lifestyle – Steven Piriano, MD

Got Fiber?

Viktoria Slowikowska/pexels.com

In my last post, I wrote about fiber and its many health benefits. I mentioned that it lowers cholesterol and triglycerides. I also stated that it reduces the risk of developing chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and several types of cancer. As an added bonus, it makes you feel fuller sooner and without increasing your caloric intake.

I stated how many different types of fiber are the food of choice for the 39 trillion bacteria living in our gut—our gut microbiome. Moreover, a thriving gut microbiome is responsible for many of the health benefits of fiber. When the bacteria in our gut are presented with different types of fiber, they produce small molecules called short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs). Aside from providing several of the health miracles described earlier, SCFAs also provide 70% of the energy needed by the cells of our colon, which will keep them functioning well.

To digress for a moment, have you ever heard of leaky gut syndrome? I certainly have. Over the years, I’ve had many patients who have told me they have this condition. But what exactly is a leaky gut? I mean, how does one’s gut leak? Well, it all comes down to the health of our colon cells. These cells are held closely together by molecules called tight junctions. If these junctions work normally, the colon cells will be held closely together. If these junctions are not operating as they should, the colon cells will separate, and there will now be spaces between cells. Substances within the gut, such as bacteria, bacterial toxins, and molecules from food, can now move through these openings and find themselves outside the gut. This, my friends, is a leaky gut.

You may wonder why it is such a problem if these things “leak” out of your gut. Well, the fact that 70% of your immune system lives just outside the gut is one big reason. When your immune system encounters these things, it can lead to allergies, excessive inflammation, and even autoimmunity. Furthermore, the muscles and nerves within the gut can be adversely affected, leading to distressing symptoms such as constipation, diarrhea, bloating, and abdominal pain.

Once again, I’d like to point out that you can lower the risk of developing many diseases and also allow yourself the opportunity to feel fantastic through the simple act of eating whole, healthy foods.

Thank you for taking the time to read this post. I hope you enjoyed it and found it informative. If so, please feel free to share it.

Make the Easy Difficult and the Difficult Easy

Building healthy habits is the best thing you can do if you’d like to start living a healthier lifestyle. However, I’ll admit that developing good habits can initially be challenging.

One thing you can do, especially in that difficult beginning stage, is to make the easy things difficult to do and make the difficult things easy to do.

Allow me to explain.

Let’s say that you are a person who currently loves snacking on unhealthy foods, but you’d like to change and instead begin eating healthier snacks such as fruits, vegetables, and some nuts. You love your cookies, candies, cakes, and chips. Whenever you get the munchies and are in the mood for a snack, all your favorite foods are right there in your kitchen. That’s easy, right?

So, you have to make the easy thing hard to do. This translates to ridding your home of all your favorite yet unhealthy snacks. Next, stock your kitchen pantry, refrigerator, and countertops with fruits, vegetables, and nuts—make the difficult thing easy to do.

The next time you are in the mood for a snack, all those healthy and tasty snacks will be easily accessible and right there for your enjoyment—easy, right? How about baby carrots and hummus? Or maybe a banana and grapes?

Moreover, if you really want to snack on some junk food, you will have to leave your home and either walk or drive to the nearby store, which is going to be relatively difficult, and it will be less likely that you will do it. This will help you to start building healthy habits.

This concept applies not only to health habits but to any behavior that you’d like to change. Let’s say that you are a shopaholic. You absolutely love going to the stores, buying all sorts of goodies, and paying for them with your favorite plastic card. However, let’s also declare that you want to change this habit and become more financially responsible. Well, in that case, make the easy thing difficult to do. I don’t remember where, but I remember reading somewhere the recommendation to put your favorite credit card in an empty coffee can, fill it with water, and place it in the freezer. The next time you have the urge to hit the stores, your credit card will be frozen in a block of ice. If you’d really like to go, you’ll have to wait for it to thaw. Hopefully, your impulse to shop will have passed by then.

Making the easy difficult and the difficult easy is a great way to help build new habits.

If you know of anyone who might benefit from reading this post, please feel free to share it with them.

The Swap Challenge: Week Four

Welcome to the end of the final week of the Swap Challenge!

