WFHers: Thanks for the Company

Researchers still haven’t figured out whether the 30 million+ Americans who were suddenly forced to work from home during the 2020 lockdown was good for productivity.

All I can say is, it worked for me.

As a long-time freelancer, I never imagined a day in which working from home would become so common it would earn its own acronym. Or where collaboration software would make an employee’s location irrelevant.

When I first became an independent consultant with a home office, I was part of a not well-understood minority. Even some of my family members side-eyed my decision. But I hated my commute (which could stretch to an hour and a half in bad weather, still short I know, by LA and NYC standards) and I resented that accounting for a day’s worth of billable hours was routinely derailed by office distractions.

My Pre-Covid Home Office

When I took the plunge to let go of a stable paycheck and go out on my own, I felt the need to prove myself as just as hard-working as any in-office counterpart. Especially in the field of PR, I knew optics and availability were just as important as my work product. I worked hard to present myself professionally.

I spent years begging family members to be quiet while I conducting a phone interview and obfuscating with clients when faced with a childcare emergency.

So by the time office buildings emptied out and millions joined me working remotely last spring, I had the routine down cold. Where new WFHers were scrambling to carve out ad hoc office space in suddenly overcrowded homes, I already had all the office accoutrements I needed—no ironing board desks or makeshift office chairs for me.

Blurred Lines

I felt a sense of camaraderie with this new legion of remote workers as they experienced the same delights—no makeup!—and travails—the isolation!—of home-officing that I’ve come to know so well. And I took just a little satisfaction knowing that I had long ago mastered the art of working from home, on my own, without anyone being the wiser. For me, the Covid pandemic helped re-frame my status as a WFH professional.

Unlike the scrutiny early WFHers faced, Corporate America took the early bumps in the transition to a remote workforce in stride. We laughed off unmuted mics, family interruptions, and naked cameos on Zoom calls. It was a pandemic after all, and everyone was new to this. Getting a glimpse into each others’ home lives made us all feel a little chummier — and maybe a little more forgiving.

Whether the majority of WFHers eventually return to offices — and the jury is still out on the extent that will happen — I’m grateful the lockdown of 2020 normalized working from home. It makes my job that much easier.

A Message for Non-Voluntary Homeschooling Parents

I was in a virtual chat with fellow yogis after live-streaming yoga class the other night when a mom shared how stressful it was to teach math to her homebound children.

Parents around the country have been thrust into homeschooling their children without warning. Many are simultaneously teaching the curriculums of multiple grades while also trying to perform their own jobs remotely.

We are in the midst of a global pandemic wreaking immeasurable economic devastation and totally disrupting our lives. We are disoriented, afraid and missing our normal activities.

The last thing families need is more stress — especially when they are stuck together under the same roof 24/7.

What parents need right now, IMO, is permission to ease up a bit on trying to be the perfect substitute teacher.

Teach to Your Talents

Mom, dad, how about shifting gears and teach some of the life skills that aren’t part of the typical school curriculum? Like how to sew on a button. Do laundry. Change the oil in the car. Most parents’ busy schedules don’t offer windows of time for these kinds of experiences. Seize the opportunity!

Why not take a break from studying and share some your own personal experiences and skills? Enlist the kids’ help in a home maintenance project. Play some of your favorite music from when you were in high school and tell a G-rated story from those days. Prepare your favorite recipe. Get out the guitar.

You can even sneak in everyday math skills along the way: convert ounces to cups while teaching basic cooking skills. Turn the dining room into a restaurant and print a menu with prices.

Draw a map of the places you go in a typical day — from your house to school to the grocery store. Ask your kids to guess the distance between the points and then verify with Google maps. They can go a step further by drawing the outline of their home state and guessing the distance miles from east to west and how long it would take to drive across the state.

Dream

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the news — and the fact that there’s no end in sight as of yet for the Corona virus crisis. Instead of focusing on the here and now, we can look to the future. Ask your kids to pick a place in the world they’d like to visit and create a presentation on the destination — for older kids it could be in PowerPoint, for younger ones, a print report with pictures.

Make wish collages by cutting pictures out of a magazine.

Don’t forget to move!

Get kids involved in cleaning the house and enlist their help in chores. Turn on some music on and sing along. Stretch or do yoga. When you’re finished shake everything out!

Kids will love this move from my fav yoga teacher: lie on the floor in a dead-bug position with both legs and arms up in the air. For 30 seconds, shake all your limbs as hard as you can. You get bonus points if you also roar like a lion.

