Click here to go to my current active blog. (I am no longer posting on this site.)

I’ve just published a post on food allergies and intolerances at my new blog home, Greens and Berries.

I’ve moved about one-third of Dietitian Online’s content to its new blog home. Please come visit me at Greens and Berries. I’ll be moving the rest of the content during the next few days. If you can’t find what you’re looking for on the new site, it will still be here.

I’ve tried to keep the same simple look for the new blog but there are a few new features I’d like to tell you about.

1. New name: Greens & Berries

2. New address (URL): This means that you if you’ve been using Google Reader, Bloglines or another blog reader, you will need to update your subscription.

3. A separate page, Archives, will list all published posts. These will be organized by category, title and month.

4. Another distinct page, Links, will list my favourite websites and blogs. These, too, will be organized into groups to aid your navigation.

Oh, you were wondering about the new blog name. It is a big change, I agree. Naming is one of the most challenging tasks in setting up a new blog. But I really wanted to have food, glorious food in the title. Also, I wanted something with a gardening connection because I also blog about my edible balcony garden, which is an experiment in year-round gardening, and I may eventually move that blog to the same site. And finally, I hope that soon there will be many dietitians online with their own blogs.

I’m in the process of moving the contents of this blog to a new hosting service so I won’t be posting anything new for a couple of days.  The new blog will look and feel much like this one but the writing and publishing features will make it easier for me to post, store and retrieve information. I hope, in turn, you will find it easier to read, seek and find. 

Addendum: more details, my new address, and tips for navigating the new site to come later this week.

I’ve added a new page, which you can access by clicking on the text next to the About pages. (All these pages are at the top, above the image header.)

Dietitians’ Practice Resources will be a never-completed work-in-progress, but it’s my attempt to collect, categorize, find,  retrieve, and of course, share resources using the minimum amount of time, space, and mental effort (as in trying to recall where I put that classic resource on subjective global assessment).

Here’s a link to an article that connects two of my favourite blogging topics that I usually write about separately: nutrition for stroke prevention and local eating. 

Eat locally, eat healthfully

Earlier today I provided some last-minute nutrition counseling to a stroke patient and wife as “they were heading out the door.”  OK, I admit for effect I’m exaggerating the time pressure, but this morning I really did get one of those typical phone calls from the nursing unit: “Mr. X is being discharged today and he and his wife want to talk to a dietitian before he goes home.” I immediately thought, “This is the perfect opportunity to test some of the education checklists and resources we are developing and compiling for our stroke program.” So, rather than use our department’s heart-health focused materials that, although very good, may not be completely up-to-date and also are not targeted to stroke patients, I decided to put together a customized nutrition and secondary stroke prevention resource package.

First, I needed to determine if the the patient and his wife were competent Internet-users. After confirming they were,  I compiled the resources listed below and wrote a brief covering page explaining how to use them and listing all the web links.

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1. Preventing another stroke: Lifestyle changes (Section 7 in the Heart & Stroke Foundation’s  information guide Let’s Talk About Stroke).
   I am going to reproduce the excerpt on eating so we know what the Heart & Stroke Foundation is recommending in one of their widely-used publications [I have bolded words for emphasis]:

The basic rule of eating a healthy diet is to follow Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating. The Food Guide recommends that you:
- Enjoy a variety of foods
- Emphasize cereals, breads, other grain products, vegetables and fruit
- Choose lower fat dairy products, leaner meats, and foods prepared with little or no fat
- Limit the amount of fat and trans fats in your diet
- Limit your use of salt, alcohol and caffeine

No more than 20% to 35% of your total daily calories should come from fat. This is about 45 to 75 grams of fat per day for a woman, and about 60 to 105 grams per day for a man. Whenever possible, eat polyunsaturated fat, especially omega-3 fatty acids and monounsaturated fats. Reduce the amount of saturated and trans fat in your diet.

