Alan Greene

How would a family go about finding a local doctor like you?

Well, we're just putting on our website a new tool, 'Find a Great Doctor,' where people can rate their doctors. What we've done is recommended green doctors and you can find someone that matches your needs.

How can a stressed-out, sleep-deprived mother add green concerns to her list of things to think about and incorporate into her life without exploding?

What I try to do is find situations in which everybody wins: the parents, the kid, and the earth. One of the best examples of that is breast-feeding. When someone's bottle-fed, there's this long trail of environmental impacts: [the carbon footprint of] cows; the fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics and hormones that go into the milk; the factory; the packaging; shipping it across many miles, which causes more air pollution and fuel loss; and then the plastic bottle that has lots of health concerns about it. Whereas nursing is the ultimate eating local: It's right there, there's no packaging, it's perfectly designed for the kid, and the mom burns an extra 300 calories a day, as if she was running a mile or two. It lowers her and her baby's lifetime cancer risk, and it decreases the baby's need for antibiotics, surgery or hospitalization. So it's this total win-win: better for the planet, better for mom, better for the baby—and easier.

Are there smaller everyday examples that might not occur to most people?

The littlest thing, for older kids, is choosing organic ketchup. It costs about the same, most kids find that it tastes better, and not only are you supporting a system of agriculture that isn't dependent on things that are toxic to the environment, but you also end up with, on average when it's been tested, 100% more antioxidants in the ketchup. So you get a lot more nutrition for essentially the same amount of money, and you don't even have to think about it. It increases [cancer-preventing] lycopene in kids' diets by 57% if you make that one little switch.

So what's next for you?

I'm working on a new book right now that I'm very excited about. The working title is The Diet So Your Baby Will Never Have To Diet, and it's about how to get kids learning to love healthy foods from the beginning. I think that our obesity epidemic in kids is such a huge problem and this is really a way to turn it around: that simple food is really great for the planet and great for families. The other big thing with the website is that we're getting ready for a major relaunch within the next month, that will include a big green directory of resources for people, tools and people for each other.

As a green doctor, do you prescribe green medicines, or is it more about preventing illnesses and infections in the first place?

Both. It's far better to prevent an illness than to have to treat one, and many of the best ways to prevent it are environmental solutions. It's about how we eat, exercise, what kinds of exposures we've have, and once you do get an illness, working with the body instead of against it. One big example that's recently been in the news pertains to over-the-counter decongestants and antihistamines. People are now recognizing they aren't a good idea because there's no evidence they help, they cost a lot, there's all the packaging that's involved, and then there are side effects. Gentler remedies have been shown scientifically to be just as effective. Things like honey or even dark chocolate for coughs in kids over a year old; there are often food solutions, and green solutions, to many of the common illnesses, that at least decrease the medicines needed. For instance, with asthma, Albuterol, the inhaler, is a great life-saving medicine, but by choosing to have a Mediterranean diet, or increasing the number of fruits and vegetables you eat, you can decrease the amount of medication you need. Now, I want to be clear, I'm in many ways a conventional physician in that I think that antibiotics were one of the greatest life-saving inventions of the 20th century—untold suffering has been prevented because of them. It's just that we overused them, and they've gotten out of control. The number one reason kids get prescribed antibiotics is for ear infections, and most ear infections are better treated without them. But in the right setting, they can be great.

Is it possible for a mother to be too green, like raising a baby on a vegan diet?

The first priority is the health of your child. It can be healthy to have a vegan diet, and it can be healthy for kids to be raised vegetarian, as long as people are paying close attention to getting plenty of nutrition. But I've had people come to me who are so concerned about being green that they forget the core health issues. I would keep that central and, after that priority, choose green.

Do you think that there's a difference between how you and a more traditional pediatrician practice medicine on a daily basis? Would a child notice the difference?

Doctors like me look more at the impact of lifestyle choices, the impact of the environment on kids. If someone comes in with eczema, the typical medical approach is to put steroids on top of the skin to treat the symptoms. My approach is to try to figure out where this is coming from, what kind of exposure might have been triggering it, to decrease and deal with that, and to use things like omega-3 fats and probiotics to try to decrease the allergic response instead of just trying to cover up the symptoms.

The green movement has been growing at a pretty rapid rate—has the medical community been quick to jump on that boat, or have they been lagging behind?

In the last year, I've seen a big change. At the Academy of Pediatrics Meeting this fall, there was a great deal of interest in this, so it's snowballing now, but it was a long time coming. It was a long time coming for me, too: It was 1995 when we started our website, and it was just to answer questions parents had about their kids' health. But in early 1996, we had a personal health crisis in our family. My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, and it was so bad that her oncologist said she would never live to see a new year. That focused our attention very much on questions like, 'Where did this come from, and what can we do since they've said there's nothing that can be done?' Looking back, she'd grown up on a conventional farm with pesticides that data has shown can cause breast cancer. But I'd never heard about that in medical school, so I started looking at some of the things that are going into our food supply, and the more I did that, the more important I saw that food-production issues were. On the positive side, when food is grown organically, it has on average 30% more antioxidants, the things that help prevent and repair damage, and so I got very excited about helping to prevent and repair health issues in kids and adults. I grew up thinking about the environment, but became passionate back in 1996.