Dr. Shmuel Shields | 1. Keys To Guarding Your Health | CHAZAQ

I'd like to welcome the listening audience to our guard your health series. Uh my name is Dr. Schmool Shields. I am a nutritionist in private practice in Queens. I'm also the author of a book called 18 chapters to live by which is a book on health and nutrition and each chapter is devoted to a different aspect of health. Anyway, I'm here today to really share uh my knowledge with you on how to guard your health. Uh a very important topic. uh we're going to be doing a series. Um so I want to start just by mentioning just to have a little bit of a waiver that um I'm giving really health you know education today. Um and I don't think it should be personally applied unless you speak with your health care professional before making any dietary lifestyle exercise changes. Uh make sure you're doing what's safe and right for you as an individual. Um okay let's get started. I want to start by mentioning um if you were to build a chair um it would need legs to support it. If you put one leg on the chair, you wouldn't get much support. It wouldn't work as a chair. If you put two legs, you're still not going to have a chair that you can sit on. A chair needs three legs to support it. A minimum of three uh to give it the stability it needs for you to uh make use of it as a chair in a safe way. Four legs, even better. you'll have maybe even more support with with four legs. I'm using the chair as an analogy because our health to protect our health to guard our health, we also need legs or pillars to support our health. And there are many many many different um facets uh to supporting our health. Many different factors go into it. Uh I'm just going to touch on on some now. I'm going to go through a list of things that play some role in managing and protecting and safeguarding our health. So, I would suggest as I go through this list, you may just want to think about some of these ideas and maybe even make a mental note or write down an area that maybe you need more support in. Okay. So, one of the pillars that supports our health or regulates our health to some degree is our genetic makeup. Um, we know that families, different families have sometimes a genetic predisposition towards certain illnesses. What that basically means is that your risk may be a little higher for the illness. It could be diabetes, it could be heart disease, it could be uh arthritis, etc. Uh, it doesn't mean you're automatically going to get the disease, but your risk factors are going to be higher than somebody that doesn't have that genetic predisposition. So knowing your family history is important and taking steps to let your health care practitioners know of your family history is important uh so they could be more proactive uh in that area. Um again let me go through the list. So genetic predisposition, weight management, exercise, adequate sleep, proper hydration, healthy foods and beverages, stress management and anger management, um having a positive attitude, having hobbies, doing volunteer work, um addressing spiritual needs, having a sense of meaning and purpose in life. uh a good self-esteem and last but not least, humor. A sense of humor. So, it might not be an exhaustive list, but I'm just trying to make an impression to show you how many factors really are important or play some role in reducing our risk of illness and protecting our health and and well-being. Now, obviously, we all have our challenges in some of these areas, but you want to try to um work on those areas that you feel you need more support in. Uh what I'm going to do, I'm obviously not going to touch on all of these, but I'm going to come back and talk being a nutritionist. I'm going to focus a little bit more on the healthy foods and beverages, and I'd like to give you some um guidelines in that area. So, I'm going to call this list over here um the dirty dozen, okay? For lack of a better better name. But these are some of the things that would put you at risk um if you use these kind of items on a regular basis in your diet. Um the consensus is that it would put you at risk for potential health problems. And although we don't see health problems, you know, it's not like somebody drinks a soda and wakes up the next day with some sort of a disease, the it's a progression. Um over time, the body is the health of the body is compromised based on our lifestyle habits. Um and that's my going to be my focus in this series is going to be more on the the lifestyle and the nutrition aspects of health. Even though I gave you a list of many many things that play a role that this will be more of the focus. So let's go through the list of the dirty dozen. I'll comment here and there on some of these items. Uh but it's just a general working list. Um if anybody does have any um comments or questions or feedback they want to give me. Uh there will be a way to do that. There'll be uh contact information u uh on the uh on the video. Okay. So, soda and soft drinks, uh, again, whatever you could do to get those out of the diet. There's no benefits, no