David MacGillivray

When you are cruising the grocery store aisles, you probably flip over a few items to scrutinize their nutrition labels. But do you understand what you’re looking at? The government is working on updating the label to reflect today’s nutritional concerns and include more realistic serving sizes, but until that...

Herbal supplements (botanicals; plant-based medicine) have been used for medicinal purposes for thousands of years. Today they are recognized for having drug-like effects such as improving mood. Products that can have medicinal effects also carry risk, especially if taken with other medicines or supplements. However, most over-the-counter herbal supplements are...

From Shakespeare’s reference to "pumpion" in The Merry Wives of Windsor to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, pumpkin is woven into the fabric of history and cuisine. Native Americans roasted long strips of pumpkin over an open flame and ate them. Colonists made pumpkin pie by slicing off the pumpkin...

There’s a frightening and emerging trend plaguing the dietary supplement (DS) industry. Recent studies (conducted by independent labs, scientists, and/or newspapers) in which DS were randomly and independently tested have shown that DS products do not always contain the ingredients (or the purity of ingredients) stated on the product label....