Food as Medicine
Did you know that diet is the leading cause of chronic disease and disability? If you eat a standard American diet, you could be seriously harming your body. For many people, this is not new information, but knowing what a healthy diet is can still be difficult.
There is already a lot of buzz about vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients. Educational material to help people understand how much of this or that chemical their body needs to function properly are plentiful.
But even with all the recommended vitamins in your body, many foods can cause chronic inflammation, which can trigger not only bodily dysfunctions, like alzheimers or cancer, but also mental ones, like depression and alzheimers.
To fully grasp why the Standard American Diet (aptly abbreviated “S.A.D.”) is so harmful, we have to understand inflammation. That’s because, as we know from a tremendous amount of research, inflammation is the cause of much, if not all, chronic disease.
There are actually two kinds of inflammation:
Acute Inflammation
- Normal and protective
And Meta-Inflammation (chronic)
- Atherosclerosis
- Diabetes
- Depression
- Many cancers
- Cognitive Decline
Meta-inflammation, not acute inflammation, is what we want to combat through dietary changes.
Some of the most common dietary factors that lead to chronic inflammation include:
- Excessive alcohol
- Fat: Saturated, Trans-Fats
- High omega-6 : omega-3 ratio
- Low fiber intake
- Fructose / Glucose
- Meat – especially grain-fed
- Sugar & Artificially Sweetened Drinks
So if we know what things might be causing inflammation, are there factors that counteract it?
Fortunately, yes, there are several, including:
- Exercise
- Healthy Weight
- No Tobacco Use
- Healthy Diet including:
- Vegetables, Fuit, Legumes
- Fiber
- Phytonutrients
- Whole Grains
- Lean game & pastured meats
- Fish high in omega-3 FAs
- Herbs/Spices (e.g., curcumin)
- Nuts
- Tea / Green Tea
- Vegetables, Fuit, Legumes
Whether by reducing inflammation, or through other means, an improved diet can have a wide range of positive and measurable effects from the reversal of coronary disease to the prevention of diabetes.
So what should you do to improve your diet? Watch the video to learn more.
Nutrition can be very complicated, and once we start accounting for inflammation, it becomes even more difficult to know what’s good and what’s bad.
The important part is to keep an open mind, and commit to a lifelong learning process. Read what you can, and pay attention to how your body responds to things. Healthy eating is a lifestyle, not something you should expect to pick up overnight.
And when in doubt, refer to the timeless words of Michael Pollan:
Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.
Are you ready to take charge of your health? Schedule your free 20-minute discovery call with our New Patient Coordinator to see how you can become a patient at MaxWell Clinic and start your healing journey today.
well good afternoon i’m dr david ferris
with maxwell clinic and i want to welcome you to this second of a continuing series of
webinars that maxwell clinic is sponsoring for our members
this is the second dr hazy gave an excellent overview of creating health last week
and today we’re going to be looking at the topic of food as medicine
couple of housekeeping matters before we
before we begin you’ll be on mute but if you have a question please type your question into
the q a box on your screen and uh at the end of the presentation
portion i’ll attempt to answer as many of those questions as we have time to
in the event that the internet goes down uh we’ll switch to a hot spot
so in the unlikely vent that that will happen usually our internet connection
is quite stable but if that should happen if you’ll be patient for a few minutes we’ll switch
to a hot spot so that we can continue the webinar
so with that uh let’s jump into our topic of food as
medicine i want to start with sharing with you some data from the centers for disease
control which shows the leading risks
in the u.s that contribute to chronic disease and disability my point in showing you this
is number one on the list represented by the longest green bar or
dietary risk food is the foundation for health and
healthy food will promote health and not just surviving but
thriving if we eat an unhealthy diet which sadly
most americans do it’s referred to often as the standard
american diet which the acronym is aptly named because it spells sad
but if if we eat the diet that most americans eat then
there’s no way that we can be be truly healthy
so as we get into this we need to understand something about
inflammation because we know from a tremendous amount of research
that inflammation is the primary root cause of much if not all chronic disease
there’s a wealth of research literature supporting this it’s important to understand that there
are two types of inflammation there is acute inflammation which is a
normal and protective process that our immune systems
create anytime we’re under threat whether it be a biological agent such as
