Ask Dr. Cheryl

Topics discussed in this episode: 

• Why my goal is to move wellness into your hands (2:24)
• Five health habits to living longer (6:20)
• Nutrition deficiencies in America (8:30)
• My goal to help you (9:30)

Transcript:

Welcome to the Wellness table. I'm doctor Cheryl, and today we're going to talk about how only 1% of the American population is eating a healthy diet.  So the question I get so often is, is a healthy diet and lifestyle, does it really make a difference? And it's really interesting when I ask each group of people that would come to the take 10 program. Would you rather change what you eat and eat something healthier or give up something that you love and live 10 years longer? Or would you rather continue eating the foods that you love and die 10 years earlier? Unanimously, it was, “I'd rather keep eating the foods I love. And I'd rather die 10 years earlier.” Shocking to me, I learned a lot from these types of responses when I was talking to real world people that found that changing the foods that we eat to be one of the most difficult things we can do. And as I began to explore that, I realized that taste is a big deal. So if taste isn't there. I'm with all of you. I would rather die 10 years younger myself than to eat food that I don't enjoy. So food is super important to me. I love food and that's what drove me into the field of nutrition and lifestyle medicine. But I promise I won't ask you to leave taste or flavor behind. And so when I ask people again the question, “What if we could find 3 breakfasts, 3 lunches, 3 dinners? What if we could find lots of foods that you really, really love?” They became your favorites and at the same time. They healed, they gave, they made you feel better. You had more energy. Your blood sugar was balanced. You didn't get that post meal slump. I kind of referred to it as the post meal hangover.  So I like to help people discover what was the meal we ate and how can we feel full without cravings and hunger and the desire to keep snacking. And to really feel full for four hours and that's what I call loving the food, feeling full, not having an energy slump and having balanced blood sugars and reaching our health goals. That, to me, was the perfect diet for me and I want to help create that for you. So I've loved nutrition and lifestyle medicine and really food since I was very young and I've always found myself intrigued with how can we make really delicious food, also be the foods that heal. And so that became my life work. I became a registered dietitian. I went to Loma Linda University and loved being a dietitian. And I found that I was able to help people, but this is where I found these questions or I'd wonder, you know, what is the best diet? Do I really know the research? And what I found with nutrition, it's a science that's moving so quickly, and if I didn't understand how to write the study or to read that research, I wouldn't be cutting edge. And I found myself more and more intrigued to continue my education, and I ended up pursuing a a doctorate in Clinical Nutrition at Rutgers University and absolutely I'm a life learner and I love learning more about nutrition, but I spent seven years really learning how to do the research myself, doing my own original research and my goal was to create a tool that could be used with everyone across the globe to actually understand how to move wellness into their own hands. Because I saw as a dietitian there wasn't always money or access to having a dietitian visit at all my medical appointments. In fact, very few people actually see a registered dietitian, and insurance doesn't always cover. So insurance really limits and controls a lot of the education and nutrition education that people get. So in my doctoral work, my goal was to create a tool that could be used to move Wellness into your hands into everyone's hands so that they would know the best foods, the best lifestyle habits, and a simple what I call a prescription of the dose and how much each day we eat. Of the 10 best foods, the 10 healthy habits, that's that's in a simple 20 point score that you can complete yourself. It's not the researchers score. There's a lot of neat scores out there. But I saw in my doctoral work the need for a score completed by you. Easy to do, super simple. That each day I can just shoot for a score of 20 and have the confidence to know that I've eaten more of the foods that heal. And also practiced some of the healthy habits like drinking enough water and moving more. Some of these very simple habits, sleep, sunshine. And as we look at these things, how do I know that I'm doing everything I can so that my body is an environment that can heal itself. It's really quite powerful how the body can heal given these right foods and lifestyle habits. It's beyond any medicine, so as I pursued creating the score and you will see it on our website that you can take it yourself. And the goal is to shoot. For 18 to 20 every day and you're doing everything you can to be as healthy as you can be today. So I was super excited about creating this and we tested this score in the take 10 program and I found the biggest challenge was finding. The score that actually was easy to do, and we tested and we spent. We have over 4000 patients that actually took the score, completed the score, asked questions. So I'm really excited that we have this to share with you in a very easy tested model, but what really inspired the score was looking at some of the research that was done by Harvard, some of the work that says does a healthy diet and lifestyle really make a difference? And as we see some of the research that has been done like when we talk about the nurses health study and the health professional study and here we have 40,000 men, 78,000 women that have been followed for over 28 years and what we find is the five health habits that they saw that were key in living longer, absent from disease were