Consider my great, great grandparents. They lived on a small farm and were largely self-sufficient. They ate two or three meals a day and never snacked. Food was locally sourced; vegetables and fruits were fresh and ripe; chickens spent the day in the fields. Fish came out of nearby streams and rivers, and meat came from animals hunted in the forests or grazed on the farm.

There were no pesticides, no foods shipped thousands of miles, no meat from animals fattened with corn and soybeans, no fish from fish farms. Candy, soda, and junk foods were almost unknown. There were no processed and packaged foods as we know them, and there were no fast-food restaurants — foods that are all heavily marketed today yet are inherently unhealthy but tasty with their ingredients of white flour, fat, sugar, and salt.

Everyone moved all day long, mostly outdoors; that was just natural. And much of that movement was hard work, the kind that kept muscles strong from lifting, bending, digging, or hoeing. The kids were sent out, if not helping with farm chores, to play, play that included lots of movement.

Of course, stress was present, but somehow, they dealt with it, allowing it to “run off their backs.” After a day of good food and plenty of movement, they slept easily and soundly from when the sun went down until the sun came up. Very few people smoked; cigarettes were not available. Alcohol was abundant, mostly homemade cider, beer, and wine, but most did not drink excessively.

Life was a constant challenge to the mind as well as the body. Families worked and played together and interacted with their neighbors. There were no radios, TVs, or video games; families interacted with each other, and grandparents were honored and part of the family.

Many people, of course, died early, especially of trauma, childbirth, and infectious diseases. Still, many also lived to a “ripe old age” yet rarely developed the chronic diseases of today — obesity, diabetes, lung cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease.

We do not live like that today and there is no reason to try to go back. But is there anything you can do directly to avoid developing a chronic disease now or in the future? Yes. It is all about modifying your lifestyles.

There are seven key steps.

• Eat a healthy diet every day
• Get adequate exercise at least 6 days per week
• Manage your chronic stress
• Enhance your sleep
• Don’t smoke or overdrink alcohol; don’t get hooked on drugs
• Challenge your brain regularly
• Stay socially engaged.

Be sure to take good care of your teeth, don’t drink or text and drive. Develop a positive attitude and be sure you have thought about your purpose in life.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC,) Americans consume an average of 57 pounds of added sugar annually! Packaged in 4-pound bags, imagine 14 bags on your kitchen table — four times that for a family of four. Of course, you are sure you don’t eat that much added sugar, but someone else is consuming even more to make it average out. To top it off, we eat an excessive number of foods made from white flour (e.g., cereal, cakes, pies, cookies, pastries, and pizza) — which is digested directly into sugar. And, of course, many of those foods are high in added sugar and often fats and salt.

Here is a bit more detail: For adult Americans, men consume about 19 teaspoons (76 grams) of sugar per day; women 15 (60 grams), both well above the recommendations of the American Heart Association of 9 teaspoons (38 grams) for men and 6 tsp (25 grams) for women. In addition, the World Health Organization recommends no more than 5% of a 2000-calorie diet be from added sugars (including honey, fruit juices, etc.) or 25 grams per day.

Lack of exercise and an unhealthy diet go together. Today we drive to work, stop for a pastry and latte, sit at a desk most of the day, eat a fast-food lunch, enjoy an afternoon snack, drive home, call out for pizza, watch television, and go to bed.

Stress is everywhere — you need to check your emails and texts right up to bedtime. Your stress levels are off the charts. You probably don’t smoke and that is good. You have all too little time for socializing with true friends. The alarm rings all too early, and you are up and at it again.

What can you do? Will it really make a difference? Yes, focus on these 7 keys of lifestyle modifications.

1-Prepare meals from scratch; it does not take much time. Think of it not as a diet that eliminates something but one that includes abundant nutrient-dense foods. Eat locally sourced, preferably organic vegetables and fruits in abundance.

Vegetables should be the major components of your diet with a wide variety of types, colors, and textures to obtain all of the primary nutrients. Include dark green leafies daily — spinach, collards, arugula, and kale are good choices. Nuts, seeds, and foods like avocados and olives have healthy oils, and omega-3 fatty acids are in wild-caught finfish like salmon, mackerel, and sardines. Avoid vegetable oils; use cold-pressed virgin olive oil instead.

