If you’re like my family, you’ve been taking advantage of this spring’s unseasonably (well, in Iowa) warm weather to get grilling early. Your grillables call for side dishes that stimulate your taste buds with lively flavors, like this make-ahead salad. It’s easy to throw together and delicious to boot.

The salad is also compatible with “VegWeek 2012,” which ends on Sunday. This seven-day event was launched in 2009 by Compassion Over Killing, a nonprofit animal advocacy organization based in Washington, DC. I’m not vegetarian and I prefer to avoid the politicization of food, but I fully believe in the health benefits of increasing one’s consumption of fruits and veggies. Are you vegetarian? If so, what’s your best tip or favorite recipe for your plant-based diet?

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I’m not a vegetarian, but I’ve found that incorporating vegetarian recipes in my diet lets me reduce some calories and fat and increase my veggie intake. I insist, however, that those recipes taste good. To me, eating is like reading: With so many great books (foods) to take in, why bother with the boring and bad ones?

That led me to read with interest Joe Yonan’s recent column in The Washington Post online about his search for “the elusive homemade veggie burger.” He disdains store-bought versions that are “dry, bland or mushy disks that not even a staunch vegetarian can embrace.” He came to recommend a recipe below adapted from an option at Veggie Galaxy in Cambridge, MA.

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What are you afraid of? When he turned 50, Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist and professor at Cornell University, became increasingly anxious about aging and what began to feel like “imminent death.” Then, as the Washington Post recently reported, “he had a conversation with a nearly blind, waxy-skinned, jubilant 90-year-old named June. ‘Young man,’ June told him, ‘you will learn, I hope, that happiness is what you make it, where you are…It’s my responsibility to be as happy as I can.’”

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Below is another tasty recipe from Des Moines University’s “Nutrition 101″ course, in which DMU Wellness Director Joy Schiller, M.S., CHES, and David Spreadbury, Ph.D., chair of biochemistry and nutrition, co-teach students how to stock their pantries and kitchens, how to approach various cooking techniques and – most important – how to cook a wide variety of foods for healthful, quick meal preparation. These are invaluable lessons students can incorporate both in their lives and in interactions with future patients.

You can learn more about the class and watch students in action in the spring issue of DMU Magazine and in this web-extra video.This pick is from class member and second-year osteopathic medical student Stephanie Athman.

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Last week’s recipe was a pick from Des Moines University’s “Nutrition 101″ course, in which DMU Wellness Director Joy Schiller, M.S., CHES, and David Spreadbury, Ph.D., chair of biochemistry and nutrition, co-teach students how to stock their pantries and kitchens, how to approach various cooking techniques and – most important – how to cook a wide variety of foods for healthful, quick and delicious meal preparation. These are invaluable lessons students can incorporate both in their lives and in interactions with future patients.

This hands-on class teaches medical students that healthy cooking is not brain surgery.

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Today is day 5 of National Public Health Week 2012! Below, members of DMU’s Master of Public Health Student Club discuss today’s theme: mental and emotional well-being.

Why focus on mental and emotional well-being?

• Many mental health disorders are preventable and treatable.
• About one in five people experience a mental, emotional, or behavioral disorder at some point in their life.
• Fewer than half of people diagnosed with a mental illness receive treatment in any given year.
• An American dies of suicide about every 15 minutes.

What can you do if you want to start small?

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