Now’s also a great time for the whole family to do breathing exercises. Breathe in as deeply as possible, filling up your belly and chest with air to a count of 10, hold it at the top and then slowly let the air out to a count of 10.

Cultivate creativity

Make a batch of salt dough. Draw each other. Invite your kids to start a journal by reminding them they are living through a part of history that people will talk about for a long time. Write a song or poem about the Corona virus and sheltering in place.

Show some goodwill

Handwrite letters to family members and friends who may be feeling lonely. Include a picture or other piece of art. I think we all agree that one of the best things about the situation we’re all facing is the community we’ve been able to create even while social distancing. If we’re lucky, the importance of reaching out and connecting will be ingrained in both our children and us.

And most importantly, de-stress. Make a laughing circle. Dance. Light candles and meditate.

If you’re a parent with school-age kid, you’ll no doubt be able to riff off these suggestions and come up with ideas that fit your family. I hope when you look back on this crisis of 2020, there will be some good memories of the time we all spent cooped up at home. Above all, I hope you and yours are healthy and safe.

The New Parent Trap: Fear, Anxiety and Fraud

With all the ways the rich and famous have to get themselves and their progeny ahead in this world, why would wealthy parents commit fraud?

Last week, thirty-three parents, including actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Laughlin, were indicted for using bribes and test cheating to gain admission for their children to prestigious universities. Even by snowplow standards — a parenting style in which parents obsessively remove barriers to their kids’ success — their alleged actions are extreme.

To shed some light on what might make a parent desperate enough to engage in this kind of criminal activity, I turned to Malcolm Harris’s newly published Kids These Days, Human Capital and the Making of Millennials. Harris presents a socio-economic analysis of the external forces that have shaped our children over the past 40 years, including the 2008 financial crisis, late capitalism and technology that makes us available 24/7. He argues that the drastic changes in the nature of American childhood are profoundly affecting society — and making Millennials and their parents highly anxious about the future.

Millennials’ Hyper-Competitive World

Harris says despite the lazy and narcissistic stereotype, Millennials on the whole are actually hard-working and highly educated. ‘…Students are doing historically anomalous amounts of homework and competition for desirable college slots is stiffer,’ writes Harris. The number of applicants to four-year colleges and universities has doubled since the early 70s, yet the number of available slots has changed little. The high-achieving pool of students has also become much more crowded: between 1984 and 2012, the number of high school students taking Advanced Placement (AP) courses increased a whopping 921 percent.

Little, Brown and Company

‘American kids spend more time on school work than ever before, even though their skills with new technology make performance of academic tasks like research and word processing much more efficient’ says Harris. ‘A scholastic arms race has pitted adolescents against each other from a young age.’

Post-graduation, more competition and uncertainty awaits Millennials, who have come of age in a time of increasing economic inequality and wage stagnation. This generation is less financiallywell-off than their parents and grandparents when they were the same age.

‘Preparing young people for the 21st century labor market is a high-stakes rat race,’ writes Harris. ‘It’s harder to compete for a good job, the bad jobs you can hope to fall back on are worse than they used to be and both good and bad jobs are less secure. The intense anxiety that has overcome American childhood flows from a reasonable fear of un-, under- and just plain lousy employment.’

Harris paints a bleak financial picture over which parents have little control. Given what’s a stake, I can understand how parents could get carried away trying to eliminate risk and give their children as many advantages as possible.

‘It’s no longer enough to graduate a kid from high school in one piece; if an American parent wants to give their child a chance at success, they can’t take any chances,’ he writes. ‘Entire industries have sprung up to prey on this anxiety from Baby Einstein to test prep academies.’

Helicopter Parents to the Rescue

Having raised a Millennial, I’m familiar with the pressure on parents to make the right choices and to take full advantage of any and all opportunities for their children. It was us Baby Boomer mothers that ushered in over-structured days, pre-arranged playdates and an intense focus on academic goals, creating the moniker ‘helicopter parent.’ Not to be outdone, today’s parents spend more money on child rearing than any previous generation.

I exposed my daughter Lauren to her fair share of ‘enrichment’ activities, from music and ballet to art and gymnastics. As for the latter, she announced after her first class that the balance beam, vault and tumbling weren’t for her. ‘Too many rules,’ she said. That self-awareness would serve Lauren well during her school years. When she announced that she intended to take only half her high school classes AP rather than the full load of advanced coursework as many of her peers were doing, I went down the rabbit-hole with worry. ‘What if she doesn’t get into a good school? What if she doesn’t get a good job? What if she can’t support herself?’

