Why Korean food is so healthy

Look at this table. My wife and I each ordered soup. If you order soup, or anything at a Korean restaurant, they will give you your soup, some rice, and anywhere from 5-20 little side dishes of blanched and/or pickled vegetables. All these little white dishes were free and included in the price of the soup.

So why is it healthy? For one thing, there is a great variety of foods. For another, they are easy to digest (either cooked or pickled). For another, it is served with white rice (which is the easiest to digest) and tea (facilitates digestions and speeds metabolism). Another side-effect of having all these side dishes is that it fills you up and you don't eat too much meat.

This pic was taken in Seoul, but you can find this type of spread at many restaurants in Chicago and many other cities in Ameerica.

Sugar Substitutes (excerpt from The Asian Diet)

The following excerpt is from The Asian Diet: Simple secrets for eating right, losing weight, and being well

Sugar substitutes

Sweetening is a multi-billion dollar industry. Money and politics have played shady roles in bringing these products to the market, and now they are everywhere. There are a few ways to sweeten things naturally. They are: pure cane sugar, raw sugar, beet sugar, honey, stevia, agave nectar, maple syrup, molassas, rapadura, brown rice syrup, barley malt syrup, sucanat, turbinado sugar, date sugar, and fruit juice. All of these are fine and should be taken in moderation.

Most of the foods we eat have at least some sweetness to them. We have become desensitized to this because we have so much concentrated sugar and sweets all the time. Eating ever-sweeter and sweeter foods just takes us further away from being able to enjoy the natural sweetness of natural foods. This is like looking directly into a spotlight for 20 minutes and then trying to appreciate candlelight. If we take a break from the artificially-super-sweet products, we can regain the appreciation of the flavors of natural foods.

Too much sweet flavor engenders dampness and phlegm in the body and taxes the digestion- regardless of its source. But the artificial sweeteners are much worse. We have evolved eating sugar. Our DNA has seen glucose for thousands of years. We have never seen high fructose corn syrup, aspartame, splenda, etc. They are unnatural and I believe they are contributing to the rise of diabetes in this country. Our pancreas knows how to handle glucose, but it doesn't know what to do with these new substances. I believe that this disturbs our insulin production. But there is big money in selling us sweeteners and they keep getting through to us.

High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)
This is the cheapest way to get sweetness into your food products; and it has become ubiquitous. It is found in everything from candy and soda, to bread, yogurt, pizza, crackers, ketchup, and much more. Remember, too much of any one thing is not a good thing. Having HFCS in so many foods means that we are being overdosed on corn and fructose. It comes from corn that is genetically modified to increase its sweetness, and prepared with genetically modified enzymes. Plus, glucose is metabolized by every individual cell, fructose is only processed in the liver. This puts additional strain on our livers.

Aspartame (aka Nutrasweet, Equal)
This is what goes into Diet Coke, Diet Pepsi, and just about every other thing that is sweet and diet. It is 180 times as sweet as sugar. Many people believe they are helping their bodies by using this instead of sugar. They are dead wrong. Recent studies have shown that people using this sugar substitute experience an increased appetite! The use of diet sodas is associated with weight gain, not weight loss. Why then would you use it if you are trying to lose weight?

The fact that is has no calories just means that we cannot break it down. It passes through the body, but that does not mean it has no impact. It interacts with many other types of cells and structures as this chemical makes it way through our bodies. The FDA has received more complaints about aspartame than any other substance.

There were many objections from the scientific community when Aspartame was seeking approval from the FDA. It breaks down into formaldehyde in the body (a known carcinogen) and is associated with headaches/migraines, brain tumors, brain lesions, memory loss, arthritis, hypertension, abdominal pain, and lymphomas. But there was enough profit to be made that Donald Rumsfeld (the then-Chairman of Searle, the company that held the patent on aspartame) was able to get it approved. The panel voted to ban the substance, but this vote was overturned through some very shady politics. There was too much money to be made. And now aspartame is in over 5000 food products in the US. I know some people who have 3-4 diet sodas a day and think they are being healthy. Microdose by microdose, they are poisoning themselves. Stay away from this one.

