Healthy Eating to Prevent, Treat, and Reverse Chronic Disease | Dr. Michael Parkinson

From the 2019 One Health One Planet™ symposium — One Health and the Future of Food. Find additional resources here:

Healthy Eating to Prevent, Treat, and Reverse Chronic Disease: What Should We Be Telling Our Patients?

Dr. Michael Parkinson, senior medical director at UPMC, discussed the necessity to train doctors in lifestyle medicine to efficiently help patients fight chronic disease in his presentation "Healthy Eating to Prevent, Treat, and Reverse Chronic Disease: What Should We be Telling Our Patients?"
If a 10-year-old child comes into the doctor's office for a visit with obesity, asthma and multiple chronic issues, what can a doctor do for him in a 15-minute visit? Dr. Parkinson examined the changes that are necessarily on the clinical level to have more of an impact on patients' health.
"What do we do to prevent, treat, and even reverse [diseases] that are not only killing us in the United States but are now exporting around the world as other societies become wealthier," said Dr. Parkinson. "We call it the McLipitor Syndrome, which is why we got to be one of the most overmedicated countries in the world, with quick fixes for things that are not quick or can be fixed with a pill." This mindset is detrimental to the population's health, and real changes need to be made to reduce mortality rates. By incorporating a lifestyle with a Mediterranean or Asian diet, not smoking, daily activity and moderate alcohol consumption all together, we can drastically reduce diseases such as obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiac disease, cancer and depression.
"Unhealthy diets, lack of physical activity, high stress, and a lot of the medications we take to treat these very conditions….lead to inflammation," Dr. Parkinson continued. "Inflammation is the common pathway to obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, 70% of cancers, depression and anxiety. If we address this as a medical issue we can move it into the medical thinking."
According to the American College of Cardiology, people with cardiac disease need to be on a whole plant-based diet. As meat consumption continues to increase, it is evident that the American diet is not moving forward in the way that it should, falling behind the diets of other countries.
So what is it that physicians need so they can help? "Knowledge and skill training," said Dr. Parkinson. When doctors are not confident in their training in nutrition, they may be hesitant to help in the way a patient needs. "We asked our own doctors, ‘What are the barriers to you actually engaging your patient on healthy eating, physical activity, and stress management?' And what they said was, ‘We don't know what we're doing. I don't have the time, I'm not sure what resources are available, I have inadequate knowledge and skills about the subject.'"
What they can prescribe is what Dr. Parkinson calls "lifestyle medicine." They key components of lifestyle medicine are "eat, move, think" — prescribing a plant-based diet, physical activity, stress reduction and mindfulness. For patients who are on a track for disease, this may be the best medicine.

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We are seeing unprecedented changes in the earth’s environmental and physical processes. Climate change, air pollution, reduced availability of clean water, and persistent toxic chemicals threaten human, animal, and environmental health and well-being.

To build a shared interdisciplinary vision of “health” and serve as a catalyst for positive change, Phipps Conservatory brings together leaders to explore global and local environmental issues and their effects on human, animal and environmental health through the One Health Initiative. One Health is a movement that is forging a new level of collaboration among physicians, veterinarians, scientific-health and environmentally-related disciplines. Thought leaders from disparate fields promote strategies to expand interdisciplinary understanding and communication in all aspects of healthcare for humans, animals and the environment.

[larsgustafmartin]

Scrap the Carbs, eat animals and some vege. Reversed my T2D, HT, high trigs, etc in 2 week and cut 17 kgs in 6 weeks. Physical and mental activity is so easy and comes naturally after that.

[LiftNBalance]

Each meal is an investment... And it Adds up 🌱😁🌱

[mrpositive]

Do you know of zidovera herbal powder?

[oldrose]

Stop human tampering with our foods and water

[brianmichel]

Dr Parkinson, So when going vegan plus 100% gluten free, can that actually reverse something like Parkinson's Disease? Thanks.