health benefits to soda and soft drinks. Uh, whether they're regular soda, diet sodas, uh, it doesn't matter. uh you want to try to move away from those and into better beverages whether it's mo you know caffeine in moderation black tea green tea herbal teas maybe moderate coffee drinking but mainly you want to focus on water which is still your best drink we're going to talk about that a little later um sweets sugar are you know refined sweets and sugars are a real source of potential health issues We consume more sugar now than ever before. In the 1700s, 1600s I should say, when the pilgrims first came to this country, the average person was consuming about 7 pounds of sugar annually. Today, we are up to 150 pounds, which is unbelievable. Sugar is added to almost all the processed foods we buy uh including things like cakes, cookies, candy, pies, pastries, ice cream, and all of your processed uh food packaged items, canned items, and so on usually have a source of sugar. So, uh we're inundated with it. Um, we're not going to go through all the health risks that sugar poses, but um, obviously we want to take steps to get as much of the processed and refined foods and sugar out of the diet as possible. Um, artificial sweeteners and alcohol sugars are also problematic. Um, you could, uh, find an abundance of research showing some of the side effects and problems that people have been having with some of these substances. Um the next uh part of the dirty dozen would be the refined carbohydrates uh grains that have been processed where much of the nutrition, vitamins and minerals, fiber have been stripped away and you're left with white flour that converts to sugar very rapidly in the body. gives you a spike and also has potential health risks for weight gain, blood sugar disorders, even cardiovascular health, triglyceride levels are affected and and so on. Uh the next item I want to talk briefly about um are hydrogenated fats, also known as trans fats. Hydrogenated or trans fats. One thing I can tell you, if you had 10 experts in the room on a particular subject, how many opinions would you get? We all know the answer to that. 11. Well, it's interesting to note that if we had 10 food scientists or nutritionists in the room, we'd have unanimous agreement that hydrogenated fats are one of the worst fats for the body. Um, nevertheless, even though in New York City, restaurants, it's been outlawed and restaurants cannot use them in cooking or food preparation for a good maybe 15, 20 years now. They've taken they've outlawed the use of hydrogenated fats. Food manufacturers can still use them in the processing of foods and adding them to foods. So things like your typical stick margarine, your commercial peanut butters, many of them uh add a hydrogenated oil or fat. Um they hydrogenate the oil that's already there actually. Um cookies, cakes, pastries, a lot of your commercial baked goods, even some breads, um some uh salad dressings, mayonnaise, you got to read the labels. Look at the ingredient list. If you see the word hydrogenated, leave it on the shelf. and find a substitute that wouldn't have uh hydrogenated uh fat or oil. Shortening is the same thing. It's another term for hydrogenated. Uh commercial or refined palm oils uh would be the same issue. A refined or processed coconut oil would be the same kind of an issue. uh although the extravirgin organic oil even uh though coconut oil I should say the extravirgin organic coconut oil even though there's some debate in the scientific community in terms of uh health benefits or risks of uh the extra virgin coconut oil uh I would ask your health care provider for suggestions on usage of that u but we'll talk more about healthy oils and fats um next list in the list of the dirty dozen. Again, I know nobody is an angel out there and um sometimes uh things come into the diet, but we're just I'm this is just about awareness and h helping you to take steps to uh remove as much of these products uh from the diet as possible. uh processed lunch and meats, your deli meats, again loaded with bad fats, high in sodium, nitrates, nitrites as preservatives. Again, you want to try to avoid or reduce as much as possible. I would say avoid uh artificial colors, artificial flavors, MSG. Try to stay away from processed foods with chemical additives. Try to avoid overeing my monities. A great medieval physician, the Rambam, has taught us that one of the worst things you could do for the body is to overeat. You tax all the organs in the body, you make them work harder, you stress put a a load, a stress load on all the organs of digestion, including the heart. Um, and um should be avoided. Um, late night eating and snacking. Another on the list of the dirty dozen to try to avoid, you know, snacking and eating through the night, eating too fast, being sedentary, and also making try to get away from the poor snack choices. You know, choosing salty and fried snack items and chips and things like that also will not be in your best health interests. Okay, so that's a little bit of a run through of the Dirty Dozen.