Equal has another ingredient that distinguishes it from Nutrasweet. It is phenylalanine, which can cause seizures at high doses.


Sucralose (Splenda)
This is found in over 3,500 food products in the US. The makers, Johnson and Johnson, claimed that it is made of sugar, but they are now being sued because that is not true. It has chlorine in it. Some other foods have naturally-occurring chlorine and that's OK because it also has other compounds to neutralize its effects; but man-made chlorine is extremely toxic and can kill. Unlike aspartame, this does not all travel through the body. As much as 15-27% of ingested sucralose is absorbed. How it behaves once absorbed is not yet understood. Anecdotal reports associate sucralose with headaches, urinary problems, fatigue, digestive disorders, and other ailments.

Saccharine (sweet 'n' low)
The first of the artificial sweeteners to bypass public safety. There has been opposition to this product for over 100 years. It is made from anthranilic acid, nitrous acid, sulfur dioxide, chlorine, and ammonia. You would never eat any of these things if you had a choice. It is suspected of causing cancer, but it is still on the market.

A general rule is: If it is made by god, it's probably ok. If it is made by man, it is suspect. (this does not apply to toadstools, arsenic, mercury, and other known, natural poisons). The natural sweeteners are always better than the artificial ones.


Diabetics often feel they have no choice but to ingest these sugar substitutes. But if you correct your diet, you can stabilize your blood sugar and be better able to tolerate the occasional encounter with sugar. Natural sugars are not so bad. Adopting a more plant-based, whole foods diet can reduce or eliminate the need for diabetic medication. But DO NOT alter your medication based on information in this book. Monitor your sugars and, when and if appropriate, discuss tapering your medication with your physician.

The government does not want you to quit smoking

* Abstract:In Chicago, for each pack of Malrboro's sold, Phillip Morris gets 25 cents and the government gets $6. When I get sick, the state sues Phillip Morris and pockets the award. They win on the sale and on the sickness.*


I have a problem with States suing tobacco manufacturers for the health problems that smoking causes. If they are so harmful, ban them completely. If we are going to leave it for people to make their own choice, then let them bear the consequences. It has been long enough now that tht surgeon general has told the world that smoking is bad for your health. If you choose to ignore that warning, you are stupid, self-destructive, and responsible for the outcome.

Why don't we sue the government for allowing this product to be sold? Until this summer, tobacco companies have been given a lot of leeway in how they adulterate their product to make it more addictive. And when I get cancer, why should Phillip Morris have to pay the state and not me? The state wins both ways.

In Chicago, where I live, a pack of cigs is about $8 (very high for the country, I know). But in the Carribean, you can still buy a pack for $2. Consider the cost of growing the product, processing it, packaging it, shipping and advertising it. From that $2, they might see $0.25. Along the way, in Illinois, taxes are levied on this pack for upwards of $6. What does the state have to do to get that $6? They have to print up a stamp and put it on the pack. That's it. No production costs, distribution, etc. They are making 24x the profit with none of the expenditure and none of the liability. Why would they want to dry up this revenue stream?

They claim to need the funds awarded from smoking lawsuits to provide the medical care to those afflicted with smoking-related disease; but they only have to pay for those who do not have their own insurance. And, as any doctor will tell you, medicaid does not pay well at all. And as medicaid patients will tell you, many doctors won't take medicaid.

The government needs to start promoting health, not just making money off those who want to poison us and those who want to sell us the remedy (chemo, radiation, drugs, etc). If the government was paying for everyone's health care, they would not want people smoking. Right now, they get a lot of money from it. This is another reason why we need to restructure our health care system so that government is on the side of the people and is invested in their well-being.

Health care debate misses the point.

There is all this talk these days about health care, but I think we are overlooking something very important in the discussion. People say we pay twice as much for our health care as other countries but have more sickness. People argue and worry about who will pay for all this sickness. These are not the right questions. The right question is: Why are we getting so sick?