a virus such as covid 19 or a bacterial infection or if we’re
injured let’s say we cut our finger and everyone’s experienced this what
happens well it gets red it gets tender there may be some
heat to that this is the body’s response flooding that area of injury
with white blood cells and other
chemical agents in the body to combat and bring about healing
so that acute inflammation in the right context is normal and it’s a good thing
it actually helps us to survive these these threats to our very being
the other type of inflammation that we’re going to focus on this evening though is called meta inflammation which
is a chronic low-grade inflammation and from a lot of research that’s been
done over a number of decades we know that this type of low-grade chronic
inflammation is the root cause of common chronic conditions such as
atherosclerosis leading to coronary artery disease heart attacks strokes
to diabetes depression depression is actually in many respects
an inflammatory disease many cancers and cognitive decline
so that’s what we uh we i want you to understand
is that meta inflammation this chronic inflammation is what underlies so much
if not all chronic disease so here’s the diagram uh
mainly what i want you to see here if you look at that box on the left hand side you see unhealthy diet number one
what we’re talking about today sedentary lifestyle high stress
certain medications poor sleep addictions of various kinds and social
isolation these things lead to alterations in our
microbiome the the the millions of bacteria that inhabit
our body on the skin on mucosal surfaces in our gut
it also leads to epigenetic changes by that by epigenetics we mean
the expression of genes being influenced by environmental factors and diet is
probably the most important environmental factor of all that actually changes the way our genes
are expressed and then finally all of these factors in that
box on the left side lead to cellular stress and injury the
result of all of those actions leads to inflammation and inflammation
again leads to a variety of chronic conditions obesity type 2 diabetes
cardiovascular disease cancer depression and most likely a wealth of other
diseases where we intervene here you see at the bottom the lifestyle interventions and diet along with
exercise and ability to manage stress are some of the major lifestyle
interventions that we can employ in order to combat these processes that
result in inflammation and by combating that minimizing eliminating inflammation so
that we don’t have to live lives full of chronic disease as too many
americans do but we can thrive
so let’s look at what causes this inflammation we’ve already touched on
that but in the category of lifestyle exercise which is a good thing in the
right amounts and there’s a wide range of healthy exercise you don’t have to be
a marathoner to be healthy just walking on a regular basis
is is a very life enhancing health enhancing activity
dr ashley woods one of our other physicians is going to be facilitating a webinar next week on
exercise as medicine so she will go into a lot more detail
about how we employ exercise as one of our our major therapeutic interventions
overweight and obesity uh also lead to does leads to inflammation and then
nutrition which is our major focus today there are a number of factors the ones
i’ve listed here are not the only ones but they’re some of the most important
not surprisingly alcohol in excess can lead
to to inflammation so what’s been generally accepted is that
alcohol one to two drinks maximum per day for
men and a maximum of one drink uh for women women are different uh they’re
biologically hormonally different and so based on the research that we have uh
one drink per day for women has been accepted as is the recommended maximum
in order to not move into this excessive category
fat in the forms of saturated fat and trans fats a lot of epidemiological
evidence that is evidence from large populations of people that demonstrate
that fat saturated fat and particularly trans fats which are mostly man-made
fats although not all that are very damaging to the
endothelial lining of our vasculature so it’s important to
to eat healthy fats and not the saturated fats and trans fats which
which are damaging to health most of you have probably heard of
omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids every new patient of maxwell clinic
gets an omega quant in which we actually measure the percentage of omega-3 fatty acids
and omega-6 fatty acids and we look at the ratio between omega-3s and omega-6s
our body needs both of them for good health but most people get way too
little of the omega-3s and they get way too much of the omega-6s and so that
produces a ratio that’s very high for our omega-6 to omega-3 and we want
that ideally in a three to one five to one ratio it’s not uncommon in the
patients that i see to see ratios of 15 to 1 or 20 to 1 or even higher and so
that’s one of the things that we focus on using diet is therapy to bring back
