The more easily digestible and refined the carbohydrates, the greater the effect on our health, weight and well-being.

I have argued for years that we do not have a health care system in America. We have a disease-management system - one that depends on ruinously expensive drugs and surgeries that treat health conditions after they manifest rather than giving our citizens simple diet, lifestyle and therapeutic tools to keep them healthy.

Citizens must pressure the American Hospital Association, the American Public Health Association, the Centers for Disease Control and other relevant governmental agencies to make greening our hospitals and medical centers a top priority so that they themselves don't create even more illness.

One of the most obvious ways dogs can improve our physical and mental health is via daily walks.

We need to accept the seemingly obvious fact that a toxic environment can make people sick and that no amount of medical intervention can protect us. The health care community must become a powerful political lobby for environmental policy and legislation.

By keeping my hand in that, it's the way I keep learning. The main way you learn in medicine is by practicing and working with patients.

If we can make the correct diagnosis, the healing can begin. If we can't, both our personal health and our economy are doomed.

Meditation while walking has a long, noble history in ancient spiritual disciplines.

Technology has a shadow side. It accounts for real progress in medicine, but has also hurt it in many ways, making it more impersonal, expensive and dangerous. The false belief that a safety net of sophisticated drugs and machines stretches below us, permitting risky or lazy lifestyle choices, has undermined our spirit of self-reliance.

Get people back into the kitchen and combat the trend toward processed food and fast food.

Get people back into the kitchen and combat the trend toward processed food and fast food.

I am not against all forms of high-tech medicine. Drugs and surgeries have a secure place in the treatment of serious health conditions. But modern American medicine treats almost every health condition as if it were an emergency.

Gardening is not trivial. If you believe that it is, closely examine why you feel that way. You may discover that this attitude has been forced upon you by mass media and the crass culture it creates and maintains. The fact is, gardening is just the opposite - it is, or should be, a central, basic expression of human life.

My passion for gardening may strike some as selfish, or merely an act of resignation in the face of overwhelming problems that beset the world. It is neither. I have found that each garden is just what Voltaire proposed in Candide: a microcosm of a just and beautiful society.

You can't afford to get sick, and you can't depend on the present health care system to keep you well. It's up to you to protect and maintain your body's innate capacity for health and healing by making the right choices in how you live.

Genuine happiness comes from within, and often it comes in spontaneous feelings of joy.

Fear and greed are potent motivators. When both of these forces push in the same direction, virtually no human being can resist.