Don’t forget to have plenty of fresh fruits every day.

Choose chickens and eggs from hens that have been free-ranged. Eat red meat sparingly and choose cuts from range-fed animals that never saw a feedlot. Finally, and very importantly, avoid sugars like the plague and dramatically reduce your intake of foods made from white flour. It follows that you will cut back on processed foods and meals from fast-food restaurants. The Mediterranean Diet is the prototype for this type of eating.

2-Get up and move. Get 30 minutes of walking every day. That alone will have a massive impact on your immediate and long-term health. Add in a few sessions per week of strengthening (“resistance”) exercises. Remember that “sitting is the new smoking.” Park your car a distance from the building entrance. Take the stairs a few flights instead of the elevator. Get up from your computer and move around for five minutes at least every half hour. Consider a stand-up desk. Spend less time sitting in a reclining chair watching TV at night.

3-We all have chronic stress, but many don’t recognize or admit it. Give some serious thought time to your pressures. Eliminate the causes where possible and, for the remainder, consider ways to tamp them down. In addition to good food and regular exercise along with adequate sleep, add in perhaps yoga, meditation, Tai Chi, coherent breathing, or just a few moments every so often to take a couple of deep breaths with the exhalation longer than the inhalation (I will explain the rationale for longer exhales in a later article.)

4-To enhance sleep, allot at least three hours between finishing dinner and bedtime so that your meal has been largely digested. This, of course, means no late-night snack before bed. No caffeine after noon. Avoid reading or watching action or horror books, TV shows, and movies before bedtime. Early in the evening, please turn off your smartphone and the texts, emails, and Facebook with it. Instead, consider some soothing music before bed. Your bedroom needs to be pitch black with all your devices turned off. Keep to a schedule, and remember that you need 7 ½ to eight hours of sleep each night. Please don’t listen to the friend that claims they can get by on 5 or 6 hours; that person is only fooling themself.

5-No tobacco. None, including vaping. And keep alcohol consumption limited.

6-Stimulate and challenge your brain. It needs to be used just like your muscles. Learn a new language or play an instrument. Learn a dance routine. Do something creative like art or writing.

7-Social engagement is critical to slow aging, prevent disease, and enhance a sense of wellness. Maintain connections with close friends and relatives.

Does all of this make a difference? Yes.

In the Nurse’s Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study totaling over 100,000 participants and observed for more than 30 years, those who followed the five “low-risk lifestyles” lived substantially longer than those who followed none. For example, a 50-year-old female could expect to live 14 added years (life expectancy rose from 29 to 43 additional years), and for a male, 12 additional years (26 rose to 38 additional years.) I will explore this and similar studies in-depth in a later article.

Whatever the exact number of added years, the direction is clear. Healthy lifestyles mean more years of healthy life. And remember, it was not just more years of life but fewer chronic illnesses for a longer “health span.” Definitely worthwhile.

Does this seem like a tall order? Perhaps, but pick one or two areas to work on at a time. Don’t try to do it all at once. Don’t set the goal too high to start. Set some intermediate goals, ones that you can achieve. Then move up to a more comprehensive goal. After a while, you’ll be doing great; you’ll have more energy, more enthusiasm for life, much better health, and a longer, healthier lifespan. And as a bonus, if you get started early in adult life, you will reap the added benefits of compounding, just like saving for retirement. What could be better than that?

The post What Can You Do To Prevent Developing a Chronic Disease? appeared first on Medika Life.

Now, back to the question my patients are asking. The best thing you can do for your health is something that you won’t find on a magazine cover: it’s simply to think deeply about it. Look at your life — your values, your purpose — and see what you need your health for. Sink your teeth into that. Sit with it for a while. Think about it, talk about it, write about it. What are you really looking for? Channel your inner toddler and ask “why” until you hear yourself answer something deeply true. This process doesn’t yield immediate, jaw-dropping before and after pictures, but it does help to establish a meaningful, sustainable relationship with your health and goals.