into balance fiber a low intake of fiber most individuals get consume way too much way
too little fiber that leads not only to problems with
constipation and and faulty elimination from our gi systems
but it leads to other problems as well we’ll be doing a separate webinar in the
future on fiber specifically and addressing uh that particular issue of
why it’s so important to a healthy microbiome and why that’s so important
to overall health including brain health fructose and glucose two different forms
of sugar in excess these can be very damaging the
good thing about fructose which is the sugar that is found in fruits
is that the antidote is bound up with what could be damaging
and so if you eat a whole orange for example you’re getting lots of fiber
along with the vitamin c along with all of the other valuable nutrients that are
contained in that orange as opposed to eat drinking orange juice
which while there’s some benefit from that you still get vitamin c
you might as well from a sugar content be be drinking a uh a soda a sugar-laden
soda so it’s important that we take our fructose
in combination with the fiber the way nature designed it meat can be and pro-inflammatory
especially grain-fed meat cows beef you know pork uh chickens
they’re typically fed lots and lots of grain which that’s what gets them fat the fastest
and so they um they accumulate a lot of omega-6 fatty
acids which are inflammatory as opposed to the omega-3 fatty acids which are
anti-inflammatory so best to eat meat in in smaller amounts
and when you do eat grain-fed i’m sorry pastured meat as opposed to grain-fed meat
and then sugar and artificially sweetened drinks we know sugar can be a
major threat to to health not only the calories that we get from sugar
but we’re learning more and more about how high levels of sugar uh
contribute to insulin resistance to very high insulin spikes
and set up a lot of metabolic dysfunction in the
body and then lastly for pro-inflammatory inducers we’re not going to talk about these today
but are all sorts of environmental toxins in our environment our environment unfortunately and
increasingly over the last 100 years has been threatened by
hundreds thousands of of toxic chemicals in various forms and and these chemicals
that we’re exposed to on a daily basis um interfere with our gene expression with
various metabolic pathways they circus blocking agents for a lot of metabolic
pathways and that can contribute to inflammation as well
so that brief summary of some of the the major factors that promote inflammation
so what is anti-inflammatory well we’ve already mentioned exercise if it’s doesn’t exist
or it’s taken to the extreme can can be inflammatory producing but
exercise regular physical activity is very anti-inflammatory
and is one of the foundations of of health along with diet and again dr
ashley woods will be addressing this topic in a lot more detail next week
achieving and maintaining a healthy weight is also really important
um we used to think that this thing we called fat in in our
bellies or other parts of our bodies was just a cosmetic issue
that it was just unhealthy and we know far more now that fatty tissue lipoid
tissue is metabolically active and that fatty tissue produces substances called
cytokines that are inflammatory agents and it becomes a vicious circle
when we don’t achieve and maintain a healthy weight certainly it’s no surprise
that uh no tobacco use refraining from the use of tobacco not only smoking but oral
tobacco is an anti-inflammatory
so it’s really important if if you are smoking to use resources that are
available to you to uh to wean yourself off and to quit
quit smoking in the use of other tobacco products and then most and most importantly a healthy diet
top on the list are vegetables fruit and legumes legumes are all sorts of beans
and there’s a multitude of beans vegetables fruits and legumes are rich
in fiber they’re great sources of fiber and they’re rich sources of thousands of
phytonutrients all the different colors of the rainbow that we encourage our patients to eat in
their diet reflect that multitude of phytonutrients these are chemicals
implants that we are really only beginning to learn
just how important they are to to health to supporting the many metabolic
reactions that take place second by second in our bodies uh in
order to produce health whole grains are healthy
many people increasing number of people are sensitive to to gluten and for people who are
sensitive to gluten then they’re going to need to minimize or eliminate gluten
from their diets but other whole grains can be enjoyed and
are healthy sources of nutrition when meat is uh is consumed
lean game meat such as venison or
or wild turkey can be be really healthy uh as well as pastured meats uh animals
that are are eaten for their meat but rather than eating grain
they they are allowed to pasture on grass which is their natural diet and it
just provides for a much healthier uh product herbs and spices are very important
sources of for any inflammation
for example curcumin this is is a substance uh
