Reversing The Obesity Problem: Maria Lattouff Anderson at TEDxCrestmoorPark

my name is Maria Anderson and yes I have a sugar problem my life and food has been filled with inconsistencies and a lot of sugar I'd like to have you come along with me through the struggle that I faced and the journey that hopefully I'm making toward wellness for community as well as for myself I was adopted as an infant so I started my food life with baby formula rather than with breast milk which was fine except that the milk formulas made me violently ill so much that I think my parents must have considered sending me back to the baby store where they got me but thankfully they didn't so they switched me over to soy formula I became a de facto vegan by the time I was three months of age and I wish I could say that we all ate happily ever after but there's a little more to it than that I was kept off milk through childhood and honestly the lack of ice cream and pizza and chocolate was psychologically traumatizing I remember a time when my mom swooped in to a birthday party that I was at as a kid and took from my hands this piece of chocolate cake I was about to eat right at the last second and I still kind of have to go through therapy to work through that but what I lacked in dairy I'm more than made up for in sugar I would eat those packets of colored sugar that came with a sugar stick do you know what I'm talking about you sort of dip the stick in the sugar and then I would also eat the sugar straws where you just poured it straight into your mouth I would suck the juice out of a lemon with candy candy stick like a lemon flavored candy stick to suck the the sugar out of there one by one my teeth eroded with cavities I grew up in southern New Jersey which meant having amazing fresh tomatoes like there we go having amazing fresh tomatoes and corn and peaches from down the street but unfortunately growing up we were just as likely to have canned and soggy spinach and green beans and asparagus my life with vegetables was kind of a complicated relationship during childhood I fail to form a food value system and what I mean by that is I never learned to distinguish what activist and author Michael Pollan would call food-like substances you know where there's calories but little nutritional value from true whole food the problem only got worse in adolescence I started eating pizza even though it made me violently ill I was taught by my dad mostly about the deliciousness of the burnt fat that's on the edge of the steak you've ever eaten that the joy of a huge slice of pie with a big scoop of Cool Whip and in the magic of the Twinkie snack cake I ate a Twinkie every single day in high school for my lunch snack I have friend in fact who made a game out of finding my Twinkie and then smashing it with her fist and I didn't care I would open up the plastic and I'd love the sound of the plastic and I'd scoop out the cake and the sugar and just kind of eat it with my hand and then I would go home and I'd have one or two or a box full of Twinkies as an after-school snack there were plenty of opportunities for growth and insight during that time at one point a girl told me I was too hippy but I kind of misunderstood her and thought she meant that I was a hippie which I thought was reasonably cool and I didn't see any problem with that so the comment just kind of washed past me but when my father had a major heart attack in his 40s that abruptly changed the landscape of food in my house my mother followed to the letter the advice of the dietitian who was at my dad's bedside no more would there be pork chops fried in butter or pizza every Saturday night from the mob-run pizza joint down the with the changes that my mom made my dad lost 20 or 30 pounds and I obviously became sensitive to the fact that I could lose my dad over something that was caused by food interesting the though my mom changed our diet but not her own she would make us say broiled fish and then she'd cook herself a cheeseburger with french fries so there were a lot of mixed messages in my household forming a food value system requires cooking my mom cooked at home and was an excellent baker but she had a lot of rules about how things were supposed to go in her kitchen if I wanted to help her or learn to cook I had to do these sort of ritualistic behaviors like I would have to sort through the already very highly processed rice to see if there were little rice bugs rice weevils I never found one but I guess they exist and also it would always have to inspect the cans to see if there was evidence of botulism which I also never found in the 1970s so I quickly lost interest in the kitchen but thankfully a woman who was like a second mother to me soon showed me that cooking could be a joy that it could be natural that looking for the best ingredients could be a pleasure that was richly rewarded so I started to cook at that point and I was guided by her principles which included never too much garlic which I still follow today but also everything's better with a little more butter in college I gained cultural awareness and that led to some social activism and community service but along with that cultural awareness came a suspicion of the man and so what I mean by the man is you know the man's not gonna tell me what I can look like or what I can eat or how much I should weigh the man was shorthand for Society for culture for magazines that equated female beauty with anorexia in college I ate nachos and sausages from carts at midnight and I drank beer I gained the obligatory 15 pounds and my cholesterol was high and that was when I was a teenager now I see that as a misdirected kind of rebellious nough Stewie t'what ever I wanted soon I attended Medical School where I learned shockingly little about nutrition but I was exposed to the scale of disease caused by what we put in our mouths I learned that most amputees suffered not from trauma but from obesity-related diabetes I learned that most people who are on hemodialysis were there due to chronic overeating leading to hypertension and obesity and then kidney failure I learned that the leading cause of blindness among adults in our country wasn't some mysterious or romantic seeming infection like Mary Ingalls had on Little House on the Prairie but again obesity related diabetes this dramatically widened my perspective on eating and wellness but even so I still lacked a deep personal understanding of the profound interconnection between food and health a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in cardiology followed and during those seven years I met a lot of people who could no longer fit on a 300 or 350 or 400 pound limited exam table I took care of a man who hid bags of candy in his hospital bedside even while he was dying of obesity-related heart failure and lung restriction more people started to come to their appointments and scooters because their knees had given out under the excess weight I cared for a prisoner as he completed a sentence for murder and after 20 years