When the most widely read magazine in America asks, “Should doctors be writing prescriptions for arugula salad?,” you know that progress is being made in spreading the word that diet is key in protecting us against disease and reducing health care costs.

In “How America Can Eat Better,” which was published this Sunday, Parade magazine explained that new efforts are under way to get people to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables to prevent obesity, heart disease and diabetes. For example, Kaiser Permanente has helped coordinate farmers’ markets at more than 30 hospital locations. At one of those farmer’s markets, a 53-year-old man started buying lots of fresh vegetables eight months ago. By emphasizing vegetables in his diet, he has now lost 63 pounds.

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Last week Natural Products Expo West, the country’s largest natural, organic, and healthy products trade show, was marked by gluten-free products at virtually every turn and an astounding array of new products sweetened with agave nectar. The trends toward more gluten-free and agave-sweetened products both sound like positive developments, but consumers need to beware of the unadvertised pitfalls of these foods.

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A follow-up to my previous post: Improvement in a wide range of health indicators was documented in nine sedentary, non-obese people with no known health problems who ate a grain-free, dairy-free, hunter-gatherer-type diet for ten days. These people were supposedly healthy to begin with, but they still, on average, saw these large improvements in health:

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BREAKING NEWS: Eating a hunter-gatherer-type diet improves a wide range of cardiovascular risk factors – blood pressure, glucose tolerance, insulin secretion, insulin sensitivity, total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglyceride levels – in people who do not exercise in less than two weeks, according to a just-published study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

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On his second full day in office, President Barack Obama surprised members of the White House press corps by unexpectedly visiting their work area in the West Wing, saying hi and commenting on the lack of healthy snacks in the vending machines in that area.

After passing by vending machines that had soda, candy bars and chips, Obama suggested that we “might want to have healthier snacks,” according to TIME magazine.

So, what does the svelte president snack on? Mostly against-the-grain snacks, such as fruits and nuts. According to USA Today, Obama likes Planters Trail Mix: Nuts, Seeds and Raisins. He also drinks a lot of bottled water.

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What’s coming in the new year? Plenty of changes, most of which were put into motion in 2008. A new U.S. president is the most obvious change, but there will also be changes in foods and drinks on supermarket store shelves, finance-driven modifications in eating and lifestyle habits, and research and news about health topics that used to be so underground that they were only covered on blogs on the Internet such as this one!

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The annual sugar-fest has begun. It starts with loads of cheap candy hitting store shelves a few weeks before Halloween. People buy candy at “bargain” prices for trick-or-treaters. With lots of candy in their house, many decide to have a piece of candy, then maybe another and another. Their sugar cravings build, and they keep eating sugar, which leads to more cravings, which leads to more bingeing.

Halloween is our culturally acceptable “eat-all-you-want” candy day. It’s fitting that right after Halloween is November, which is National Diabetes Awareness Month. Few people see how ironic and telling this is.

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Are you experiencing anxiety about the worldwide economic crisis and wondering how you can tighten your budget? One simple way is to slash the number and amount of gluten-free products you buy. Gluten-free foods aren’t available at most stores so people have to spend more money to drive to locations farther away to purchase them. Even worse, gluten-free products are two to three times more expensive than regular products, according to a 2007 study. That’s a hefty price to pay for people experiencing tough financial times.

Consider also that it’s not just the cost of gluten-free products – it’s the cost of those products to our health. Few people in the gluten-free community or natural food industry like to talk about it, but many gluten-free products are simply junk foods that happen to be gluten-free.

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Higher plasma vitamin C levels, an indicator of a high fruit and vegetable intake, is associated with a substantially decreased risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a European-based study of more than 20,000 middle-aged adults.

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Many people like to read nutrition information that motivates them to eat better, but they also like to learn information through watching movies. As one client said to me, “Being able to both read information and watch it works really well together, helping to reinforce why we all need to ‘go against the grain’ with our diet for improved health.”

In my previous post, I wrote about “King Corn”, a documentary that explains how cheap corn ends up in most commercial American foods and plays a major role in our widespread and widening health problems. But two other documentary movies to watch are “SuperSize Me” and “McLibel”.

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