that is uh found in the the um the spice turmeric
it’s used particularly in a lot of indian foods and other ethnic foods
but there are just thousands of research studies
supporting the value of uh of curcumin and and how it supports
um health in the body um that’s uh another topic for another day but just
one example of the many many herbs and spices which not only add lots of flavor and
variety to foods but have a really healthy impact
particularly for their anti-inflammatory inducing effects nuts
of all kinds can be a very healthy snack used in moderation they do contain
fats healthy fats and so [Music] if one is concerned about weight
and losing weight one wants to be careful in consumption but nuts are very healthy sources of nutrition and then
finally tea and particularly green tea has has nutrients
in it that are anti-inflammatory and have very beneficial effects
so based on knowing what is inflammatory and what is
anti-inflammatory particularly in our diets i want to share with you
two illustrations that i believe illustrate just how powerful our diets
are with respect to the development and the
improvement in in our health uh one of the most important is the
reversal of coronary disease that’s achieved with a plant-based diet
dr dean ornish was the first vision physician who did some really
paradigm breaking work over 25 years ago when he
had developed his healthy heart
lifestyle intervention and he actually was able to demonstrate
that individuals with documented atherosclerotic heart disease so there’s
major plaque that can be seen on angiograms taken of
the coronary arteries that you could actually produce reversal of that
regression in many patients within as short a time as a year and
after a five-year period of time uh even more
regression of that plaque with a reduction in chest pain and angina and a
restoration to to healthy function this was paradigm changing no one thought that was
possible that heart disease coronary artery disease was a irreversible
process and we know that in most cases that’s not true with
the right types of healthy lifestyle intervention another individual that’s been prominent
in this space is dr caldwell esselstyn at the cleveland clinic and the two
photographs to angiogram
images that you see here are from dr esselstyn’s work these are from the same patient
uh three years apart actually not quite three years only 32 months apart
and you see on the image on the left in 1996 you see the
left anterior descending artery which is one of the primary coronary arteries
supplying blood to the heart and particularly the distal
left anterior artery you can see in that left photograph
is is very mothy that’s reflecting all of the plaque that has been built up
which is uh not only obstructing but is also a danger for
disruption of that plaque because it’s the result of an inflammatory process
and uh it’s prone to rupture and that’s actually what causes 85
of heart attacks is is not the sclerosis of the article of the artery
due to atherosclerosis but the rupture of of plaque the exuding of
inflammatory content into the lumen of the artery and then the body’s response
to contain that which is to form a clot a thrombus and that’s what causes sudden
in many cases life-threatening and life-taking
disease on the right image you see just 32 months later after placing this patient
with severe atherosclerotic heart disease on a plant-based diet without any
cholesterol-lowering lowering medications you see
that the health of that artery has apparently been restored
it’s smooth it doesn’t have that moth eaten appearance like it once did
so just an illustration of just how powerful healthy food can be
not only of preventing disease but restoring uh health
from a diseased state and and that’s really what we’re about at maxwell
clinic uh if you’re a patient here and all of you are uh you know that we
uh practice a functional medicine type of model which is really an application
of systems biology it’s it’s a an attempt to identify in a particular
individual one unique individual at a time to um
to address root causes to identify what are those root causes address those and
if we do that then people usually improve their symptoms improve and often
completely disappear so this is a powerful example i think of
how lifestyle change uh a fundamental principle of the type of medicine that
we practice at maxwell clinic can result in even the reversal of atherosclerotic
heart disease and this is true not only in the heart but in a condition we call claudication
in the lower extremities where there is atherosclerotic plaque in the the femoral arteries and other arteries of
the legs and causes a lot of pain when someone walks it prevents them from walking anything but a short
distance and erectile dysfunction in uh in men usually that’s an early sign of
atherosclerosis in the penile artery and by addressing that simply with diet
alone many men can reverse that and be restored to full
sexual health the second example that i want to give you today
is diabetes diabetes is a huge chronic disease burden in the u.s