Step away from your smartphone

Now, stop googling for health hacks (or double-tapping them on your feed). Hacks are solutions in search of problems. They are created to capture your attention. Hacks are things you can do with as little effort as possible. If you are looking for ways to exert no effort, though, I wonder why you are trying to improve your health at all. Is your health not worth doing well? Is it less important than other things you’ve chosen to spend your energy and resources on? Don’t shortchange your commitment to your health. Dream bigger! Once you’ve established your own internal reasons for pursuing health, you can work on identifying goals and steps to meet them. You might find it helpful to work with a healthcare provider, coach, or even a like-minded friend to build informed, manageable steps that are appropriate for your life.

The problem with hacks

I get it, hacks are fun. They’re immediate and full of promises. You can start something, buy something, sign up for something, and it feels like you’re going somewhere. But. . . where? Whose road are you walking down, and why was it built? Where does it lead? Who is it designed to serve, and whose values is it based on? Maybe, there’s something for sale, and the purpose is to make money for another person. Maybe there are embedded assumptions of white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia, or fatphobia, and the purpose is to perpetuate a power imbalance. Maybe there are other values underlying the hack that are not in line with the reasons you need your health. Woah. Suddenly those ten weird tips don’t seem so cool.

So slow down, step back, and take a deep breath. You can find small actions that will improve your health, but they won’t come from clickbait, they’ll come from within. Stop hacking. Start healing.

Elizabeth Knight is a scientist, nurse practitioner, educator, and coach. You can find her at www.flowerpower.health.

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His mission has its roots in personal loss; his father died of cancer at a young age. When Jeff discovered that the cancer was largely a result of lifestyle choices, it demonstrated how unhealthy behaviors go unaddressed until it is too late to intervene.

It led to the realization of how backward our traditional health care system has become: it’s really a reactive sick care system that treats people after they’ve already become sick, rather than a proactive health care system that works to keep people healthy and prevent illness through primary prevention.

Jeff’s belief in the critical importance of prevention led him to establish several innovative health care startups prior to founding his current company, Newtopia, a tech-enabled habit change provider that helps health insurers prevent disease and save costs through sustainable habit change instead of late-stage condition management.

As Jeff says:

Health care providers often offer patients lifestyle-related platitudes — eat healthier, exercise more, get more sleep, reduce stress — but they are not trained or incentivized to take the time to really get to know their patients and their unique needs and work with them to make the daily choices that will build new, incremental healthy habits. So how do we make sure that these recommendations actually turn into change in people’s lives? A new front door and front line is required. Changing and stacking habits requires both a hyper-personalized approach (taking into account factors such as genetics, medical history, social determinants of health, behavioral profile and personal preferences, for example) and a strong human connection supported by technology to ensure inspiration, build confidence and accountability..

Jeff is committed to helping health insurers re-envision their investment in health and realize the greater returns of creating pro-health and pro-wellbeing workplace cultures. By addressing the unhealthy life choices that are a major risk factor for many noncommunicable diseases –
including obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke – health insurers can proactively intervene to change the trajectory of chronic disease development, saving lives and reducing costs.

According to Michael Palmer, the former Chief Innovation and Digital Officer at Aetna, and current Newtopia Board member:

Jeff proved his solution works – for Aetna he netted out over $1,500/year in medical cost savings per member per year, kept over 70% of them engaged to achieve their goals, and materially reduced risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease for a large percentage of our at-risk people. We even co-published the results of a randomized controlled trial – and Aetna would only put our stamp of approval on a solution that is proven safe, effective and economically beneficial. In addition to finding the secret sauce of personalized habit change, Jeff has built an inspiring team of health coaches, technologists and habit change gurus who will likely change the trajectory of healthcare for good.

Prior to founding Newtopia in 2008, Jeff was co-founder and chief operating officer of Cleveland Clinic Canada, a collaboration between the Cleveland Clinic Foundation and Canyon Ranch, and Canada’s leading destination for preventive health and lifestyle management; co-founder and chief operating officer of Life Screening Centers Inc., a cancer screening and prevention company; and co-founder and head of operations of Genetic Diagnostics Inc., an early-stage biotechnology company commercializing a new genetic diagnostic testing platform. 
 
Jeff holds a joint Juris Doctor and Master of Business Administration from York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School and Schulich School of Business in Toronto. He received his bachelor’s degree from Western University in London, Ontario. 

If you’re interested in the push to create a more sustainable approach to health care, Jeff is someone you’ll want to have on your radar. If you’d like to connect with him, you can do so via the links below.

Getting in touch with Jeff

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