When I was in my Doctor of Pharmacy program, I’ve seen large emphasis placed on preventative measures for obesity, insulin resistance, cardiovascular conditions. But for some reason, the charts for these diseases were hitting all-time-highs every year. There are of course many contributing factors to this, which are beyond the scope of this article, but in the grand scheme of things, the entire Savvy community is mostly comprised of educated individuals. And most of you are capable of making informed choices when it comes to your health. Which is why I want to concentrate on what you and I CAN control.
Why is this happening?
It became clear that humans are terrible at setting and adhering to long-term goals. Like a slow-boiling frog 🐸 , we don’t notice our deteriorating health from abovementioned conditions, because they happen over a long period of time. Simply put, the ramifications of your actions (a crappy diet) will not be felt tomorrow (except for flatulence or a headache).
In the grand scheme of things, doing my hospital rotations, it became clear that as much as we credit ourselves for being homosapiens, we are pretty dumb (I mainly speak about myself). The resources are there, the education is there (your hospital most likely has nutrition classes), but we just give it great importance.
The biggest culprit to this phenomenon (in my opinion) is motivation and it is multipartite:
The quantification of nutritional intake is very complicated
Low motivation to adhere to a dietary plan, because results are hard to measure short-term
Why should I care about my diet?
See, in the grand scheme of things, there are many factors that can influence how long you’re going to live and how healthy you’re going to be. Most of them, such as genetics and bad luck are out of our control. I would argue that for most of us it is very hard to control our socioeconomic status as well, which is also an important predictor of your longevity.
However, there are things that you CAN control, such as your diet, exercise and stress control. And it is not a far-fetched idea. You can control these immediately, if you’re armed with the right knowledge. This is why I will emphasize on these in this article.
Think of what you eat and how much you eat like multipliers. If your genetics and the environment predisposes you to a 85 year lifespan, a bad diet could multiply this by 0.9. Now we get 85 years x 0.9=76.5 years. This is a VERY simplified and abstract idea, but please go with it for a second.
How does what I eat influence me?
When I used to look at patient charts, I could see their medical conditions and the medications they are currently taking. After doing this for a while, you start to see trends for disease progressions, as vicious cycle if you will.