this is directly the result type 2 diabetes of of uh insulin resistance
which is a result of unhealthy eating putting on excessive weight gain and it
just becomes a metabolic vicious circle uh promoting disease
and so what you see here is a diagram from a study that was done
back in the early 2000s called the diabetes prevention program research
study this was a study that was conducted at some 27
academic medical centers around the country and they did an experiment and they
divided a group of individuals a large group of individuals
all who had been diagnosed with pre-diabetes they had insulin resistance
they had fasting blood sugars between 100 and 125
and they were on a path to developing full-blown diabetes
and what they did is they took one group and this was the control group or what’s
marked as the placebo group on the graph and with this group they gave them some
standard educational material related to eating healthy and the
importance of exercising regularly but that was it and then for a second group they gave
them that standard educational material regarding a healthy diet and a healthy exercise but they
also added a medication called metformin which has been used for a long time to
help combat insulin resistance and it’s been used in the treatment of pre-diabetes and diabetes they put them
on 850 milligrams of metformin twice a day and then the third group
uh got intensive lifestyle interventions uh they were
uh in co they were coached they were educated they were encouraged and supported
in getting a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week so that’s an
average of 30 minutes of moderate exercise five days a week
and in addition to that we’re given intensive instruction on eating a healthy diet which was low
calorie low fat and so those were the three groups and
the researchers conducting this study in these 27 different centers around the country they followed these patients and
and took a variety of measurements uh for four years and so at the end of the
four years you see what the results were what you’re looking at on the
y-axis on the vertical scale is the cumulative incidence that is the
initiation of diabetes and you see how it increases
year over year as we follow these patients out for the four years that
this study ran and you see the placebo the control group who really got only
nominal education in a healthy diet and the importance of regular exercise
they were up about 37 38 progress to full-blown diabetes over
that four-year period of time the group of patients who were in the
metformin group the drug group did better so metformin was
was helpful in reducing the cumulative incidence of diabetes
but the lifestyle group without any medication just intensive lifestyle
change did the very best they experienced a 58 reduction in incidence which is is quite
significant um i’ll give you an example a patient at maxwell clinic that i treated just over
the past year uh was a man in his 40s
he was found to have uh diagnosed his diabetes and he wasn’t even aware of it
and that’s true for so much diabetes is people have diabetes and and they it’s
undiagnosed diabetes but fortunately for him he
attended a screening and he had a high blood sugar uh of over 230
normal would be under 100 and so he sought care he came to maxwell
clinic because he wanted to know was there another option and what i told him was
if uh if he were committed to making some significant lifestyle changes it
was quite possible that we could bring his blood sugars down without medication
and indeed he was medicated he worked with me he worked with
our registered dietitian in an intense way and we saw dramatic reductions in
his blood sugar over a very uh short amount of time um he came down from 2 30 and and within
about six weeks he was uh down around 110 and has continued to come down since
then in his is fasting blood sugar levels his hemoglobin a1c which was 11.5
which is extremely high uh came down relatively rapidly uh
within a few months uh we had it down into the eight and we’re working on
getting that down to a normal range he’s about seven now but that’s a huge
improvement over where he started simply by lifestyle interventions with
no medication so i wanted to give you that examines that example as well just to point out
how very powerful a healthy diet is
to create health one more study that i want to mention
uh before we we get to our questions and answers um a famous study that was done a number
of years called the epic study that stands for the european prospective investigation of cancer study this was a
very large epidemiological study meaning a study of a large population of
individuals in europe and this portion of it was specifically in germany with
uh as i recall about 37 000 individuals who were studied over a
period of a number of years and what they did is they identified four healthy lifestyle behaviors
individuals who never smoked they had a body mass index of last of
less than 30 so they weren’t obese they were either normal weight or are
overweight between 25 and 30 but they were not obese they