I hope everyone was able to swap out at least one unhealthy meal for a healthy one each week over the past month. More importantly, I hope that you found it delicious and satisfying.

This week I’d like to share a tuna recipe without the tuna. It uses chickpeas and vegan mayonnaise and is delicious.

You can find it here: Chuna Salad Sandwich.

When I made mine, I didn’t have the pickles, and it was still mouthwatering.

If you are just beginning your journey to a healthy lifestyle, I hope this was a great start for you.

Be well!

The Swap Challenge: Week Three

How are you doing for week three of The Swap Challenge?

I hope that you have swapped out at least one unhealthy meal for a healthy one this week and are feeling great about it.

This week I made sweet potato-black bean enchiladas. This recipe was a bit more involved, but definitely worth it!

You can find it here: sweet potato-black bean enchiladas.

One more week to go!

Take Advantage of Momentum and Become Unstoppable

Jesse Zheng/pexels.com

Two of the most important things you can do to help maintain good health and help prevent the development of lifestyle-related diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, are eating healthy foods and exercising. If you are not accustomed to doing these things regularly, it may very well be difficult to get to this place. So, what can you do to move in the right direction?

The most important thing, the key factor, is the establishment of healthy routines and habits. If you can develop healthy routines and habits, everything else will become simple and fall right into place. Understandably, the initial set-up of healthy habits may be challenging. I would thus like to offer two ideas to help get you started on your journey.

First, I believe that for most people, trying to accomplish too much too quickly may be overwhelming and possibly become a setup for failure. As a result, it is better to start small, take baby steps, and gradually advance.

The next ideas I want to share are concepts I learned back in my college physics class—inertia and momentum. Inertia is the propensity for a body to remain unchanged with regard to its motion. So, if a body is at rest, it will tend to stay at rest. Momentum can be thought of as the energy gained by a body in motion.

How about a practical example demonstrating how these concepts can help a person develop healthy routines? Let’s say that you don’t run at all and would like to run for thirty minutes five times each week. Currently, you have a great deal of inertia—you don’t run at all and would tend to remain in this state. However, once you start to break free from your inertia, by perhaps going for a light run twice this week for five minutes each time, you will also begin to build a small amount of momentum. Next week you might commit to running three times for ten minutes each time. You’ve just broken free from more inertia and have developed more momentum. You then decide that you will run four times the following week for ten minutes each session, and then for the next two weeks, you will increase your time for those runs to fifteen minutes. Each week you will be unloading more inertia, developing greater momentum, and finding that the runs are becoming easier and more enjoyable. Over the ensuing weeks, you will hit your goal and feel fantastic. The momentum you have developed will make you unstoppable!

These all-important concepts of inertia and momentum are not only pertinent to running. They can be applied to almost anything else. Some other things that come to mind are eating healthy, studying a new language, practicing a sport, or learning a new skill, such as playing the piano. You can achieve so much in life by breaking free from inertia and taking advantage of momentum.

The Swap Challenge: Week Two

Welcome to week two of the Swap Challenge!

I hope everyone has been having a great week.

Feel free to leave a comment if you have swapped out an unhealthy meal for a healthy one.

I prepared pizza with creamed spinach, sun-dried tomatoes, red onion, and olives this week. The cream part of the creamed spinach was made from tofu!

I found the recipe on forksoverknives.com.

It was delicious.

Be well, and have a fantastic week!

The Swap Challenge: Week One

Allan Mas/pexels.com

Welcome to the Swap Challenge Week One!

I hope everyone is doing great.

If anyone has swapped out an unhealthy meal for a healthy one, please feel free to comment and share what meal you prepared and how things went.

I’ll start—I found this recipe for vegan crab cakes on the CNS Kitchen site that was very easy to make and delicious. I thought it tasted better than the crab cakes I used to eat. Oh, and the tartar sauce was so good.

Until next week, be well!

