Dr. Sal AbiEzzi discusses obesity as a global health crisis and argues for whole foods and plant-based eating. He covers food sensitivities like dairy and gluten, the limits of current testing, and how time-restricted eating may help patients improve their health.
Chapters
The biggest problem we're facing in our world today is obviously obesity. And the reason we get overweight or obese, which is 70% of people on the planet today are overweight or obese, so a huge problem, and it's because we eat calories that tend to be very dense and not very rich in nutrients. So plants give you the nutrients you need, all of them, including proteins. If you think of broccoli, 100 calories of broccoli has more protein than 100 calories of red meat. So let's— I'm gonna go over the 4 4 pillars quickly. Again, this is kind of— I want to take you back to the basics. But when we want to talk about technology, we can open that up at the end. So what is healthy nutrition? We've had really a media blitz. It's very confusing, right? I mean, you have all kinds of people telling you all kinds of things, like eat meat, don't eat meat, eat a balanced diet, don't go balanced, go paleo, and so forth. So I loved this quote from Michael Pollan. He's a researcher at UC Berkeley. In a nutshell, he sums it up this way. Eat food. So what does that mean, eat food? Nature-made versus man-made. The more natural the food is, the more nutritious it's going to be for you. That's what he means by eat food. So nature-made versus man-made. So think of that as a very simple mantra. Whatever you're looking at, the more processed it is, the less likely it's going to be nutritious for you. That's rule number 1. Mostly plants. And there's a simple reason for that. I mean, you can really— it's very hard to kind of generalize that. So every one of us has their own microbiome, their own genetic profile. And their own relationship with food. But plants give you the most nutrients with the least amount of calories. The biggest problem we're facing in our world today is obviously obesity. And the reason we get overweight or obese, which is 70% of people on the planet today are overweight or obese, so a huge problem, and it's because we eat calories that tend to be very dense and not very rich in nutrients. So plants give you the nutrients you need, all of them, including proteins. If you think of broccoli, 100 calories of broccoli has more protein than 100 calories of red meat. And not too much of it. So, that's really if you want to sum it in a nutshell. I want to touch a little bit on food sensitivities. This is something I deal with every day in my practice. And that has come up because we've processed food so much that we've started having major food sensitivities. It starts very early in life. And children, they get initially the exposure through the skin or food, and then eventually They develop these super allergies. You think of dairy sensitivity or dairy allergies, you think of gluten, that's big right now, which is coming from wheat and certain gluten products. You think of FODMAP. Do you know what the FODMAP diet is? No. So that's a popular diet for people who have irritable bowel syndrome, people who get bloating, nausea, diarrhea, constipation. Sometimes certain foods which are plant-based can be bad for you. And there's other diets that cause food sensitivities. There's a lot of research in that arena. A lot of startups want you to go and do food testing, whether in terms of a blood test or patch skin test or looking at the stool. That might give you a clue. The problem with all these tests, from my experience so far and from the science, is that if your blood test shows that you're allergic to a specific food, that doesn't mean that you can't have that food. You may have developed the allergy at some point in life, but then you may have Conquer that allergy, or it could be dose-dependent. If you have almonds every day, sometimes you become allergic to almonds, but you can probably handle a handful of almonds as opposed to a whole bag. So, it's a very complex story about food allergy. We can talk about that at the end. This is a new kind of fad, which is— and there's a lot of science to support that— is time-restricted eating. So, we used to call that intermittent fasting. Now we are getting away from the term intermittent fasting. Time restricted, that means if you skip a meal or 2 and you go 8 hours, 12 hours, 14 hours without food, that seems to be good for our body. It kind of calms down the immune system, the inflammatory system, allows the repair mechanism of the DNA system to kick in and repair our body on the inside. So that's kind of important. And there are a lot of different startups in that arena. There's a startup called Noone that That wants you to delve into that space. And some people go fast a whole day or 2 days or 3 days. There are different ways to approach that. I don't think science has helped us decide which is the best way. But again, skipping meals or reducing calories seems to be good for us. So just take an inventory. I do that with all my patients now when I see them for a physical and a wellness consult. What do you eat? Breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks? Ice cream. Ice cream. Drinks are very important. A lot of drinks have empty calories. And then what time do you eat? And then do you have any food sensitivities? So this is kind of a cool way to think about it.
