I listened to a fascinating lecture by Dr. David Katz during my Integrative Nutrition studies this week. He boldly claims that a few lifestyle changes could practically eradicate most of the chronic diseases from which Americans currently suffer. Dr. Katz’s lecture was incredibly convicting for me personally.
As a person who has experienced the freedom that wholistic lifestyle changes can offer on overall health, I hung on every intriguing word that he shared. He suggested that there is no magic pill for abundant health, and that lifestyle is the medicine we need. He shared that our mission needs to be getting out of the dark woods of chronic diseases. But in order to do that, we need to see the forest through the trees.
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Decades of scientific evidence supports that a few major factors account for all chronic diseases and premature deaths. This is actually good news, because they are factors that we can all do something about. They are all modifiable. Studies dating back to 1993 prove over and over again that the overwhelming and consistent prevalence of these three factors dominate the causes of chronic diseases, and therefore premature deaths:
- smoking tobacco
- eating a poor diet
- lacking in physical activity
A 2009 German study compared these three factors, with the addition of maintaining a healthy weight. The results were mind blowing. The research showed that people were 80% less likely to develop a chronic disease when they didn’t smoke, they ate a diet that included habitual intake of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, they were physically active, and they had a well-controlled weight.
Wow. 80%.
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Even more intriguing, a healthy diet including regular fruits, vegetables, and whole grains was found to be the biggest predictor of health. This is such good news because it tells us that simply adding these foods into our diets is enough to make a change. We don’t need any fad diets or new research. Simply eating whole foods rich in nutrients is enough to lower our likelihood of developing a chronic disease.
A cancer study from Dean Ornish resulted in the same information, and found that “lifestyle medicine” can actually turn off 500 cancer promoter genes and dramatically down-regulate their expression. His study suggests that we can refashion our fate at the gene level and actually nurture our nature through our lifestyle choices. No more nurture versus nature debates!
Using decades of research and studies, including the ones cited above, Dr. Katz founded the True Health Initiative – a “six cylinder engine of lifestyle medicine.” The basic premise is that if we can get these six factors right, everything else is less important.
So what are they?
1. Forks
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The Integrative Nutrition Circle of Life
Eat a diet comprised mostly of minimally-processed, plant-based food sources that include fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
2. Feet
Get routine physical activity.
3. Fingers
Avoid toxins, particularly tobacco and alcohol.
4. Sleep
Get adequate quality and quantity of sleep each night.
5. Stress
Effectively mitigate and manage psychological stressors.
6. Love
Cultivate meaningful, supportive relationships and strong social bonds.
Why should we care about these factors?
The obvious answer is that they can greatly lower our rates of chronic disease. But also important to consider is that obesity trends are only increasing. That points to more cancer, more stroke, more heart disease, more arthritis, more dementia, and more diabetes. Sadly, trends are showing that up to 40% of Americans will be diabetic by 2050. With 28 million people currently diagnosed in America, that equates to as many as 150 million people by 2050. That doesn’t include people who have undiagnosed diabetes.
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Source: True Health Initiative
And even scarier, it’s thought that the mortality toll of obesity is worse than previously assumed because more people are experiencing obesity at younger and younger ages. We’re raising a generation of children who live in a world of obesity. Kids now have cardiac risk factors, including a 35% increased rate of stroke, because of epidemic childhood obesity rates.
We need to pay attention to these statistics. It matters because we don’t need expensive pharmaceuticals to make lifestyle changes. Decades of research support the fact that our lifestyle choices can be our medicine. Incredibly, it’s estimated that we could eliminate 80% of chronic diseases, including 90% of diabetes and up to 60% of all cancers, with these changes.
By making slow changes to our lifestyles, one at a time, we can reverse our rates of chronic diseases. And together, we can help to reverse the trends of our future.
Which one can you most easily begin implementing today?