Making Food Healthier

February 9, 2009

Interview with John La Puma, author of Chef MD's Big Book of Culinary Medicine: A Food Lover's Road Map to Losing Weight, Preventing Disease, and Getting Really Healthy

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Mike Carruthers:
Some scientific research has been done on the food we eat and how we cook it and how that impacts our health - the results are really interesting.

John La Puma:
If you marinate meats or chicken or fish and then grill it (at high temperature) you actually reduce the cancer-causing chemicals by 77% just with that marinade.

John LaPuma, M.D.

John La Puma M.D. and author of the book Chef MD's Big Book of Culinary Medicine: A Food Lover's Road Map to Losing Weight, Preventing Disease, and Getting Really Healthy

And the addition of rosemary - the herb rosemary - reduces the HCA's even further. If you add black pepper to your curry you absorb more turmeric from that curry (it makes the curry yellow) and the turmeric has a chemical in it called cercumin that has been shown to reduce Alzheimer's risk as well as stabilize ulcerative colitis. And in some people, it actually reduces arthritis symptoms but you don't absorb the turmeric in cercumin unless you have a little bit of black pepper.

Dr. La Puma says you should add avocado to your spinach salad.

Because you absorb seven times the lutein from the spinach (the eye protecting anti-oxidant that fights against cataract development in acute macular degeneration) than if there's no avocado. And same thing - a full fat salad dressing instead of a non-fat or low fat because they're not as well absorbable with low fat dressing or non-fat dressing.

Tomorrow changing the way you cook pizza and pasta can make it more healthy.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.