At the same time, I saw the logic in Lauren’s thinking. ‘Why would I take an advanced class in a subject I don’t like and I’m not good at?” she reasoned. I admired her ability to push back against over-scheduling and crushing academic loads. And all the reasons I could think of for her to take harder coursework than she could handle just rang hollow: ‘Because it’s good to work hard… Because all those APs on your transcript will look great.’

I’m also a big believer in work-life balance and it’s crazy to me that our children experience the exact opposite during their formative school years. Harris concurs: ‘‘The whole school culture is built around hyper-competition, from first period, to extracurricular activities, to homework, to the video games kids play when they have a minute of downtime.’

In the end I still worried about Lauren’s final transcript — because that’s what parents do — but she ultimately made the choices that were best for her. (She got into a good school.)

Surviving in a Take-No-Chances World

I believe wanting your child to succeed comes from a loving place, whether you’re wealthy, famous or struggling to get by. But that genuine desire can be perverted a hyper-competitive culture that focuses on the exceptional. It takes some fortitude to opt out. As parents we have to work hard to keep our own fears, anxiety and egos in check.

When you live in a take-no-chances kind of world, letting your foot off the gas pedal can feel awfully uncomfortable. In our household, we often repeat the phrase (borrowed from Warren Buffett) to ease anxiety about the future: ‘Do what you can do then let go of outcomes.’ The ultimate challenge is to find that line between being supportive and doing too much for our kids — so they can get on with the work of learning how to survive and prosper in the 21st century. If the current economic and cultural trends continue as Harris predicts, it’s going to be up to the Millennials to turn this ship around — and they’re going to need all the support the rest of us can muster.

As for Felicity, Lori and the other individuals charged in the admissions scandal, it remains to be seen how their future will pan out. But I know one thing for sure: it’s tough being a Millennial. And it ain’t easy parenting one either.

Blasting Through Age and Gender Discrimination

Maybe it’s the silver & platinum hair trend. Or the growing demand for greater transparency and authenticity. Whatever the case, my recent blog about how I’d be perceived in the workplace if I let my hair go gray (or white) really resonated.

I heard from other professional women who told me the topic is frequently discussed in their offices. A hairdresser said she has the same conversation weekly with her clients. And a talent recruiter verified what we all know to be true: ageism is rampant, and when it comes to appearances, women are more harshly judged. It’s the age-old double-standard: a man with graying temples has gravitas, a woman who no longer colors her hair is ‘letting herself go.’

Employees too young to retire want to know ‘What’s next?’

Our youth-obsessed, social media-driven Western culture renders older generations, especially women, invisible. In the workplace, age discrimination is exacerbated by the fast pace of technology development, which can make people feel obsolete well before they’re ready to retire. The New York Times just reported on a new resort in Mexico that offers retreats to help ‘elderly’ tech workers—as young as 30—cope with our rapidly evolving digital economy. Tech and startup industries, particularly in Silicon Valley, have always favored the young and bold—and that workplace culture is bleeding into other industries.

So I completely understand the women who told me they wouldn’t dare stop coloring their hair for fear of looking older, being treated differently by colleagues or being unable to find another job if necessary. I get it: women over 50 have very little job security and are the most likely demographic to experience long-term unemployment. Women face a triple jeopardy: ageism, gender discrimination and superficial prejudice based on appearance alone.

Are there professions you don’t age out of?

Which got me wondering… Is there an age-proof profession? Tenure and life-long appointments allow professors and judges to work into their 80s (if they desire). Aging lawyers can slot into ‘Special Counsel’ roles. In professional services, there will always be a role for senior consultants who have the maturity and experience to advise high-level executives. Sales and real estate offer older workers opportunities for second careers.

What about marketing and PR? The industry pub Ad Age reported late last year that advertising has an ageism problem, or as a senior ad writer described it, ‘discrimination on steroids.’ Digital advancements, cost efficiencies and a lack of positions other than management for experienced workers end up squeezing out ‘older’ professionals: In 2018, 62 percent of workers in advertising, public relations and other related services were under 45 years of age.

Are women complicit in age discrimination?

Which is why I’m clapping hard for the senior creative designer in LA who told me via LinkedIn that she let her gray hair grow out as a form of rebellion. ‘The only way to blast through age discrimination is to blatantly wear my age,’ she said. Her attitude got me thinking. Is it possible women are unwittingly complicit in the perpetuation of ageism? By continuing to color our hair, botox our wrinkles and Spanx the bulge, are we reinforcing the connection between our worth and appearance? What if we rebelled en masse and proved that age and competency go hand-in-hand? That women of all ages—and looks—have valuable contributions to make to the workplace?