having a healthy diet, being physically active, not smoking, having a healthy body weight and a moderate alcohol intake. They analyze people and what they found is that people that met all the criteria for these five habits, women lived 14 years longer and men lived 12 years longer. And that was after the age of 50 starting to practice these habits after the age of 50. So that was really inspiring to me because I realized that even if we're 50 years old and that's when we began to start to make changes because we realized maybe we've had our first pain point or we've experienced a symptom. Sometimes for people to make changes, they need to have felt a pain point or all of a sudden. I have a new diagnosis of high blood pressure. And so now I'm starting to Google,  “What do I do to lower blood naturally? I don't want to take or rely on this medication that I'm being asked to take, or now I have high cholesterol. What are the things I can do in my diet and lifestyle that can have a medicine-like effect?” And so that's what we want to talk about with Doctor Cheryl Wellness and we'll talk about how can I lower my cholesterol naturally. How can I lower blood pressure naturally? And we'll get into all of those things in detail in future podcasts, but number one for what I want you to know is that in the 20 points score, it targets all across the board, flavor, taste, super important. Having hunger shut off so we don't feel hungry all day. What do we need to make sure we have that? How can I feel sustained energy? We want to target those goals as well, but we also want to turn on the body's natural health defense. So we want to boost immunity. We want to repair. Any damage to our blood vessels? How do we repair our liver? And that's our stem cells and we can talk about the mechanism of action of that. But food drives all of these mechanisms in our body, so eating the right foods and getting a score of 20 out of 20 or even sometimes we say 18 plus gives us all the foods that we need to turn on all those natural, body defenses to actually prevent a chronic disease treat and sometimes even reverse chronic disease.  What I find interesting is the number one nutrition deficiency in America is the lack of fruits and vegetables. And Doctor Gregor just posted a social post that was actually about potassium, being the number one micronutrient deficiency and potassium is in fruits and vegetables. So this really adds more support to that we have a potassium deficient diet and part of the study that we've looked at when we looked at how are people eating and what's the healthy diet? It and how well are people doing with that diet and as they're smoking, they realize that they want to do less smoking. We need to move more, but in the healthy diet score, what we found is less than 1% of the population, including children, were scoring optimal on a healthy diet and that's really alarming to me. And that's my goal is to move that number. And move it in a way that we're not threatening, that you have to give up everything that you love and that you can enjoy the food that you eat. So my goal is to show you how to do more of the foods that heal. And find foods that heal that you also enjoy the taste of and enjoy eating. So how do we really do this and how do we really inspire healthier eating with each one of us in our home and in our lives? And we've talked about how important it is, but do I have to start cooking and what I want to say is that this is really not about cooking, it's about eating. And so the first simple step I would say is adding one cup of blueberries or any kind of berry that you love every day is one of the first greatest steps you can make to changing your entire health. It turns on the body's natural health defense, but they taste good. I've seen very few people, very few children, 4 year olds, 6 year olds, 95 year olds that like strawberries and blueberries and blackberries and raspberries. These fees are healing foods, so if we started by adding one cup of berries every day, that's the first step in literally transforming your health. What we find with one cup of berries every day, there's a lot of research, especially on blueberries. So blueberries are loaded with phytonutrients, and these phytonutrients are the secret little healing medicines within the food. They're also loaded with fruit sugar, which sometimes people are afraid of, am I eating sugar. Is this the same as added sugar? But when we eat fruit sugar, we find it to be some of the most healing foods. It's when it's naturally packaged in the whole berry, so there's soluble fiber and whole fibers that package and sort of delay the post meal blood sugar response. So eating these berries naturally packaged not in a juice, but in their whole natural form, we find a 40% improvement in short term memory with one cup of berries between 1 and 6 hours of consumption. That's pretty powerful and we see 20% improvement even in those people with dementia. So blueberries are really powerful for the brain and when we think about it, it's actually improving circulation. So they also are helping to relax the arterial wall and what that means to you is naturally lowering blood pressure. So we can actually heal blood vessels with blueberries. So any berry that you love one cup a day is really powerful. Our master class takes a really deep dive into the science of how these foods work and how powerful they are as medicine. So if you're really interested in the science, take our master class and you will really enjoy learning more about how these foods have the most powerful medicine-like effect.  Thanks for coming to the table where every week we're going to talk about nutrition, longevity and what it means to be well. If you would like to have your specific questions answered, become a member today to get access to our weekly private podcast, Ask Doctor Cheryl where we will get to talk about Wellness together. I can't wait to see you on the inside.