News

May 31, 2022

Medically Tailored Meals debut in NC this month!

Medically Tailored Meals (MTM) is a relatively new concept, but they are becoming a reality this month in North Carolina. In 2018, Dr. Seth Berkowitz from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill found that when patients with diabetes were given a diet tailored to their diagnosis, their food insecurity and their hyperglycemia decreased.1 These individualized meal… 

May 31, 2022

Summer Reading

Learning about food from the perspective of a medical provider has always interested me. How can we interact with our food in such a way that we can support healthy biochemical pathways in our bodies? Physician and author Daphne Miller asks similar questions in her book Farmacology: Total Health From the Ground Up. I thought this… 

May 31, 2022

Reading palms, assessing health

When Guiseppe Valacchi first demonstrated the Nu Skin Carotenoid Hand Scanner, I was intrigued. In less than a minute, without drawing blood or swabbing saliva, he had given me a carotenoid “score” that could be correlated to my personal intake of fruits and vegetables. My mind was racing. How did it work? Was it accurate?… 

Apr 29, 2022

E-news Launch!

The first issue of FRESH Rx, the PhytoMedicine e-newsletter hit inboxes April 27. The e-news will be a place to learn what is new in the world of nutrition in health and how that pertains to healthcare providers and the general patient population. Extension associate, Cheri Granillo, is the content developer and curator of the newsletter.… 

Apr 29, 2022

What is Precision Nutrition?

You are what you eat, but who you are can also affect how your body uses what you eat. General recommendations, as we’ve been accustomed to, are made for populations of people, but the future of nutrition in medicine may look more like putting a puzzle together. Research is showing that there can be significant… 

Apr 29, 2022

Have you heard of Med Instead of Meds?

It’s easy for patients to get overwhelmed as they make grocery selections, but it’s just as easy to commit to a few specific areas of evidence-based dietary change that have demonstrated improvements in chronic disease.  The Mediterranean Diet is one of the best studied nutritional approaches and easiest for lifestyle adaptation.1 A few tenets of the… 

Jul 28, 2020

PhytoRx Launches

On July 14, the first patient at HealthReach Community Clinic in Mooresville, NC was handed a PhytoRx, a prescription for fruits and vegetables that contain specific health-promoting compounds. The prescription lasts for 3 months and will be filled at Feed NC, a food distribution center in Mooresville. In addition, the patient will receive coaching on… 

Sep 10, 2019

Carotenoid Screenings

“Would you like to scan your hand?” It’s an engaging question. Within a few seconds, a small lab instrument uses Raman spectroscopy to scan the palm of the hand, measuring the skin carotenoid score. The skin carotenoid score is a non-invasive biomarker that can indicate the amount of fruits and vegetables consumed. (If you’d like… 

Jun 15, 2019

Festival Fun for Phytomedicine

We took the Phytomedicine message on the road to the NC Blueberry Festival in Burgaw, NC. Folks who visited our tent were happy to receive a paper fan to cool off on a typically warm Eastern NC Saturday in June. The fan, shaped and printed to look like a giant blueberry, included phyto-facts about blueberries…