Ginger Hudock

Latest Author Features

Garden-Fresh ‘Maters

As a child I am not sure that I realized you could purchase fresh tomatoes in a store, because all the ones I ate were homegrown and garden-fresh. My family lived with my grandmother from the time I was six, and every year she grew the most delicious tomatoes. She did not have a huge garden, but instead, she planted tomatoes (and sometimes other vegetables) in the spaces between her beloved rosebushes. I remember that she saved our coffee grounds to amend the soil. Even though the concept of organic gardening was not well known in the 1970s, she instinctively knew that the flavor of the tomatoes would be enhanced

Six Steps to Simple Home Cooking

The closure of restaurants and the stay-at-home orders that were enacted during the 2020 COVID-19 crisis have magnified the fact that many households are not cooking for themselves. Many families were eating takeout and convenience meals for the most part. In some cases they didn’t know how to cook, but in other cases it was because of excessive busy-ness. Some people have used this forced time at home as an opportunity to do more cooking from scratch. I was a typical full-time working mother until twelve years ago. Breakfast was usually boxed cereal with milk. My normal lunch was a frozen Lean Cuisine meal with a Diet Coke. I sometimes

Do You Need to Take Supplements to Be Healthy?

I first thought about supplements when I became pregnant with my first child. My obstetrician prescribed prenatal vitamins which I dutifully took. My son was born very healthy and then I promptly stopped taking them. I took prenatal vitamins again a few years later when I was pregnant with my daughter. I did not think about supplements again until 2008 when my general practitioner checked my Vitamin D levels as part of the many tests she ran to discover the causes of my physical pains and exhaustion. Over the years, through my nutrition education, I have learned a lot more about the role supplements can play in our health status.

4 Lessons I Learned From an Unexpected Diagnosis

“Mrs. Hudock, you have a number of heart abnormalities.” The cardiologist was speaking to me after he had viewed my first echocardiogram. “The right side of your heart is severely enlarged. You have several valves that are leaking. You may have pulmonary hypertension. You may have atrial fibrillation and you may have a hole in your heart.” WHAT? I could not believe I was hearing this. I am a nutritionist and eat an almost perfect whole foods diet. I have low blood pressure and low cholesterol. I exercise all the time. I can’t be having heart problems. But I was. I had begun having heart palpitations that were increasing in

Tips for Exercising For A Lifetime of Health

My husband, Doug, is a natural athlete. Doug was successful in both baseball and football when he was in middle and high school. As a young adult, in his late teens and twenties, he became an amateur boxer. Later on he took up karate and tennis. He also became a scuba diver for the Augusta Rescue Dive Team. But his favorite sport is golf. Doug continues to play on several amateur golf leagues. I, on the other hand, am a lifetime klutz. In elementary school I was the last one picked for teams when we played kickball. When I was 10, I swam on the local summer swim team. The

Fasting For Faith and Health

When I was a child it was the custom in my family and in my church to give something up for Lent. This was most often a food such as candy or soft drinks. The couple of years that I gave up candy for Lent, the candy that I got in my basket on Easter Sunday morning tasted even sweeter because I had not eaten candy for about six weeks. As a child I did not understand the spiritual implications of fasting, or that it might have health implications as well. Fasting as a Spiritual Discipline Fasting is a tradition in many religions including Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism.

How to Live to 100

As I entered my 60s, I became more interested in how to live a long and healthy life. Most people would like to increase their lifespans, but even more important is increasing your health span. Health span is the number of years in which you live without chronic diseases and are able to carry on your normal life tasks independently. What can we learn about increasing both lifespan and health span from centenarians? Boston University is conducting one major study, the New England Centenarian Study. Areas of the world that have the largest numbers of centenarians are called Blue Zones. Researchers are also doing experiments with animals on diet and

Find Your Bigger Why to Maximize Your Health

If you are reading this column, I assume that you would like to eat in a healthier way. Perhaps you would like to lose some weight. I was talking to someone recently who said she lost over 20 pounds four years ago. When I asked her why, she said that she turned 55 and did not like how she looked. Now four years later she has gained all of that weight back and then some. She is not unique. Studies show that between one-third and two-thirds of people who diet regain most of the lost weight within five years, mostly because they did not make a permanent change to their

How to Adapt Recipes

Most of my readers are on some sort of specialized diet due to a health condition. There are recipes available online for most diets, including low carb, ketogenic, gluten-free, dairy-free, reduced sugar, and others. There are even specialized magazines for paleo or allergy-free diets. Sometimes you may want to make a special family recipe or favorite treat that includes one or more ingredients you can no longer have. Over the years I have learned some techniques for adapting standard recipes to suit specialized diets. Follow my process as I adapt an online muffin recipe to suit my own dietary needs. Use Healthy Ingredients Each time I make a recipe I

Ginger’s Food Rules

Rules, rules, rules. People are confused about what to eat. There is a lot of information about healthy eating available on-line and in books. Unfortunately, much of it is conflicting. It is difficult for the average person to figure out which sources are most reliable. There are a couple of successful and reliable books published with the title Food Rules. Food Rules, by Catherine Shanahan, provides a guide to healthy eating with a real food, Paleo-diet slant. Shanahan gives a lot of great advice, but there are 97 rules related to food and another 20 related to general health and lifestyle. This is likely to be overwhelming for most people.