Plants Over Pills: A New Paradigm for the Management of Chronic Disease
FEATURED IN RHODE ISLAND FAMILY MEDICINE
We live in a country with the top hospitals and medical care in the world, yet Americans are dying in the greatest numbers from preventable diseases caused primarily by poor dietary choices.1 The Standard American diet is literally feeding multiple disease states that are defining Americans: obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.2 How did we get here?
Americans are so confused about what they should be eating. We are all bombarded by misinformation from all directions: whatever the fad diet of the year is, social media representing every nutrition angle possible, supermarkets full of unhealthy options, and the beef and dairy industry imparting their heavy-handed influence with billions of dollars spent on lobbyists and marketing (including an advertisement in the last RI Family Medicine newspaper with debatable information about infant feeding).
It’s no wonder people are confused. Even doctors offer conflicting advice on nutrition. It’s not surprising since we get little to no nutrition education in medical school. In addition, nutrition studies are quite hard to conduct and interpret, often contradicting one another. I’ve spent my professional career in search of the most accurate nutrition information to optimize human health beginning with an undergraduate degree in Nutrition Sciences, becoming a breastfeeding expert, training at Harvard for the Obesity Medicine boards, attending multiple lifestyle medicine and cardiology conferences, and receiving several nutrition certificates.
Here are 10 recommendations that most everyone can agree on:
