The role of food in health | Dr Rupy Aujla | TEDxBristol

[Applause] i was just 24 years old when i saw a patient die in front of me for the first time i was working as a junior doctor in a busy a department a 60 year old lady came in having had a cardiac arrest most likely a result of a heart attack the ambulance crew had started resuscitation at the scene and we continued delivering drugs manual compressions exactly how we'd all been trained but despite our best efforts we ended up calling her death and i remember leaving that recess bay feeling so frustrated this wasn't what i'd been led to believe medicine was about i wanted to save lives not struggle in vain and succumb to losing patience and when i went home that night i refreshed my memory on how many heart attacks there are in the uk every year it was slightly less than but now it's over a hundred thousand one every five minutes and thirty thousand cardiac arrests occur in the same way this poor lady presented out of hospital with less than a one in ten chance that they'll survive so the reality was from the moment the ambulance crew brought her into the department there wasn't much we could do at that point we were reacting to disease that had been untreated undiagnosed and started long ago the first presentation of which was her collapsing to the floor with a heart attack but today i have 15 minutes to save your life or more specifically i have 15 minutes to help prevent the deaths of roughly 50 of the adults in this audience today who will succumb to preventable lifestyle related illnesses like heart disease stroke and complications of metabolic disease lifestyle related illnesses that cause millions of deaths worldwide and in this country my name is rupee i'm a nhs doctor and the medicine i'm prescribing today is food but as more people understand the power of our diets to help prevent and in some cases treat ill health the logical question becomes doctor what should i be eating and if you've looked at the headlines or scroll through social media you will notice meat eaters fighting with vegans paleo fighting with the diabetes association a war of attrition between multiple sides with the losers being the millions of people just trying to figure out how best to look after themselves today i'm going to help you with a different approach because it seems strange to me that you can have some people who decide to eat a plant-based diet and improve their heart disease markers others who choose paleo and improve their bowel symptoms while some swear by low carbohydrate and come off diabetes medications if these diets are so wildly different how can they achieve such similar and frankly remarkable outcomes and the reason why is because a lot of the underlying principles are the same let's take a visual approach so i've taken the liberty of excluding diets that restrict yourself to just eating cucumbers or just pure meat luckily they're not that popular and they lack an evidence base but when we look at popular diets that have credible studies paleo low carbohydrate mediterranean dash whole food plant-based and we map out where the similarities lie you will notice an abundance of overlapping themes and it's this exercise that reveals the principles behind a lot of them naturally as you would imagine all of them remove excess junk food processed foods excess sugar as well as balancing for energy control i think we can all reason with that but what do they include largely plants fiber quality fats and lots of colors what do these do well when you eat largely plants you're ensuring a selection of micronutrients vitamins minerals but also phytochemicals the thousands of chemicals that we find locked in roots leaves and grains we used to think that the benefits of plants were just because of antioxidants but it is far more complicated than that these chemicals can help regenerate our human cells help signaling between them as well as changing their function fiber from whole grains beans legumes can contain hundreds of different types of fibers and these feed your microbiota this incredible population of microbes that nurture your health by releasing nutrients they digest food for you they balance inflammation they they balance excess sugar and feeding this population with these sorts of foods is critical to maintaining them fats essential for your brain health the precursors to hormones that curse through your bloodstream quality fats that you find in nuts and seeds are incredible for benefiting your health and contain a myriad of different fatty acids and colors food has the ability to interact with the very core of our existence our dna and alongside other lifestyle factors like stress and sleep food has the potential to switch genes on and others off this is the exciting field of nutrigenetics the power of your food to change the expression of your genes to promote health and we know for the majority of us it is a diet that consists largely of plants and lots of colors many bodies including the world health organization recognize that eating a prudent diet consistent with these features lowers the risk of chronic kidney disease autoimmune conditions inflammatory bowel disease cancer depression and many more beyond just obesity and disease your plate contains a wealth of information that interacts with your very inner ecosystem in the most powerful way and the confusion that surrounds dietary conflict is actually creating an apathy toward motivation and behavior change what we initially assume as conflicting dietary methods are actually adversarial and complementary in many ways i want to make it clear here that food is not a panacea it's not a cure or a replacement for the many drugs and services that i prescribe as an nhs doctor daily but it is a huge component of well-being and it's this conflict that is creating an issue i would also love to stand here and explain to you what you should be eating and expect you to just do it in the same way i can prescribe a pill to a patient and ask them to take it three times a day but it's not i remember around