My intent isn’t to blame the victims of age discrimination, but rather to find another way to chip away at the cultural forces that deny women opportunities. Going gray won’t be for everyone—I’m not even sure it’s for me. Every woman should do exactly what makes her most comfortable and confident in and out of the workplace. At the moment, I’m committed to going forward with my hair plan, empowered in part by the support I’ve received, including my friend Linda who said she takes inspiration from French women who don’t strive to look younger, but rather to be best version of themselves at every age. I’m going to embrace who I am at this moment in my career by rocking a trendy cut and getting some new glasses. And because it’s not all about looks, I’ll keep updating my skills and stay on top of news, trends and key issues in the industries I work in.

Time to blast away.

Elisabeth Holmes Got One Thing Right

I was intrigued by Elizabeth Holmes’s now-defunct Theranos company early on not because she promised to develop a novel blood testing technology, but by her overarching goal:

‘to redefine the paradigm of diagnosis away from one in which people have to present with a symptom in order to get access to information about their bodies to one in which every person, no matter how much money they have or where they live, has access to actionable health information at the time it matters.’

The most appealing part of the Theranos business model, IMO, was the ability to walk into a Walgreens and have your blood tested with or without a doctor’s prescription. I’m squarely behind efforts to give consumers greater agency over their health: I’ve been part of the content-building team for RadiologyInfo, a leading medical information website, for more than a decade. In just the last five years, visits to the site have increased 400 percent to a record high of 2 million (November 2018).

As much as online health information empowers consumers, Internet-enabled mobile and wearable devices will take us to the next level by offering more personalized health data. Where Theranos failed miserably, other innovators are successfully democratizing medicine through direct-to-consumer health tests, wearable devices and artificial intelligence.

“We are about to see a medical revolution with little mobile devices,” writes Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, in his book “The Patient Will See You Now.” With smartphones in hand, Topol says we’ll no longer be beholden to an impersonal and paternalistic system in which "doctor knows best."

Smartphone as a Pre-Screening Tool

Miniature attachments can turn the smartphone into a stethoscope, a portable ultrasound scanner and in the near future, a miniature laboratory capable of testing blood electrolytes and liver, kidney and thyroid function. And smartwatches are going way beyond counting steps:  the new Apple Watch Series 4 introduced last September has an FDA-approved electrocardiogram (ECG) sensor that records and sends a record of your heart rhythm to your smartphone. The difficult-to-diagnose irregular heart rhythm called atrial fibrillation, or A-fib, is one of the leading causes of stroke. Apple’s new ECG sensor is just the first ’pre-screening tool’ for smartphones the company plans to develop.

Wearable Devices Simplify Blood Sugar Monitoring

Another wearable device with the potential to impact both individual lives and healthcare costs is a quarter-sized continuous glucose monitoring(GCM) sensor, designed to help the 1.5 million Americans with Type 1 diabetes monitor their blood sugar. For individuals with diabetes, poor control of blood sugar levels can lead to complications, including nerve damage, eye problems and heart disease. Rather than using a painful and inconvenient finger-stick blood test to track their glucose levels, patients instead fix the GCM sensor to their upper arm and swipe a hand-held scanning device over it to obtain quick readings throughout the day.

Direct-to-Consumer Testing Services

While Theranos ultimately failed to fundamentally change the delivery of healthcare—other startups are gaining a foothold. Companies like Everly Well are now offering common blood tests to assess thyroid function, vitamin D levels and food sensitivities directly to consumers without a doctor’s prescription. Everly Well expects to make $50 million this year selling its tests, which can be purchased online or in drugstores, performed at home with a few drops of blood from the finger and returned by mail for processing in a certified lab. One caveat: Out-of-pocket-fees for the tests mentioned here, which range from $59 to $159, are not covered by insurance.

Consumers clearly want to be both informed and engaged in their healthcare—and they have an appetite for devices and technologies that provide actionable data to help them stay healthy and prevent or manage chronic health conditions. Smartwatch sales are expected to continue climbing from the 43 million units sold last year to more than 89 million in 2022, when the the entire healthcare wearables market is projected to reach $60 billion.

Managing and interpreting the deluge of data these devices will provide—which can produce false-positive other inaccurate results—is another story. An ‘informed’ patient is a double-edged sword for healthcare practitioners who have less and less time to spend with patients. How will physicians and insurers square with the time required for longer conversations with patients?