Homocysteine is a substance that is produced naturally in the body as the body breaks down protein for fuel. In some studies, a high level of homocysteine in the blood was associated with a higher risk of stroke. Folic acid (a B vitamin) can help to keep homocysteine levels in the blood low. However, doctors still do not know if taking folic acid or redcuing homocysteine levels also reduces the risk of stroke (pages 24-5).

You may already know why I highlighted selected words in this excerpt. These are  key concepts, perhaps not even all of them, that needed to be explained and illustrated with practical examples of real food and simple, visual rules-of-thumb for portion sizes. As good as it is,  Let’s Talk About Stroke needs to be supplemented with more how-to advice.  And this is where resources #2 - 5  are so valuable in providing practical, up-to-date tips and more detailed explanations. 

2. Heart & Stroke Foundation home page (this page changes monthly and always contains nutrition tips and links to other nutrition content on the site)

3. Health Check (Heart & Stroke Foundation’s food information program)

4. EATracker

5. Dial-A-Dietitian

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I must also state that in a ten-minute, bed-side counseling session with a patient and family member eager to go home I obviously was not able to cover everything in-depth.  I also provided information on how they could access nutrition counseling through their local hospital, particularly because the patient is hypercholesterolemic, had a mild stroke that left him with minimal or no deficits and is hightly motivated to make lifestyle changes to prevent a second stroke.

This week, thanks to Alex Steffan’s Worldchanging post, I discovered a real gem to help broaden and deepen my nutrition knowledge and take it well beyond its usual geographic and professional interest boundaries. The Weblog is: 

Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

A good place to begin exploring the blog is on the About page. Then, as dietitians, we probably will want to check out the posts in the Nutrition, Organic Agriculture, Cooking, Fruits & Nuts,  Vegetables, and Nibbles.

I’m working my way through the nutrition archive today. Here is a sample of well-written posts on various topics: 

Food is good
Kids eat more if fruit and veg are home-grown
School gardens
Heirlooms are better for you

Hat-tip and a huge thank you to Gillian for introducing me to the Open Medicine (OM) Journal and Blog.

The blog writer and associate editor of the journal is Dean Giustini, a medical librarian at the University of British Columbia.

Here is an excerpt from one of Dean’s introductory blog posts, which gives me several reasons to keep reading today and revisit the blog regularly:

So, why visit OM blog? What are the benefits? First, blogs play a key role in the evolution of the web; they bring people together to share knowledge and to help them learn about new information technologies. We are, after all, in the information age. Furthermore, blogs are increasingly used to support continuing medical education, and viewed as an enhancement to clinical practice and rapid research dissemination. I hope that the OM blog will facilitate open discussion and collaboration, and function as a completely open repository of useful clinical cases and websites.

As a medical librarian, I will also share my thoughts about locating reliable medical information on the Web. In contrast to the original research published in Open Medicine, the blog will highlight interesting or emerging ideas from the blogosphere that are not covered elsewhere - thereby filling an important information gap. Topics I will cover include perspectives on information technologies, health care systems, research funding, drug releases and alerts, health legislation and government policies.

Who will find this blog useful? Physicians, medical students, residents and other health professionals; information professionals such as clinical/ medical librarians and informationists; health consumers and patients who need information about emerging diseases (e.g. SARS), global health issues and important research published elsewhere. (Link)

Open access to scholarly information is a principle I strongly believe in. I’ve talked about my reasons for blogging in previous posts (#1, #2, #3), but one of them is the desire to freely share new nutrition practice discoveries as well as classic resources because it benefits everyone — practitioners and the patient/clients we serve.

You can read more about the concept of open access here and more about the Open Access medical journal here.

Since taking DC’s evidence-based decision-making course, I have become very selective about my background reading and if I do have some time to scan journals, articles and summaries, I focus on the areas where I practice — e.g, brain injury, stroke, dysphagia. One gem of a newsletter I regularly read is Heart Headlines.  (I always mentally insert “& Stroke” after heart because nutrition advice for health of the organ in our chest also applies to the one in our head.)

The Summer 2007 issue, which I received in the mail today but is also available online, features an interesting review article on how and why dietary fat guidelines evolved to the statements in the 2007 Food Guide.