seven years ago when i started introducing diet into my consultations i had a 45 year old man come into my clinic his blood work showed that he was on the verge of type 2 diabetes and we had a conversation about how diet and lifestyle can prevent the progression to type two he wasn't keen on changing much about his diet that was full of convenience foods but i said look let's just start slow let's just start with one meal and he said well i have frosted wheaties for breakfast i don't really like that maybe that i said great do you like oats he said i don't mind porridge fantastic here's a recipe make some oats put some sunflower seeds on it add some frozen berries they're very cheap try that for a couple of weeks come back and let me know how you get on i wrote down the ingredients for him he got up to leave and i thought to myself wow roofie i think you've really changed this guy's life and then as he left through the door he turned back to me and he said just one more thing doctor how do you make oats nutrition isn't simple for a number of other reasons food is an emotive subject it's how we celebrate it's part of our culture our history nutritional medicine isn't being talked about by us in medicine because most of the doctors here in this room were not taught about the importance of food at medical school our children are not educated in how to grow or cook as part of their schooling which is why i have patients that can't make the simplest of dishes like oats and access to healthy foods depends on where you live the promotion of unhealthy options target the most vulnerable and whilst i can't pretend to help with every aspect of this complicated food environment i can provide you with some insight into some hope there is a movement starting in the uk and it is starting right here in bristol because your local medical school is one of the first in the country to start teaching future doctors not only the foundations of nutrition but also how to cook in 2018 i brought together a group of nutrition experts and doctors passionate about reforming nutrition education and uk medical schools we ran the uk's first culinary medicine course an intense four weeks of culinary activities with a professional chef nutrition lectures with a registered dietitian and teaching on how to apply this information within the constraints of an nhs clinic appointment by a gp this unique collaborative teaching method took students through the impact of nutrition on mental health on our guts on our environment and beyond we ran the cooking courses in an nhs gp surgery right here in bristol with its own fit for purpose community kitchen we even had students run their own health promotion clinics going to families homes and helping them stock their cupboards with nutritious affordable ingredients and arranged by one of your incredible local gps we even had medical students cooking for the homeless talking to them listening providing a medicine and its purest sense this is a career defining experience that all health professionals should have it starts a conversation a real perspective into the grandeur of food beyond just whether something is a carbohydrate or full of vitamins all health professionals have a role in nurturing a culture that appreciates the power of food this is how we reverse the tidal wave of lifestyle-related illnesses that threaten to completely expend all nhs resources unless we get to the root cause of what is causing illness in the first place and many diet many many studies point toward diet as the contributing factor today we need to ask ourselves if we dare to think as radically as we have done in the past this is not radical this is the norm in almost 50 percent of american medical schools but we will make that the norm here in the uk as more medical schools wake up to the need for nutrition training in medicine but if we are serious about building the healthiest population possible where chronic disease is a rarity type 2 diabetes is uncommon heart disease affects the minority of people if we are serious about giving everybody access the best possible protection from disease then we need to start reforming our food systems and our food environment making food as medicine not acute or quirky concept but the norm elevating nutritional medicine into a recognizable mainstream concept in the pursuit of a proactive healthier population affiliating all gp surgeries up and down the country with community kitchens and investing far much more research into nutrition i've talked a bit about how food can prevent disease i've talked to you a bit about how complicated this food environment is and our little way of mitigating that and i want to end this talk in the same way i end my clinical consultations with some simple tangible advice as i promised i'd help you prevent disease just one more every time you look at a plate of food or you sit down to eat just ask yourself can you add just one more can you eat just one more colorful vegetable portion of nuts or seeds or fruit at every meal time just one more if you're having a curry can you add some spinach to it if you're eating an omelette can you serve it with some green beans and even if you're enjoying a delicious cornish pasty can you serve that with a side of butternut squash mash it's these collections of small additions to what our diets lack every day every week every year that have the potential for much larger downstream effects the opportunity of having the biggest impact on your health is actually in your hands it's not with a blockbuster drug it's not with a new pioneering surgical technique it is with the simplest solution is how we feed ourselves and i'm hopeful we can generate a food-focused approach to health in our communities instead of reacting to disease in our emergency departments thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 236,923

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Health, Food, Life Hack, Medical research, Medicine

Id: yTQ0tBmLbns

Length: 16min 0sec (960 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 14 2020