The New Doctor-Patient Relationship

Providers will need to work to integrate and manage this new flow of personal medical information into their practice while helping patients contextualize the data. Now’s the time for practices to consider expanding education offerings through newsletters, websites and even webinars to help patients not only understand the new and expanding metrics of health produced by wearables, but also how to be better partners with their healthcare providers.

In the near future, digitally empowered patients will not only have symptoms to share with their physician, but potentially a handful of self-administered test results as well. Here’s hoping that together, patients and providers can use personalized health data from wearable and other technologies to more quickly diagnose medical issues, better manage chronic conditions and prevent adverse events.

If I look more like a Baby Boomer, will employers hold it against me?

Full disclosure: I am not a brunette. The primary virtue of the mousy brown hair I was born with is that it’s easily colored. I started using Sun-In spray in high school and never looked back, highlighting my hair for decades and spending some time as a redhead before turning to this auburn shade of brown. I like variety.

But I’m less sure about my next transition. Underneath this beautiful Aveda color I have applied in the salon every 5 weeks is a head of — gasp — silvery white hair. Half grudgingly and half excitedly, I’m considering letting my natural hair grow a few inches and then chopping off the rest. A full-on Jamie Lee Curtis.

You can understand my trepidation. My hair not only makes me feel attractive, but I equate the length and rich color with youth — and I’m not anxious to let either go. I’ve always admired women who forgo makeup and hair styling. But it’s never been my style. I’ve always appreciated the boost I get from enhancing what God gave me — and I’m not alone. The US beauty and personal care market generates about $84 billion in annual revenue.

Working in PR and marketing, I’ve always believed a polished personal appearance was a definite advantage, if not a unstated job requirement. You have to be able to master your own personal brand before you can credibly advise a business on managing theirs. Fair or not, I’ve accepted this reality which also happens to comport with my personal philosophy.

Dressing well and ‘putting my face on’ are two ways I put my best foot forward each day. It’s also a type of armor for what can be a brutal and competitive marketplace. Feeling good about how I look and what I’m wearing is a great confidence booster.

But at this point in my life, coloring my hair has become a less-than-satisfying beauty routine that also feels like a bit of a charade. Just two weeks after my salon visit, my white roots re-emerge, reminding me that not only am I aging, I’m also pretending to be someone I’m not. As liberating as it may be to unshackle myself from the time and expense of coloring my hair, going gray still feels like a risk. If I look more like the Baby Boomer I am, will I find myself marginalized in the marketplace?

The fear is real. The WSJ reported that women over 50 often find doors closed to them. They face potential gender and age discrimination, along with the stigma of having spent time out of the workforce for caregiving. Researcherswho created 40,000 job applications for fictitious male and female candidates in three age ranges and analyzed employer callback rates found ‘robust evidence’ of age discrimination against older female workers were more likely to be judged negatively for their appearance than men.

And yet women over 55 and older are reportedly the fastest growing age-gender segment in the workforce. We will account for more than a third — nearly 3.6 million — of additional workers entering the labor force through 2026. I don’t have to look far to find fierce women in my age group and older doing amazing work: from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the notorious US Supreme Court Justice RBG and GM CEO Mary Barra to Meryl Streep, Glenn Close and Frances McDormand and others, all of whom are slaying it in Hollywood, which is known to be notoriously unwelcoming to women over 40. Closer to home, the city of Chicago will choose a woman over the age of 55 as mayor next month.

As I slog through the coming months looking like Cruella DeVil, I hope I have the patience and tenacity to follow through with my plan. It’s human nature, and certainly my own person inclination, to ‘hold on to the good’ and fear change. But I recognize that there are opportunity costs to staying with the status quo. What would happen if instead of grudgingly resisting the future, I whole-heartedly embraced it instead? What if what’s waiting for me on the other side is actually better?

Stay tuned. I’ll let you know.

A Doctor’s Advice for a Healthier Body: Small, Sustainable Steps

News that Weight Watchers lost 300,000 members and 30 percent of its stock price last week demonstrates how difficult it is to stick to a diet. In her book Release Your Weight, Dr. Karin Drummond offers an alternative to both old-fashioned programs like Weight Watchers (disastrously rebranded “WW” last year) and diets-du-jour including the controversial Atkins and Keto.

