My favorite website

I'm a bit of a wannabe health nut. I try to eat healthy and exercise, but I'm nowhere near fanatical or even terribly consistent. But I'm constantly on the lookout for good information about health and nutrition. And the best source I've found is http://drbenkim.com/ This website is in sort of a quasi blog format with lots of information about health and nutrition and recipes, and also an online natural health store. My boyfriend calls me a Dr. Ben groupie, and I guess I kind of am. I am a big fan of his overall philosophy about health. The more research I do about health care, and as a former pre-med student I've done a lot, the more convinced I am that simple steps to improve overall health are often the best and most effective. He advocates trying to make changes in daily habits or diets rather than turning to conventional medicine. Obviously, both he and I think there is a time and a place for conventional medicine, but perhaps I will get into that another time.

I first came across his website when I was just messing around looking for some sort of advice for managing chronic nose stuffiness. A number of years ago, I was diagnosed with non-allergic nasal rhinitis, meaning my nose was stuffy all the time for no reason. I tried a few different treatments, but none really worked that well, and I think my sniffles annoyed my family more then they bothered me anyways, so I just kind of lived with it. Then I came across an article by Dr. Ben noting that dairy allergies often caused chronic congestion. So, just for the heck of it, I tried cutting down on my dairy intake for a week, and magically, my congestion reduced. Now, I haven't tried to completely cut out dairy, so I still have some congestion, but it has definitely helped. So my non-allergic rhinitis isn't really non-allergic, it appears to be a mild dairy allergy.

He also stresses the connection between emotional and physical health--something I think is underestimated in modern medicine. However, I think this connection is slowly being given more consideration. I took a physiology course my junior year of college, and my professor was an endocrinologist. Whenever we studied a certain organ system, we would also study how it was controlled by the endocrine system, which is a very complicated system of hormones, chemical messengers, etc. And our emotions have a great impact over our endocrine systems. Perhaps sometime I'll write more on this. But for now I'd encourage you to go check out what Dr. Ben has to say.