A Food-Borne Illness

As an Emergency Medicine physician, when I hear the term “food-borne illness,” it immediately conjures images of people with vomiting and diarrhea secondary to consuming undercooked or spoiled food contaminated with bacteria or their toxins. However, I recently learned of a new usage of this term. In his article, “Is the Present Therapy for Coronary Artery Disease the Radical Mastectomy of the Twenty-First Century?” Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn ascribes a new meaning to the phrase “food-borne illness,” referring to coronary artery disease as this type of illness. According to the CDC, coronary artery disease (CAD) is the most common type of heart disease in the United States. It is the narrowing and blockage of blood vessels supplying blood to the heart, which can eventually lead to heart attacks. The CDC also states that in the United States, over 20 million adults over age 20 have CAD and that someone has a heart attack every 40 seconds.

Those are some pretty frightening statistics. But luckily, doctors have treatments for heart disease. We have an armamentarium of medications as well as procedures such as coronary stents and coronary artery bypass surgeries. These are remarkable advances that are lifesaving for those that are having a heart attack. However, as Dr. Esselstyn states, “…none of the present therapies targets the cause: the Western diet.” Yes, our Western diet—filled with processed foods, fried foods, meats, oils, and dairy. He describes cultures that consume a plant-based diet in which CAD is almost non-existent. Moreover, the converse is also true. When plant-based cultures adopt a Western diet, guess what? Yes, that’s right, they develop CAD. Thus, it seems as though heart disease really is a food-borne illness.

History also teaches us this lesson. Between 1939 and 1945, Norway was occupied by Nazi Germany. During this time, the Germans removed all animal livestock, forcing the population to subsist on whole grains, legumes, fruits, and vegetables. Following this, deaths from heart attacks and strokes fell. When the war ended, and animal products became available again, deaths from these illnesses rose to prewar levels. Thought-provoking, isn’t it?

In his article, Dr. Esselstyn mentions a study he conducted on very ill patients with CAD that he placed on a plant-based diet. These patients have thus far been followed for twenty years, and the results are fascinating. A plant-based diet not only stopped the progression of heart disease but even reversed it! Yes, reversed it. Furthermore, this study and its follow-up showed that people with CAD would stick with dietary changes for decades. If provided with an understanding of the link between diet and disease, I believe that people will want to take control of their own health and give themselves the opportunity to be better.

Consequences

Cheeseburgers and chocolate cake are delicious. Eat a cheeseburger for lunch, and you will likely feel really good. And that piece of rich chocolate cake—definitely mouthwatering. The same goes for pizza dripping with cheese, juicy porterhouse steaks, hot dogs with all the fixins, moist frosted creme donuts, and many others. Undoubtedly tasty and gratifying.

Eating such foods on infrequent occasions is pleasurable and will probably cause no harm. However, filling your plate with these types of foods on most days of the week is an entirely different story—one whose ending is difficult to visualize in the present moment.

Many of us are probably aware that foods high in sugars, fats, and cholesterol are not the healthiest options. They increase the risk of developing many chronic diseases, including heart disease. Moreover, this risk increases the more often these foods are consumed. I’d bet that countless people who understand the dangers of eating these foods consistently still do so. Why would this be?

The likely answer is that the consequences of regularly eating unhealthy foods do not occur right away. As a matter of fact, the results of these actions will typically take years to manifest. If you knew that eating cheeseburgers a few times every week would increase your risk of suffering a heart attack ten or fifteen years down the road, it might not bother you too much. However, if you knew that eating a cheeseburger on Monday would cause you to have a heart attack on Tuesday, I’ll bet that you’d think twice about it.

The converse is also true. Eating a vegetable salad on Monday will not turn you into a picture of good health on Tuesday. But eat lots of fruits and vegetables every day, and you will undoubtedly see and feel the difference in the following months and years. Again, when there is a lot of time separating actions and consequences, people will oftentimes only care about the immediate or near-term results without giving much regard to the long-term effects of their choices.

This concept was explained very well by Ray Dalio in his book Principles. He refers to near-term effects as first-order consequences and long-term effects as second- and subsequent-order consequences. As Mr. Dalio says, “Quite often the first-order consequences are the temptations that cost us what we really want, and sometimes they are the barriers that stand in our way.”

The next time you are about to order that cheeseburger, don’t just think about how it will make you feel as you’re eating it. Consider how it may affect you a few years into the future. After all, it is still you that will bear the consequences.