Rather than prescribing a specific diet to help you lose weight quickly, Drummond advocates for slowly making small, sustainable lifestyle changes. Her wholistic approach to a healthier body includes addressing how much sleep and exercise you get, tackling mental health issues and identifying factors that both motivate and impede your personal progress. The topic of food doesn’t appear until chapter eight.

Equal Parts Science and Support

In Release Your Weight—the latest in the author’s series of books on healthy living—Drummond serves up a combination of science, psychology and encouragement. She talks to readers in a way that you wish all your healthcare practitioners would, sharing her personal experiences and daily health routines.

She always eats breakfast and avoids processed foods and simple carbs (like bread and potatoes) at all costs. If she’s on the go, she hits the grocery store for salad, soup or sushi. In a pinch, she says, deli food is better than fast food. Does she ever cheat? Yep.

“If I go to a party and cake is put in front of me, I either eat a piece or take a piece to enjoy as breakfast the following morning,” she tells readers. “Life is too short to deny yourself yummy food. The trick is to eat it in moderation. It is rare for me to eat junk food, but I don’t get upset with myself if I do eat it. I enjoy it and move on.”

Weighing in on the Microbiome & Sleep Hygiene

In addition to giving readers a primer on leaky gut syndrome, a condition increasingly tied to excess weight and obesity, Drummond describes the loss of the ‘full button,’ which causes the inability to moderate food intake. In her critique of the outdated Body Mass Index (BMI), she offers more accurate measures for determining your healthy weight.

She also addresses the connection between weight gain and sleep deprivation, offering tips for selecting the right mattress and improving sleep hygiene. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say more than a third of Americans don’t get enough sleep, putting them at increased risk for obesity, heart disease and stroke. From meditation apps to supplements, there’s no shortage of solutions for insomniacs to try, but Drummond offers a host of tips including the use of CBD, refraining from using back-lit screens two hours before bed choose a red night light instead of a blue light, which halts the body’s production of sleep-inducing melatonin.

Straight-Up Advice for Everyone

When it comes to food choices, Drummond acknowledges there is not optimal diet for everyone—she suggests finding a good nutritionist to help personalize your diet to account for individual body type, allergies and underlying medical conditions. But she also offers straight-forward advice that nearly everyone can embrace: substituting water for soda, intermittent fasting (eating 500 calories a day twice a week), eating your last meal three hours before bed and spacing out meals by at least four hours.

As a vegetarian, I appreciated Drummond’s advice to add variety to my diet instead of relying on the same greens and roasted brussels sprouts. She cites studies that suggest we need to eat dozens of different types of vegetables to maintain a healthy gut flora, or the naturally occurring intestinal bacteria that are part of a healthy immune system.

Do What Moves You

Another important daily habit Drummond wants us to cultivate is exercise. She suggests engaging in five to 20 minutes of physical activity a day plus one exercise class a week. Moving your body throughout the day might mean hourly stretching breaks at your desk or doing squats in the grocery checkout line. I was inspired to learn she has a chin-up bar in the doorway of her bathroom so she can do a few pull-ups every time she hits the loo—that’s dedication.

Drummond thinks outside the box when it comes to longer forms of exercise as well. While most of us immediately think of hitting the gym, she has done salsa dancing, pole fitness, rock climbing, wake boarding and yoga. She knows from personal experience that making daily physical activity a permanent behavior change is much more likely if we have some fun at it.

It’s obvious Drummond cares about her patients—the last thing she wants is to is heap more stress on already stressed-out readers by handing them a strict list of have-tos and must-nots.

“Stress is the number one cause of ‘dis-ease’,” Drummond writes. “Living stress-free means that sometimes I must simply enjoy the food in front of me, the company of my friends and life in general.” 

Podcast: My Smart and Funny Friends

My uber creative and clever friend/marketing pro Lisa Richter recently started a podcast and asked me to be a guest. In this episode of My Smart and Funny Friends, Lisa and I debate whether writing is an innate or learned skill ... and lament being involuntary members of the grammar police. I talk about how rewarding my career in health and medical PR and marketing has been--and I also get a chance to riff on something I’m passionate about: eating in a way that's healthy for both humans and the earth. What a total blast!

Healthy Eating Needs a Champion

When I hear health experts telling us to eat more vegetables and whole grains and less meat and processed foods, I get a bit overwhelmed—and my diet is fairly healthy. I can only imagine what this advice sounds like to people who are time-crunched and resource-limited.

Making healthier food choices is considerably easier for affluent consumers, who can order meal kits or buy high quality prepared foods. But for much of the population, the prospect of buying all organic and cooking with unfamiliar foods like quinoa, kale and alternative proteins must seem like a bridge too far. 

