Dr Shmuel Shields Guard Your Health Series Part 9 Healthier Kids for Flu Season & Beyond

welcome everybody my name is dr shmuel shields i'm a nutritionist and we are continuing with our health series our guard your health series these are short series that we hope to continue through part of the winter and topic today i'm very excited about i think it's a very very important topic and i hope everybody will get a lot out of it we're basically going to just try to introduce the topic today before i do that i just want to express my hakarasa tov to the ribena shalom for giving me a chance to reach a wider audience and get a hopefully a good message across and i want to express a karusetov to the kazakh organization and to torah anytime who do tremendous things for the jewish community as we all know we don't even have to say more than that um anyway the topic we're going to talk about today is called healthier kids for flu season and beyond i just want to mention if there are any comments or questions or feedback on this particular presentation today please direct them to events org again that's events e-v-e-n-t-s at hazak c-h-a-z-a-q dot org um okay so i want to start off by just saying we have a mitzvah in the torah who shamar temmie owed lenovo we should guard our health exceedingly we should be very careful with our with our health and as a friend of mine a friend his name is rabbi dr moshe miller pointed out to me there are very few mitzvahs where the torah goes out of its way to use the word ma'od ushimar tem lenovcho safem we should guard ourselves exceedingly we should be very careful with our health and i think this is a very important point and having said that i want to talk about the health of children some of you heard people say the following they listen to a piece of news they get up in the morning they read a piece of news they hear a piece of news and they'll just comment by saying nothing shocks me anymore nothing shocks me anymore i sometimes say that we live in a world today where we're so exposed to so many things and the media and all the methods that we have to bring news to us today we're constantly being bombarded with shocking things with horrific things i mean the news doesn't talk about good things that happen in the world it's always the terrible things but people have gotten many people have developed an attitude that nothing shocks them anymore well i'm going to tell you something that shocks me the deterioration of the health of children it's shocking to see children who should be healthy and well and we seeing for many years now a rapid deterioration in their health and i think there are things that we could do about it but it's going to take a communal effort family effort a real grassroots effort to uh to change this this picture so i'm going to ask the listening audience what i'm going to list a few things here and i want you to think about what all these things have in common or maybe what is the common denominator or possibly a contributing factor or a consequence of some of these things root canals obesity elevated lipid levels elevated cholesterol levels triglyceride levels elevated blood sugar levels hyperactivity mood swings concentration issues compromised immunity and frequent cold flu strep and ear infections so one of the things i want to suggest maybe you came up with the same thing one of the common denominators to almost all of these conditions i mentioned is foods foods that we eat things that we use to nourish our body if we are not using the right kind of foods on a regular basis we could make these conditions worse we can contribute to these conditions that i mentioned and there's probably a host more but i'm just giving you uh a little picture here of how foods can affect us and i know food and diet and nutrition is not the only part of the puzzle here but it's certainly a significant contributory uh piece that has to be addressed and oftentimes it's taken very lightly and it's not really addressed properly and that's really the the focus of these series today is to try to make us more aware i think most people know that food plays some role in our well-being and our health but sometimes we just don't think about it and we don't we sort of kind of take it for granted and we don't really address it the way it really needs to be addressed so what is the problem today with the foods and how have the food choices affected the health of children again all of these conditions i mentioned from root canals to obesity to colds flu strep ear infections concentration issues high cholesterol levels are seen in children every single day by pediatricians throughout the country okay these are not isolated things these are conditions that you know if i had someone come into my office and they told me oh i don't feel so good today i just had a root canal and the guy was 47 years old so i wouldn't flinch but when a seven-year-old comes in and says and the parent might say to me oh just came from the dentist he had a root canal that still shocks me or if a child an eight or a nine or a 10 or 11 12 year old child has an elevated cholesterol level those are things we normally don't see until maybe a person is you know middle-aged but we see this routinely routinely today so something is very wrong everybody's got to take a step back and has to recognize the consequences here because these kind of conditions seen in children at such young ages are rapidly accelerating the disease pathway and and the onset of catastrophic illnesses is being accelerated when you're seeing health issues in children this age so as a nutritionist and as a health educator i've always seen myself playing more of a preventive role i believe strongly in prevention and i also feel that's the you know lit kagila prevention and taking steps to prevent problems i think is the torah hashgaffer and i think there are things that we definitely uh can do uh to uh to address those those issues so um i want to um see if i can give you maybe some thoughts today and then we're going to continue with this uh we'll probably have a few other upcoming presentations on this to give you and again i don't want to just talk theoretically i want to give practical suggestions that can be implemented and i will say it is an uphill battle we're struggling against a lot of things i'm going to talk about some of those things now uh but look what's at stake here the health of our children and even our own health and our family's health and well-being so i think this these ideas are not just for children children are just small adults but they're really for everybody and everybody has to be involved in in trying to change the picture here so we're dealing with processed foods at the turn of the century only about 10 of our foods were processed and currently approximately 90 of our foods are processed so what does that mean processing usually means essential nutrients the food chain has been disturbed in some way nutrients have been stripped away uh foods are grown and on soils that