got at least 3.5 hours per week of moderate exercise and most importantly i think
here they followed a healthy diet a high intake of fruit high intake of
vegetables high intake of whole grains so they’re getting lots of fiber lots of
very low in saturated fats minimal to no trans fats and they also
had low meat consumption and when they looked at these individuals over a number of years and
they followed them to see what percentage of these individuals who
did not have diabetes at the beginning develop diabetes how many experienced
heart attacks myocardial infarctions strokes and all types of cancer and what
they saw is across all chronic conditions the individuals who exhibited all four of
those healthy lifestyle behaviors had 78 percent lower risk
of developing any of those conditions compared with individuals who
did smoke had a bmi greater than 30 got less than three and a half hours of
moderate exercise and did not follow this healthy diet when they broke out the percentage
of reduction of risk for the specific diseases that they studied there was an
81 percent lower risk of diabetes 81 lower risk of myocardial infarction 50
lower incidence of stroke and 30 percent lower risk of all types of cancer uh
collectively so again more very strong evidence that the
importance that lifestyle plays in in achieving health
and particularly diet which i think is the most powerful of all
so i want to close this portion of our webinar with some wisdom wisdom from the past and wisdom from the present
archimedes who lived from 287 to 212 bc
very famous philosopher said let food be thy medicine and
medicine be thy food so we can legitimately say this is not anything
new uh this we’ve known this for a long time uh it’s just uh implementing it
and uh and and doing it and then uh current thinker and thought leader
michael pollan uh many of you may have read some of his books such as the
omnivore’s dilemma uh he’s a an author who has looked at
food and its relationship to health in in some major ways he really boils it
down to seven words but i think so much truth is summed up uh in these seven words eat food meaning
real food not highly processed food eat food is grown lots of vegetables fruits
legumes whole grains mostly plants doesn’t mean you have to eat just plants
but are for for maximum health our our diet should be dominated by plants
mostly plants and not too much not over adult something our grandmothers told us
when we were children so that concludes
some of the key points i wanted to drive home much of this may have been a uh a
refresher course for many of you hopefully it was but uh again uh we’re we’re flying at 30
000 feet here over the coming weeks and months we’re going to be addressing a lot more
very specific nutrition topics and our dietitians will be doing some of
those presentations as well as myself and other clinicians at maxwell
clinic to delve more deeply into just how important nutrition is
and and some of these specific topics so with that um in the the time that we
have remaining we’ll answer as many questions as we can
so what i’m going to do is i’m going to stop sharing my screen
and i’m going to go to the q a section
and here is a our first question concerns
coconut oil it says here coconut oil is sold as a
good saturated fat especially for raising testosterone
is it bad for the endothelial lining of the arteries too i think the most accurate answer that i
can give right now is that uh there are differing opinions on this
uh there is some controversy and you know coconut oil unlike when we usually
talk about saturated fat we’re we’re talking about saturated fat from animal
sources and clearly there’s a lot of evidence that that’s harmful
coconut oil um and palm oil come from plants and so
there are a number of experts that would say uh it’s not harmful like
saturated fats are from uh from from meat
but uh i’m always uh a bit leery uh i tend to avoid uh coconut oil and palm
oil in in my diets because of the concern about uh its impact it’s still saturated
fat but again this is an area of which there’s some controversy and perhaps
we’ll we’ll do a deeper dive into this topic in uh in the future
um second question is would you give examples of the best fish to eat i know
salmon is good what else um many of you have had an omega quant
done and if you will go to your patient portal
and print out print uh bring up the results of your omega quant and scroll
down there’s a very helpful list of rich sources of omega-3 fatty acids
and at the top of the list are many fish so certainly salmon
herring rainbow trout sardines mackerel these are all
um fish that tend to be rich in uh omega-3
fatty acids but there are other fish that um
have lesser amounts but still valuable sources of omega-3 fatty acids
so i would refer that you to your your omega quant results and there’s
some rich resources in that report that give you more information
one comment regarding fish i i tend to recommend
wild caught fish whenever possible a lot of there are some exceptions to