So the experts behind the new Planetary Health Diet were wise to accompany their life- and planet-saving food guidelines with calls for affordable healthy foods and more consumer education. Simply telling consumers to shop in the produce section instead of the processed food aisle and to cook from scratch isn’t realistic.

Close the Nutrition Education Gap

Improving access to healthy food does not automatically translate into better food choices and improved health. Studies have shown that local eating habits are not significantly impacted when grocery stores are opened in food deserts—many low-income consumers instead continue to purchase foods of low nutritional value. Food-buying behaviors are ingrained and difficult to change.

Researchers say it’s not proximity to healthy food but deeper, more fundamental differences in education and nutritional knowledge that shape eating habits and in turn, impact health. To achieve the ‘Great Food Transformation’ the EAT-Lancet Commission envisions, we’ll need to close that nutrition education gap by providing know-how where consumers live and shop.

If I were PR counsel advising for the commission and its stakeholders, I’d be looking for a high-profile athlete or celebrity to champion a healthier way of eating. I might team that person with a collaborator from the culinary field—a ‘Top Chef’ if you will, for the every man and woman.

Imagine the impact of videos of LeBron James talking about how healthy food fuels his performance in FB and IG feeds. Or a video of Gordon Ramsay embedded among the produce in grocery stores, doing a demo on how to simply cook in-season vegetables—along with tastings and weekly specials .

No doubt there are plenty of cooking videos already on YouTube. But many are overly complicated or tout diets that are unrealistic for the average consumer. We need inspirational, common-sense nutritional messaging that can rise above a staggering amount of misinformation and compete against mega million-dollar advertising budgets for fast food and snack brands.

Make Healthy, Sustainable Food a Trending #

To inspire consumers to re-think their food choices to improve their own health and that of the planet, we’ll need top-shelf social influencers who are able to catapult healthy, sustainable food into the national zeitgeist. Someone as physically accomplished as LeBron could help connect the dots between nutrition and human potential. Combined with the culinary authority of Ramsay, this is the kind of team that could make healthy, sustainable food go viral.

But harnessing the power of social media and re-shaping the retail food environment and are just some of what it will take to change food-buying habits. With an obesity crisis and growing incidence of diabetes, we also need to reprioritize health-related school programming to help future generations establish healthy eating patterns from an early age.

Bring Back Home Ec

We need to put a fresh spin on ‘home economics’ and make the class mandatory again in secondary school, while developing additional programming for primary students. With a focus on testing and shrinking budgets, home ec—now called Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS)—has become an elective in many states with only a third of secondary students participating, according to the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences. Agriculture is the largest economy in our country, yet FCS teachers lament many students still don’t know where their food comes from.

That truth is borne out here in Chicago, where the non-profit Purple Asparagus visits 16 schools every month to talk about fruits and vegetables with first and second graders, some of whom have never seen a strawberry or a kumquat (to be honest, I’m not sure I could pick out a kumquat).

“Our goal is to get kids started on a healthy relationship with fruits and vegetables,” says Purple Asparagus Founding CEO Melissa Graham. “We want to inspire a life-long love of good food.”

The “Delicious Nutritious Adventures” program allows children to taste, prepare simple recipes and learn about foods they might otherwise reject.

Children who have participated in the program say they become more open to trying new foods and actually enjoy eating fruits and vegetables. They also bring what they learn from Purple Asparagus home, which in turn inspires parents to prepare more vegetables for the family.

Graham says the key to the program’s success is making the experience fun and enjoyable. With more funding, she hopes Purple Asparagus will be able to reach even more Chicago school children.

“We emphasize eating food that tastes good and that’s good for the body and the planet,” she says.

What a great way to jump-start the plant-based food revolution.

#FoodEducation #HealthyKidsFood #ChicagoSchools #FoodLiteracy #LeBronJames #GordonRamsay #EatLancet #plantbased #HealthyEating

Time to Re-Think Your Plate

Eating the right combination of foods may lead to a longer, healthier life… and save the planet

Growing up, dinners at my house consisted of a main entree, a starch, vegetables and maybe a side salad, all topped off with milk—which at the time was considered to be a good square meal. Dessert awaited if you cleaned your plate.

Today, scientists and health experts are reimagining the plate for the better: protein 'foods' have been moved to a co-starring role along with whole grains, both of which are balanced by hefty portions of fruits and veggies. It's a long overdue overhaul to the definition of a healthy diet, driven in equal parts by growing global malnutrition, an unsustainable food system and the impending demands of feeding a world population of 10 billion by 2050.

