Training and background
- 1996 Doctor of Medicine Carol Davila University of Medicine and Pharmacy, Bucharest, Romania
- 2000 Residency in Infectious Diseases — five years Victor Babeș Hospital, Bucharest, Romania
- 2001 Emigrated to the United States
- 2004 Master of Science in Human Nutrition Andrews University, Michigan — with a focus on vegetarian nutrition
- 2007 Residency in Internal Medicine — three years Norwalk Hospital, Connecticut, affiliated with Yale University
- Board certified in Internal Medicine American Board of Internal Medicine
- Until 2024 Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences, Yakima, Washington
- Until 2026 Instructor in Internal Medicine Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, Hanover, New Hampshire
- Since 2024 Current Outpatient Internal Medicine Clinic Dartmouth Health, Lyme, New Hampshire
Why this site exists
I see patients every day who live with chronic conditions — diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, arthritis. A great deal can be done to prevent or blunt the impact of these diseases, if lifestyle changes are made early enough and held long enough. That conviction is the foundation of everything here.
The problem is time. A clinic appointment is not long enough to explain why whole grains behave differently from refined ones, or what a basal metabolic rate actually is, or why a supplement that helped a friend may do nothing for you. So I write it down instead, and I build the tools, and I hand people the link.
Two things do most of the work in prevention, and neither is glamorous.
Regular moderate physical activity can prevent and in some cases reverse conditions such as type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure. I am unashamedly a fan of exercise, and I wish more people would drink from what is genuinely the closest thing we have to a fountain of youth. Several of the tools here exist to make that easier to plan and to measure.
A good diet is the other. We now know that a substantial share of coronary heart disease and heart attacks could be prevented by a predominantly plant-based diet. That is not a fringe position; it is where the evidence has landed. Much of my writing here is about how to act on it without turning eating into a joyless arithmetic exercise.
About the calculators
I have a long-standing weakness for health calculators, and over the years I have built or adapted a number of them — ideal weight and BMI, basal metabolic rate, energy cost of activity, walking-test estimates of aerobic fitness. Every one of them is built on a published equation, and each page tells you which equation, why that one rather than a better-known alternative, and how wide the error bars really are.
That last part matters to me. A calculator that hands you a confident single number is usually overselling what it knows. You are welcome to use all of them freely, and I would encourage you to discuss anything surprising with your own clinician.
Where the apps came from
Excess weight is fast becoming the foremost public health problem in the western world, and weight loss attempts have discouragingly low long-term success rates. The honest response to that is not another diet — it is better information and better tools.
That is what NutriRank and VitalFill grew out of: the tracking tools on this site, rebuilt properly for a phone. NutriRank ranks foods by the nutrients they actually contain. VitalFill tracks what you eat against more than forty nutrient targets set for you personally, and shows which ones you fill and which you fall short on.
A word about what I can and cannot do here
Everything on this site is general health education. It is not medical advice, and reading it does not make you my patient. I am not able to answer questions about personal health problems or offer opinions on individual treatments by email — not because I am unwilling, but because doing so responsibly requires an examination, a history, and a chart, none of which a contact form can provide.
For anything specific to you, please speak to your own physician. For everything else, I am glad you are here.