By Robert Heller, MD — Co-Founder and Medical Director, Juvelixir
I stopped asking patients to keep food diaries somewhere around my thirtieth year of practice. They were a great deal of work for the patient and, in my experience, not very informative. People wrote down the week they wished they had eaten.
So I replaced all of it with one question:
How many of last week’s dinners did you cook yourself?
Not what did you eat. Not how much. How many did you make.
Why that number and not a better one
Because people can answer it accurately in about four seconds, and because almost nobody has a reason to shade it. Ask someone how much sugar they ate last week and you get an estimate filtered through how they feel about themselves. Ask how many dinners they cooked and you get a number. Two. Five. None — I travel.
And that number turned out to carry a remarkable amount of information. Someone who cooked five dinners was, without my having asked, eating differently: more vegetables, fewer things engineered to be difficult to stop eating, portions set by a person rather than by a package. They were also, more often than not, sitting down to eat, at roughly the same time, with someone else in the room. I got all of that from one number I did not have to argue about.
What it was really measuring
Partly the food. Mostly the friction.
Cooking a meal takes planning, a stocked kitchen, and thirty minutes you decided to spend that way. When a patient’s number fell — five dinners one year, one the next — it usually meant something else had gone. A new job. A stretch of poor sleep. A person they used to cook for who was no longer there. The kitchen was where I could see it first.
So the follow-up question was rarely about food. It was: what changed?
What I said when the answer was zero
Never “cook more.” That is advice, and advice is free and mostly useless. I asked for one dinner. One, this week, something the patient already knew how to make without looking anything up.
People underestimate how much of the benefit sits in that first meal, and overestimate what it takes to get there. A person who cooks one dinner a week has a functioning kitchen, some food in it, and evidence that they can do it. A person who has committed to cooking seven has usually made a decision they will quietly abandon by Thursday and feel bad about on Friday.
I would rather have the one than the seven.
Where a supplement fits into this
Juvelixir is a dietary supplement. It is nutritional support for adults who are already doing the work, and it is not food. It cannot substitute for a kitchen, and I have never seen anything in a bottle produce what I watched a well-run kitchen produce over a decade of appointments.
The order has not changed. Get some dinners back. Then, if the foundation is working and you want to do more on top of it, look at what else is worth adding.
And if your appetite, your weight, or your ability to eat normally has shifted in a way you did not choose, that is a conversation for your own physician rather than for a column. It is worth having properly.
See what sixty years in practice taught me about supplements — read the anchor entry →
These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This article is for general educational purposes only and is not medical advice. Individual experiences vary. Talk with your doctor or pharmacist before starting any new supplement or making changes to your diet, exercise, or sleep routine, especially if you take medication, have a health condition, or are pregnant or nursing.