may not be as good as they once were or could be you know we are feeding a lot of people and methods have come into play to maybe make that more expedient but there have been consequences because of that so all i could tell you is the foods have been processed important nutrients have been stripped out of the foods um and then other ingredients have been added into the foods in the course of processing our foods sugar artificial coloring flavorings dyes hydrogenated oils these are all harmful ingredients and it's probably the amounts that make it even more compelling because the amounts are extraordinary today extraordinary i can tell you if we went back to the 1600s when the pilgrims first came to this country the average person back then was consuming about seven pounds of sugar annually today the average person is consuming somewhere between 125 and 150 pounds of sugar a year and a lot of my patients will tell me but i don't use any sugar i don't add any sugar but i tell them if you look at your labels and you look at grams of sugar and even uneven a glass of juice there could be 28 to 30 grams of sugar every four grams of sugar equals a teaspoon so a person could drink a glass of juice and get six or seven teaspoons of sugar right there and then he goes for a fruit flavored yogurt with another 28 grams of sugar and there's another six or seven teaspoons of sugar there and as the day goes on and there are snacks and other meals and then there's a soda with lunch with another 10 grams of sugar by the end of the day the person could be taking in 30 25 30 40 teaspoons of sugar in one day okay just setting the stage here i know there are a lot of issues to talk about but i just want to give you a little time a little taste a little feel for what we're dealing with today and then as i mentioned earlier frequency and amounts make a big difference you know the jelly doughnut once a year for hanukkah i could live with that you know a rosh kodesh party with some reasonable snacks once a month okay but that's not where that's not what it's like it's an inundation it's like a marble of bad food choices poor snacks harmful ingredients there's always an occasion there's always a reason and it's it's it's really it boils down to frequency and amounts in moderation some of these things you know can fit in uh we will talk about rewarding children possibly in different ways um okay so we have um we have some of those issues um we also have what i call a hijacking of the taste buds once a kid or even an adult let's we're talking about kids now um sits down to that that burger or that fried chicken or the french fries fried foods that kind of combination it's it's very hard to compete when you offer fresh produce or a salad or fruits or vegetables when you're competing against either very sugary you know things concentrated sugars refined sugars that affect the brain affect receptive sense receptor centers in the brain pleasure centers in the brain set up addictive qualities um and then just the taste of fried foods you know it's very appealing they taste good but then you set up a very difficult scenario for eating healthier food that aren't prepared or cooked that way because the taste buds have literally been hijacked and sometimes addictions develop and so on so we as i said it's an uphill battle but i think it's it's winnable or it's certainly at least modifiable and those are the things i think we have to try to work with uh anyway everything i've spoken about so far sets the stage for nutritional deficiencies and once with once the stage has been set for nutritional deficiencies then we open the door to a host of potential problems nutritional deficiencies mean a compromised immune system a compromised immune system means more we become more prone to colds flu strep ear infections and the list goes on a compromised immune system also means besides those kind of things the immune system is protecting us against all types of harmful invaders and even against cancer cells so we want an optimal working immune system if you are deficient in things like vitamin e or vitamin c or vitamin d or selenium or magnesium or there are many many nutrients what we call micro and macro nutrients that affect the immune system the immune system doesn't have those nutrients it may not be able to build the specialized cells that the immune system is made up of the antibodies that it has to make to deal with um invading microorganisms so as louis pasteur that french i think a french biologist who lived a couple of hundred years ago who gave us the germ theory before he passed away on his deathbed he said the following the germ is nothing the terrain is everything meaning the integrity of our inner health our immune health could deal very effectively with organisms microorganisms and bacteria and viruses and so on and so forth provided that it's working in an optimal way you know you're giving your immune system the best chance to fight these kind of things okay anyway having said that um i just want to talk a little bit about behavioral issues and the role that food and nutrients play there so many children as we all know are suffering today from inability to concentrate hyperactivity add adhd all sorts of terms that children have been labeled with um and for for some of these children again i'm not saying this is a simple uh issue and there are many factors that are involved here but for a certain percentage of children the kind of snacks and beverages and foods that they're consuming on a regular basis could possibly be at the cause of some of these problems or at the very least certainly making these conditions worse again if you have a child that has a root can had to have a root canal you don't want that child to have another root canal if you have a child that's hyperactive you don't want he or she to become more hyperactive or you don't want concentration issues to get worse but if we don't address some of the underlying cause or contributing factors they could potentially get worse and that's really what i'm trying to stress today that there are ways to address many of these issues and possibly hopefully with the reboundish lumps help you know improve these issues and make them better maybe even prevent the problems down the road so those are some of the things that this series is going to get into i hope that in some upcoming series i've had planned we'll try to give some more practical ideas and solutions and suggestions uh to promote better health in our children and our families and hopefully address some of these issues and again it's all of us have to do our part and i want to thank you again for listening to this introduction and i want to talk more about some very practical and important ways that we can maybe make some changes so stay tuned we will continue hashem with this series and again if you want to if you have any questions any comments any feedback please address them to events spelled c-h-a-z-a-q events at kazakh.org thank you again for listening have a great day