- normal blood sugar
- Exercise
- Weight loss and bmi
- type 2 diabetes
- Blood sugar
- physical activity social connection glucose
heart diseases Exercise Weight loss and bmi typ
heart diseases Exercise Weight loss and bmi type 2 diabetes Blood sugar normal blood sugar vegan diet
so the amount of money that we spend on health care every year is almost
inconceivable we spend about 316 billion dollars on cardiovascular related costs and then another 327 billion on costs associated with diabetes last year we spent over $11,000 per person on health care and now the irony of this is that most of that money is actually
going to sick care not to things that help us with healthy behaviors or for wellness so what are we buying with all of that money is it good health is it maybe a long life expectancy do we actually have more vitality and resilience and endurance than citizens of other countries that spend significantly less than we do on health care every year unfortunately no actually not only no but hell no now
growing up I actually didn’t want to be a doctor what I actually wanted to be was a shaman more specifically what I wanted to be was a healer I wanted to care for the physical and the mental and the emotional and the spiritual health of my community.
while living my life ensconced in that web of relationships that makes up a tribe now you may not be surprised that shaman was not a career path that was listed in my high school guidance counselor’s college
20% of the health outcomes here in the United States are directly related to the clinical care
catalogs so I decided to choose medicine instead and I thought that becoming a family doc would be the most modern path to serving my community as a healer but I had no idea what I was getting myself into now it might surprise you to know that only about 20% of the health outcomes here in the United States are directly related to the clinical care that we
receive so that’s like the quality of the doctors and then nurses and medical facilities we can access the remaining 80% is directly related to our own health behaviors
socioeconomic factors and the impact of our physical environment so the chronic
disease epidemic that has really emerged over the last 50 years including
cardiovascular disease diabetes cancer dementia these things can really be attributed to the cumulative effect of our lifestyle choices that we make every day for the most part these diseases
happen by choice not by chance and unfortunately all those pills and
procedures that we use to try to combat them it might slow down this impending
train wreck of disability and disease but it rarely is able to bring us back to a
state of resilience and well-being but
what if we could change the game what if we could create a new paradigm something
that actually brings us both along health span and a long lifespan well I studied hard in medical school and I learned many things I met brilliant clinicians I devoured cutting-edge
research studies I experienced the joy of delivering babies and I also found that peace and solace are possible even for those that are dying if someone has
time to sit and breathe and just be there for the experience with them so I found a quote during medical school that I felt distilled this essence of being a
healer and it said to cure sometimes to relieve often but to comfort always and
so I chose that as my Creed and I absorbed everything that I could from the late 20th century Western medical paradigm my memories for me and physiology and pathology microbiology I
learned all these evidence-based guidelines for treating hypertension and
I eventually became a practicing physician with my own
heart disease and high cholesterol and diabetes I eventually became a practicing physician with my own panel of wonderful patients forced by the system to spend 15 minutes or less with
each of them but still finding my purpose and trying to live that Creed Cheers sometimes we
leave often but comfort always but unfortunately I began to see that the medical paradigm that I had been trained in and practiced was not working I cared for many children who struggled with
obesity and had very poor cardiovascular fitness so much so that they could not even run one lap around a gym without getting out of breath
and I could see that they were already well on their way to a lifetime of chronic disease just because of the lifestyle choices and social norms that were surrounding them so coming to see me once a year for their well child check and being told
drink less sweetened beverages eat more fruits and vegetables participate in active play for 60 minutes a day this was completely ineffective I mean especially compared to the tsunami
of competing messages that they were exposed to every day in our society asking them and urging them to eat more sugary sweet salty foods to exercise less and to consume as much digital
entertainment as possible I kind of felt like I was trying to prevent an avalanche from like burying them by flicking cotton balls at it which is basically an exercise in futility and
how about their parents well following evidence-based guidelines on how to treat my patient’s hypertension and diabetes and heart disease did not reverse these problems I frequently
found that I needed to either increase their medications or maybe even add
rising blood pressure and blood sugar and chest pain the pills and procedures
additional new pills to try to combat the stubbornly rising blood pressure and blood sugar and chest pain the pills and procedures that I had been taught we’re the gold standard for maintaining and improving health had failed so I became discontented actually in the medical
vernacular I reached my puke point so I felt like there had to be a better way to nurture well-being and reverse disease and being a science geek.
I decided to take a deep dive into the medical literature and hope that I could
find some answers there so one of the most inspiring and impactful studies that I have ever read
was done back in 2009 and it evaluated four simple lifestyle factors one does a person have a BMI less than 30 which means they’re not classified as obese do they smoke three do they participate in at least three and a half hours a week of physical activity so that’s like
thirty minutes a day and we are not talking about running marathons here this is just getting your body moving enough to get your heart rate up into that light to moderate activity zone and
then four do they eat a predominantly diet that has fruits vegetables and whole grains with low red meat consumption so I’m not talking about a vegan diet here are not even a impacted by our lifestyle choices so let’s talk about our number one killer which is heart disease heart disease is
the most likely thing to kill anyone sitting in this room there’s over 600,000 deaths from
cardiovascular disease every year in this country so that’s about one person
every minute we know that healthy diet regular physical activity stress management restorative sleep social connection avoiding tobacco like all of those things are really powerful preventive strategies but what about if you already have heart disease .
well it turns out that patients who have severe heart disease who have been put on a low-fat whole food plant-based diet can
show increases in their blood flow that makes their symptoms disappear how long
does it take for this transformation to occur three weeks that’s right people who had been told that they were out of options so I had significant improvement
in their symptoms and in objective measurements of blood flow in just three
weeks on a dietary lifestyle therapy so how about diabetes turns out that using as a food as medicine approach to type 2 diabetes shows similarly dramatic results so they took a bunch of men who had type 2 diabetes that were requiring daily insulin injections.
and they admitted them to the hospital they put them on a low-fat whole food plant-based
diet and they fed them this diet so that it was weight maintaining so that meant
they weighed them every day and if they showed signs of losing weight they made
them eat even more food so what happened to him turns out that the insulin requirements of the group decreased by 60% and over half of the men were able to stop their insulin injection
entirely their blood sugar normalized despite losing no weight and having had
diabetes for years so how long did it take you know for these astonishing results to happen do you know is months 16 days it took only 16 days of having a whole food plant-based diet for their bodies to start to transform and to begin that healing progress the process.
so the good news is our community doesn’t need to wait for a new study or a new pill we
can start tackling our chronic epidemic of chronic disease right now with tools that we already know to be effective food physical activity social connection.