this but but so many fish are farm raised and those fish typically are fed grain
fish don’t eat grain they don’t eat corn uh naturally in their environment so
best costs uh best uh the best choice are uh wild caught fish that uh have been
caught in a sustainable way to preserve the the environment to preserve the health
of the um of the oceans uh i will give you one i
thought it was a funny story uh some months ago i saw a new patient
at maxwell clinic and i i think it’s fair to say and i think my
clinical colleagues would agree with me that the vast majority of individuals whom we see when we do an omega quan
most people unless they are already on a fish oil supplement
are very low in their omega-3 fatty acids many people in the three percent four
percent low five percent range and optimal as you may know is between eight
and twelve percent but this one individual who did not give uh any indication that he was taking
uh a official supplement or any supplements when he first came to maxwell clinic
had an omega 3 fatty acid index of 10
and i thought oh wow he’s got to be maybe we just didn’t collect that data and he said no he was
not on fish oil i said do you eat a lot of fish and he said i eat a can of sardines every day and i thought well
that explains it um and so uh he loves he loves sardines uh
it’s not for me but uh he enjoyed them and uh it was a
certainly a logical answer as to why he um um
why his omega-3 fatty acid index and consequently his omega-6 to omega-3
ratio were all in the optimal range
another question that we have is how long does one need to stay on the keto diet to train a carb dependent body
to depend more on fats than carbs for energy um
there are there is a lot of value in in ketogenic diets i think they have to
be used appropriately and certainly one can go to extremes
there there are some clear medical indications for a ketogenic diet one
example would be uncontrolled seizures in uh in in children especially and when
uh they start eating a ketogenic diet many times the incidence of seizures
goes way down or they they quit having seizures all
together the body typically takes two to three days to switch from
metabolizing carbohydrate as its primary fuel to
uh to fat but that will start taking place and even on a short range basis
many of you are familiar with intermittent fasting and fasting again that’s a whole topic that is
worthy of one or more future webinars and uh we will
undoubtedly uh dig into that in the in the future
but um but even going without food such as an intermittent eating
eating for example your evening meal early around six o’clock
and then not eating until late morning 10 to 12 to well no 18 hours later say
skipping breakfast and eating lunch the next day and doing that even a few times a week
can produce some mild the beginnings of ketosis and it has a major impact of
helping reduce insulin resistance and to um
um uh promote uh a reset of the body in many ways but
we’ll get into the details of that in uh in a future webinar um but
i i don’t think it’s possible to train the body to
uh eat uh to process just fats uh through a ketogenic diet uh unless you
stay on that ketogenic diet and and i would say you want to be careful in doing that long term there’s some other
downsides of of just eating ketogenically for one
reason if you eliminate mostly carbohydrates from your diet you’re going to eliminate all of those
thousands of valuable phytochemicals and vitamins and minerals that plants are a
rich source for as a source of carbohydrate so you want to be
careful and balanced there and then a another
question has to do with the book of food what the heck should i
eat by mark hyman i believe that’s dr hyman’s latest book
i’ll admit i’m aware that it’s been published i have not read it
i think it is most likely a synthesis or an extension a lot of
things that dr hyman has read i i know mark personally and uh i i’ve valued his his books
and uh the the important role he has played in taking functional uh medicine concepts
to a a large uh number of individuals
um but uh i’m sorry i haven’t read the book yet so i i can’t comment
specifically uh specifically on that um
those are the questions that we’ve received
thank you for all of all of you who submitted a question uh again there will be plenty of time to
dialogue and to delve into a variety of more specific nutritional topics in the
future but i hope today was uh helpful to you
uh in in just emphasizing the importance that food as medicine
is to creating health allowing us to not just survive but to
thrive so thank you for being maxwell care members
under our our new model we value you we look forward to seeing you and providing ongoing care
and we hope the research the the webinars uh group visits that we have
planned for you over the coming weeks and months uh will be uh help to
improving your uh your health and achieving maximum wellness which is what maxwell clinic is
all about so we’ll end there and uh thank you for your time and i look forward to seeing
you again on future webinars take care
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