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My Latest Column

08/18/08 Environmental cues affect how much you eat

  • Next time you sit down to dinner, dim the lights - but not too much. Both bright light and dim light may make you eat more. Watch the background music, too. If it's too fast, you'll eat fast, and therefore more; too slow and you'll keep eating. And think small for plates - a portion that looks skimpy on a dinner plate looks ample on a salad plate.

My Last Five Columns

06/23/08 Hip surgery hype

  • An alternative to hip replacement is popular with the young and active, but is it worth the risks? Jeff Stewart, 43, a house painter and former high school and college athlete, remembers the exact moment his hip gave out: Valentine's Day 2006.

 05/26/08 'Fighting' isn't how you deal with cancer

  • Fight, Ted, fight!" This mantra, chanted over and over to give moral support to Senator Edward M. Kennedy as he faces brain cancer, drives me nuts. The caring behind it is wonderful; the metaphor is not. Cancer is not a football game. It's more of an involuntary dance with a partner you didn't choose, more judo than battlefield warfare.

 05/12/08 Time to cleanse? Think again

  • To read the Internet ads, you'd think that our bodies were awash in "toxins" - usually unspecified - and that we should therefore go to dramatic lengths, like "colon cleansing" and chelation to get rid of all this bad stuff. Don't believe it. Or, to put it a bit more gently, don't risk your health or your pocketbook on programs that promise to "detoxify" you, without at least doing lots of homework first. Like asking exactly what these supposed "toxins" are. And thinking twice - or 20 times - before undergoing chelation, a procedure that uses powerful drugs to rid your body of heavy metals such as mercury or lead.

 04/14/08 Women athletes win equal time on injury list

  • A week from today, 10,375 women - and 14,737 men - are expected to run in the Boston Marathon. The presence of so many women - the most ever entered in the historic race - is a sure sign of how far women have come in athletics. So is this: In 1972, before Title IX, the law that spurred women's athletics, fewer than 300,000 high school girls played sports, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Now it's more than 3 million.

 3/17/08 A sinus sufferer chooses surgery

  • After years of suffering from chronically inflamed and infected sinuses, I finally decided I'd had enough. I chose to do what 500,000 other Americans do every year - have sinus surgery. It wasn't an easy decision. I had to balance my need for a fix against my fear of surgery and research that raised questions about the procedure.