The stakes couldn't be higher. Our food system is not only a greedy consumer of the earth's landmass and water, it's also the single biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. At the same time, rates of obesity and malnutrition are skyrocketing, causing premature deaths and illness.

Good for the body, good for the planet

In a new report from the Lancet Commission, a group of multidisciplinary scientists from 16 countries have proposed the Planetary Health Diet, a way to save both lives and the Earth. The guidelines, which are flexitarian in nature and similar to the Mediterranean diet, include vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes, nuts and unsaturated oils along with little or no red and processed meats, added sugar, refined grains and starches. According to the scientific panel, converting to the largely plant-based diet could prevent nearly 12 million people a year from dying prematurely.

In addition to the dietary guidelines, the commission also proposes a framework for making food production more sustainable, with lofty goals for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, improving fertilizer and water use and enhancing agricultural biodiversity, among others. To provide win-win diets for everyone by 2050, the scientists say it will take nothing less than a ‘great food transformation’ and an unprecedented level of cooperation from global policy makers and stakeholders all along the food supply chain.

Small changes add up

We consumers, however, can have an immediate impact simply by tweaking our food choices. We have the power to amp up our veggies, substitute quinoa for potatoes and swap red meat for another protein—even just once a week. As someone who never really liked eating meat, I welcome all the new protein alternatives and guidelines like these from the Canadian government to help brainstorm healthy meals. I’m a big fan of eating 'power foods' that give me a good return of nutrients for the calories and researching and writing on health and medicine for 20 years has only reinforced the value of healthy food choices. My goal is to live a long and healthy life to see as much of my daughter’s life as possible.

I may have an unusually utilitarian approach to food and nutrition, but that doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with carnivores and people who can never get enough bread. I get it—sugar is my Achilles heel and, according to the commission’s report, I should cut my intake in half.

To lead longer, healthier lives and stop degrading the planet, we will all need to re-think how we fill our plate—and when to push it away.

What beats a trip to the urgent care clinic? A virtual doctor visit

It’s not often that we read about efficiencies in the US healthcare system, but my experience last week with telemedicine offers some inspiration.

When a head cold lingered for seven days then worsened, I feared it had morphed into a sinus infection. Unfortunately, my Rush Medical primary care physician had recently relocated to Seattle and I hadn’t selected a replacement. As I searched my online patient portal for the nearest walk-in clinic—I spied a very attractive alternative: an electronic or ‘e-visit’ with a Rush medical professional.

A Welcome Addition to Primary Care Delivery

For $30, I filled out a questionnaire on my symptoms and submitted it online, which was reviewed, along with my medical records, by a physician assistant. Within the hour, I had a message in my online patient chart with a diagnosis of sinusitis and a text from my pharmacy saying my prescription for amoxycillin was ready for pick up. (Thanks to the CVS drive-up pharmacy window, I didn’t even have to get out of my PJs.)

E-visits and other telemedicine (also called telehealth) services that allow patients to be ‘seen’ via phone, computer or mobile app are expanding across the country. In addition to major medical centers like Rush, insurance plans and independent companies provide virtual consult options, many of which are covered by insurance.

Customer Demand for Convenience

What’s behind the trend? A major driver is the fight for primary care customers who are making provider decisions based in part on convenience. The pressure is on medical practices to meet patients when and where they need care—whether it’s a 2 a.m. consult or a Sunday morning clinic visit.

E-visits are not only an efficient option for both the patient and provider, they also help mitigate the spread of viruses and germs by allowing sick patients to stay at home. Virtual visits for common health problems should help reduce unnecessary visits to the doctor’s office and more importantly, to the ER. Follow-up appointments, monitoring chronic conditions (with the help of other technologies) and dermatology are other great uses of e-visits.

Monitoring Patient Outcomes

Questions remain as to whether quick and easy medical consults will actually increase utilization of overall healthcare services, negating any potential cost savings of virtual visits. The risk of misdiagnosis, inappropriate treatment and the overprescribing of antibiotics within the new delivery channel will have to be closely monitored and assessed.

Nevertheless, my first experience with telehealth was impressive—I especially appreciate that the service is part of the Rush system where practitioners have access to my medical records and the consult becomes part of my patient history.

When strategically implemented, carefully monitored and integrated within a system of care, e-visits will help providers more efficiently manage patient care—and give patients the opportunity to expend more of their energy toward getting better.