated to the diet level- in 110,000 people- they predicted all-cause mortality and total chronic disease slightly better than USDA’s Healthy Eating Index-2005. So there is clearly a link between nutritious foods, and how they add up to make a more healthful diet. But both the individual choices, and the pattern of those choices, have to be ‘right’ for there to be a true health benefit.

Finally, we are currently in advanced testing of an ONQI algorithm derivative to score the quality of the overall diet. It includes the initial measure of the overall nutritional quality of individual foods used in NuVal, but then adjusts for variety, balance, and distribution- using the Dietary Guidelines and reference ranges from the Institute of Medicine. We will be testing its performance against health outcomes in large cohort studies, and anticipate it being used in an interactive Web environment in particular. It could be used to track your diet over time, and with each addition of a day’s intake, learn immediately if the overall diet quality is rising, falling, or stable.

I hope this fully addresses your question, Jenna- thanks for the interest.

All best,
DK