in the hospital he got out I mean in the in the prison he got out and went straight to Chinese food and wound up in the hospital within a day due to congestive heart failure precipitated by salt one woman I took care of couldn't stop eating her ice cream as her intensive care unit physician explained that she was very likely to die of complications from obesity and I took care of an 18 year old girl with a heart attack not from some weird childhood heart abnormality but from two-pack-a-day smoking and high cholesterol I was starting to see more of diseases of the old and people who were young so what was i eating during those years I lived near farms and I took advantage of local fresh produce and I learned the terms local and seasonal but on the other hand drug companies who made drugs for high cholesterol and high blood pressure maybe there are another manifestation of the man they brought us lunches of burritos and lasagna and cookies and brownies the residency can be exhausting and stressful when you're a resident you learn never stand when you can sit never sit when you can lie down see a doughnut eat a doughnut see a burrito eat a burrito my own doctor warned me then my weight was steadily increasing and that my triglycerides which are a measure of fat in your bloodstream were high I became pregnant with a six pound baby and gained 45 pounds all my experience and knowledge were still not enough to keep me from falling into obesity and the health problems that related from it I was great at living with contradictions after I had my daughter concern for what I was putting in her mouth led me to care more for what I was putting in my own but around that time even more importantly I gained friends who were passionate about food issues I cooked more I read Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma I learned about community sponsored agriculture I bought from farmers markets I started to understand really how my health correlated with my food I lost the forty five pounds and ten more I moved to Colorado after training and became a shareholder at Delaney farm which is a CSA within Denver urban gardens and that helped me overcome a lifelong black thumb and learn about organic farming being surrounded by people who were passionate about hunger and obesity was transformative for me these people provided cohesion to a lifetime of these individual experiences I had their work and bringing great food to the community was inspiring I dropped a few more pounds and got my triglycerides finally to low normal and I had much more energy and just felt better I also around that time joined a journal Club where physicians talk about articles relating to preventing heart disease most of the discussions we had centered on cholesterol-lowering statin medications the perfect blood-pressure pill for every scenario and the best use of stress testing or calcium scoring but what we didn't seem to discuss was the obesity epidemic and how to counter that my colleagues sort of had a sense of fatalism about trying to teach people about lifestyle rather than prescribe them a medication even though they themselves generally followed a very healthy way of life they had a hard time kind of conveying that to people and hearing that I started to feel the weights of all the food contradictions that I'd been under for all those years we always meet over dinner and suddenly fried calamari and tiramisu didn't seem as appealing as they might otherwise so by default I became the devil's advocate and started to discuss prevention from a lifestyle standpoint I brought articles about the effects of sugar sweetened beverages on high blood pressure and obesity I was able to present to them the work of TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver and his work in transforming school lunch programs and I talked to them about repeat TED speaker dr. Dean Ornish who's not only defined what it is to have a healthy lifestyle lifestyle but has shown that healthy lifestyle can reverse heart disease so in that small way I helped my colleagues kind of have the courage to pass on specific lifestyle advice to their many patients and from a personal standpoint having the opportunity to teach others about those kinds of lifestyle changes really focused my attention on my own in my first job as a cardiologist in Colorado I saw a lot of obesity related illness but it was very difficult to treat the underlying obesity appointments were short and I was informed that taking the time to counsel people about their weight wasn't reimbursable in other words the insurance company would pay doctors to place thin sand heart arteries and prescribe medications and perform lots of stress tests but not to reduce the need for those things or to offer a better therapy stents don't prevent heart attacks but a healthy lifestyle does I left that first job without a clear indication of what I was going to do next after about two days of enjoying not working I started a business it was called medical mentors and it was a private medical practice that was focused on lifestyle change and health improvement it was an amazing experience and I finally had the time to teach people about lifestyle change and get into their home's sadly around that time the economy suffered and my practice closed and even though it was a failure from a business standpoint I learned a lot about starting a business about PR and marketing about forming a website also I gained just these entrepreneurial skills and after that I was able to form my own job with a great cardiology practice that allowed for a flexible schedule then I learned through the women a social entrepreneurs community of Cooking Matters which is a national organization which does almost exactly what my business did so now I work as a nutrition educator for them and I have the time 12 hours over six weeks to spend teaching people about durable lifestyle change in my life there have been experiences and educate and exposure to the world and then there was community community allows cohesion to all these random experiences we have and helps internally contradictory individuals to make sense of everything through their own journeys it will take a community of food activists and teachers and educators and Ted speakers and TED attendees to turn around the obesity epidemic I'm honored to be a part of that community I feel like I'm very early in my own food activist journey but I hope that my gradual development mirrors that of the global food movement toward healthier eating which is becoming more cohesive and determined and active every day and I hope that my personal evolution supports and elevates your own thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 15,339

Rating: 4.5492959 out of 5

Keywords: Social Change, USA, Education, Medicine, tedx talks, Food, Culture, Lifestyle, tedx, Health, Science, ted, TedxCrestmoorPark, ted talks, ted x, tedx talk, English, ted talk

Id: gtbSj2eEyOI

Length: 16min 40sec (1000 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 11 2012