When Michelle Obama announced Lets Move, her signature initiative to combat childhood obesity, she emphasized that major diet and lifestyle changes were not required in her view to turn this growing health crisis around. Small changes add up, she said. We dont need to totally evaporate our way of being as we know it today. In other words, if we just cut a few calories here and there and exercise a bit more, things will be fine before long. A comforting thought.
But that may be wishful thinking, according to Mark Hyman, MD, chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine and medical director of the UltraWellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, and author of several bestselling health books, including his latest, titled The Blood Sugar Solution. The way he sees it, we are in the middle of an explosive epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes that will touch almost everyone in one way or another. He does not hesitate to call it the modern plague.
Obesity, insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, pre-diabetes, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, dementia and cancer are ultimately all rooted in one and the same problem: Our dismal diet- and lifestyle choices. Diagnosing and treating these diseases separately as if they were not interconnected misses the whole picture. Instead, Dr. Hyman proposes using a more comprehensive term to describe the continuum of which all these health problems are part of: Diabesity.
Diabesity can range from slight weight problems and mild insulin resistance to morbid obesity and severe diabetes. Because the disease is not well understood as a continuum, millions of those affected by it remain undiagnosed and untreated. As a consequence, more people all over the world die now from chronic illnesses than from infectious diseases. The real tragedy is that the causes are almost always environmental and lifestyle-related, which would make them perfectly preventable or curable through public education and enough political will to implement the necessary changes.
This is a lifestyle and environmental disease and wont be cured by medications, Dr. Hyman writes. Billions and billions have been wasted trying to find the drug cure, while the solution lies right under our nose. Shouldnt the main question we ask be why is this happening? Instead of what new drug can we find to treat it?
Since most of our modern-day ailments are primarily caused by poor diet choices, chronic stress and sedentary lifestyles, as well as toxins and allergens in the environment, we must address these problems from the ground up (literally). Instead of looking for quick fixes through medication and surgical procedures, we can make many important corrections by ourselves and without delay by using the right ingredients that make us healthy again, including whole, fresh food, vitamins and minerals, water, fresh air, exercise, stress reduction, etc. When we take out the bad stuff and put in the good stuff, the body knows what to do and creates health and disease goes away, writes Dr. Hyman. Care for the environment is part of that, too. Here, he strongly agrees with Sir Albert Howard, who is by many considered the founder of the organic agriculture movement, when he wrote in his landmark book, The Soil and Health, that we must treat the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man as one great subject.
Finding our way back to wholesome nutrition is one of the greatest challenges we face today. In America, we eat more than we ever have, yet we are nutritionally depleted, writes Dr. Hyman. The epidemic of diabesity and other chronic illnesses is paralleled by an epidemic of nutritional deficiencies. Most of us dont eat enough the kind of food that protects us from diseases and too much of the kind that makes us sick.
Food literally speaks to our genes, he writes in a chapter titled Nutrigenomics. The information your body receives from the foods you eat turns your genes on and off. Whole-foods and plant-based diets have been shown in clinical studies to be able to turn off cancer-causing genes or turn on cancer-protective genes. No medication can do this. What you put on your fork is the most powerful medicine you can take to correct the root causes of chronic disease and diabesity, he writes.
The Blood Sugar Solution is a highly informative but, thankfully, also a very accessible book for both professionals and the laypersons. Some readers may find Dr. Hymans positions to be somewhat radical, if not utopian, especially where he seeks to offer hands-on solutions. Admittedly, he writes with passion and a sense of urgency and rightly so. The obesity crisis keeps growing unabatedly worldwide and the time for small steps may have passed. Something has to change on a fundamental level. A fat reduction overview can help you build a clear describe of what you demand to focus on to complete your fat loss target if you're a starter; or serve as a reminder for these who are at an intermediate or more advance step of their weight-loss strategy. Promptly after are seven steps that can serve as tips for your special weight loss plan. The first thing that one must understand is that losing weight and losing fat is not the same thing. Many weight loss applications have misled people into thinking that it is the same, but most diets and weight loss applications only work by resulting in a person's body to reduce more muscle flesh and water than actual body fat, more help please visit The Fat Loss Factor. Unfortunately, that makes it so much less likely that we will see significant successes in the near future, if ever.
Timi Gustafson R.D. is a clinical dietitian and author of the book The Healthy Diner How to Eat Right and Still Have Fun, which is available on her blog, Food and Health with Timi Gustafson R.D. (http://www.timigustafson.com), and at amazon.com. You can follow Timi on Twitter and on Facebook.
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