We need a national campaign to get people healthy. If there is anything that the Nazi's taught us, it is that a good propaganda campaign can motivate the masses. As it is now, the government has no stake in our health. Right now there is a lot of money to be made (and being made) from the population being ill. In fact, the government has been complicit in our becoming unhealthy. By relaxing environmental protections, blocking proper labeling of food, allowing drug companies to do their own drug testing, promoting GMO's, putting dairy as a food group on the food pyramid when it has no place in an adult's diet, etc. There is money to be saved by jeopardizing the public health, and there is money to be made by selling sick people medicines. Big industry lobbies for the ability to poison us, then big pharma gets to sell us the remedy. If the state is giving away the remedies, they will want us to not get sick.

In China, they have a state supported health care system. I am not arguing that they have the best system (not necessarily even better than ours), but it raises an interesting point. When the government is paying for your health care, it is their best interest for everybody to stay healthy. This is why many Asian employers (in Asian and America) have their employee exercise on company time, why people in China are encouraged to go to the doctor at the first sign of illness. With our system, there is too much money to be made from us being sick. So we have developed this for-profit system to its breaking point. We now have too many people with too much illness for the system to support.

Diabetes is not a normal part of aging. Nor is cancer, high blood pressure, or any of the myriad malfunctions that are epidemic in our seniors (and younger). If the government is paying for the remedy, then they are on the right side of the equation; working for the benefit of the people. Lindsay Graham says that we don't want the government standing between us and our providers. Right now I have blue cross standing between me and my providers. If we have to have some type of middleman, is it better to have one who is NOT allowed to make money, or one who's sole purpose is TO MAKE MONEY. Now I concede that the government is not always the most efficient machine (think of road crews where one man in deigging a hole and four men are paid to watch him), so there will need to be good oversight of the program. But I don't hear congresspeople complaining about the government running their health plans. I do hear most Americans complaining about their health plans though.

90% of your medical expenses will be incurred in your last 10 years of life. It does not have to be this way. To control costs, we do need to make the system more efficient, but we also need to reduce demand. If we can unburdon the system, we will all get better care and need less of it. We need to get ourselves healthy again. The government should help.

I believe that health care should be a right and be provided by the government. The government is of the people; a healthy government needs a healthy populus. One necessary component of the system is that doctors should be well paid. Doctors, nurses, medical techs, and especially acupuncturists should be well compensated so that these professions can attract the brightest minds. Medicine need not be a million dollar a year profession, but it should pay well.

Another problem with the system is insurance. A graduating obstetrician in Illinois pays over $100,000 for malpractice a year. Hospital costs are inflated by the outrageous insurance costs they incur. This is from unrestricted court awards. Doctors should be expected to try their best to help. No medical person can ever guarantee a good result. If they are not overburdened, and if they went into medicine for the right reasons, they will do their best for every patient. If they do that, they do not deserve to be sued if things do not turn out well for the patient.

Chinese medicine is suited for treating and preventing disease in a cost-effective manner. Whatever health care plan we adopt should include chinese medicine and its preventative techniques.

Another opinion on why calories don't matter

A good friend of mine sent me this link from NewScientist.com. This article is about how caloric science is flawed and it brings up some good points that were not in my book. If I had read this prior to writing my book, I would have included some of these arguments.

Stats from this year's sidewalk sale.

We gave 130 free treatments over the past 2 days at the Wilmette Sidewalk sale. Of those, 100% agreed that acupuncture did not hurt, and 90% stated that it helped their problem. I love being able to help people for a living. We also sold several books and raised awareness of The Asian Diet. Again, hoping to help more people.

Next free acupuncture will be at the Taste of Wilmette, which is usually in October or November. Stay tuned.

And a shout out to my wife, who had to run the office by herself today. She rocked, seeing patients back to back to back all day, and never got more than 10 minutes behind schedule.

My article picked up by another magazine

My article was picked up by The Healing Path: The Colorado Region’s Premier Comprehensive Guide to Holistic Health and Sustainable Lifestyles.

Check it out if you have not already read this summary of my book.