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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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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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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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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If you rent just one movie to watch at home this year, make sure it’s “King Corn”. Better yet, buy yourself a copy, so you can watch it every so often and remind yourself of the messes that have been created in our farming practices, our system of raising animals for meat, our own health and the health of the environment — all because of growing outrageous amounts of corn.

“King Corn” documents the experience of two idealistic college graduates who decide to grow an acre of corn in Iowa. Viewers follow them through the whole process — government subsidies, genetically engineered seed, and pesticides that kill everything but the genetically engineered corn. Viewers then learn how the surplus of corn seeps into our foods in many ways, and what all that corn does to us, to animals, to the environment, and to small farmers who can’t compete with big industrialized food corporations.

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At a gluten-free fair a few months ago, a friend briefly saw me and said, “Oh, Melissa, I am so bloated and gaining so much weight lately. I know it is all the corn products I have been eating lately.”

My friend is not alone. Corn has infiltrated the American food supply in a major, yet mostly invisible way, and virtually all Americans eat corn in some form without knowing it. People who begin a gluten-free diet (free of wheat, rye and barley) often are so focused on avoiding gluten that they substitute corn-based foods in place of wheat – repeatedly having corn tortillas instead of flour tortillas, for example – and end up eating a lot more corn-based foods. They gain weight and develop other health problems and don’t understand the reason why. Corn is the reason.

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A reader from Canada wrote me to let me know about a post she wrote today on the Sjogren’s World Community Forum. She told me that my Going Against the Grain book helped her and that eating completely against the grain proved to be the answer to greatly improve many symptoms she was experiencing.

Sjogren’s disease is an autoimmune disorder characterized by dry eyes and a dry mouth. It also can be a more systemic disease, affecting many organs and involving connective tissue disease, such as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erthematosus or scleroderma.

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Drinking more than one soft drink a day is associated with a higher risk of developing individual cardiovascular disease risk factors, as well as developing the cluster of risk factors known as metabolic syndrome, according to a 2007 study published in Circulation.

The research, part of the ongoing Framingham Heart Study that evaluates common factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, followed middle-aged men and women during a four-year period.

At the start of the study, researchers established that participants who drank one or more soft drinks a day had a 48 percent higher chance of having metabolic syndrome than those who drank less. Over the four-year follow-up, the results were similar, showing that people who drank one or more soft drinks a day had a 44 percent higher risk of developing metabolic syndrome for the first time.

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Last Monday I participated in a short, nationally televised “grain debate” in New Zealand on NZ TV One.

You can view the video here.

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