This content was created by Nick Norwitz. This content was uploaded by Nick Norwitz. This is a YouTube video titled "Nick Norwitz's Food as Medicine Journey" (uploaded 2021-01-19) featuring Nick Norwitz speaking in first person. In the talk he describes living in Newton, Massachusetts, his history of metabolic health problems (recurrent fractures, osteoporosis from a DEXA scan, severe ulcerative colitis, dramatic weight loss and hospitalization), failed medications, and how studying nutrition and adopting a ketogenic approach rapidly resolved his colitis and reduced inflammation, allowing him to come off meds and improve bone health. He frames food as a central tool in metabolic medicine, connects his story to the wider epidemic of metabolic diseases (diabetes, obesity, Alzheimer’s, etc.), and closes with a Marcus Aurelius quote. The content is a personal testimonial / advocacy talk about food-as-medicine and metabolic health.
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Food is one of the most powerful tools we have to transform health. My name is Nick. I live in Newton, Massachusetts. I'm an aspiring physician scientist interested in metabolic medicine and food as medicine. I've always been a foodie. I've always loved food, even from when I was little. I always loved to cook and experiment. I would eat anything. And then it became something that I really feared when my metabolic conditions came to the fore and food became just a chore for nourishing my body and not wasting away. Throughout my entire childhood, I basically never went to the doctor for more than a stuffy nose. Later in high school, I really got into marathon running. And I was training for the 2014 Boston Marathon and I got a fracture in my right tibia. And over the next couple years, I just kept on getting more and more fractures. I eventually got a DEXA scan, a bone density scan, and it revealed I had osteoporosis. I already felt like a little bit of a medical mystery, like, well, what's going on? So there was a lot of questions. It wasn't just the diagnosis, but it was not understanding why. And then over the next couple years, I developed gut issues. Everything I ate hurt. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, which is an inflammatory bowel disease. Things were deteriorating. Life became the challenge. I started having a severe colitis flare, dropped 20% of my body weight in a couple weeks, and ended up in the palliative care ward. My heart rate was in the 20s, and I was at my wit's end. I had tried every medication, and none of them had helped me. Some had caused extreme distress where I'd just be like convulsing on the floor for 24 hours. I remember sitting in bed thinking, "I have to do something. Like, I have to at this point take responsibility for my health." And so that's what I started to do. I started studying nutrition science for my own health and found out that maybe a ketogenic diet could help me with my issues. And so I gave it a whirl and The effect was just phenomenal. It just completely made my colitis symptoms go away within a week, and my inflammation dropped within a week, and I came off my meds, and my inflammation stayed away, and even my bones have gotten better. What was most remarkable about my stay my story and my conditions was that— not that they were unique, but that they weren't at all. That they were actually really typical. I realized that everything I went through— ulcerative colitis and osteoporosis— was just little drops in this huge wave pandemic of metabolic diseases that is affecting basically all the developed world. Poor nutrition, I think, is one of the biggest and most important roots that feeds these common pathologies that underlie all the metabolic diseases that are the most burdensome today. Diabetes, Alzheimer's, obesity, Parkinson's, what have you. They all have their roots in a messed up metabolism, and that has its roots in poor lifestyle factors. Sedentary lifestyle, chronic stress, but a big, big root of chronic diseases is food. Nutrition is a key to good metabolic health and to preventing or treating all these different metabolic diseases. I extrapolate my experience to the experience of everybody dealing with a chronic health condition that has a metabolic underpinning. I think it's, it's all part of the same set of pathologies that all have similar treatments that can be found through metabolic medicine and food as medicine. I really love this quote by Marcus Aurelius. It's from his meditations that the impediment to action advances action. That which stands in the way becomes the way. Basically, it communicates the perspective that the obstacles that are put in front of you, they can either break you or they can form you, and how you choose to respond to them is up to you.
