Your Health

Best-selling author Mark Hyman, M.D., is a family physician who founded the Ultra Wellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts. In an interview about his book, The Blood Sugar Solution, http://drhyman.com/blog/video/with-tavis-smily/, Dr. Hyman said one in two Americans has either diabetes or pre-diabetes, a condition he calls diabesity.

Ninety percent of us don't even know we have it. That's one in two: me and you, you and your significant other, your child and his third grade teacher, your granddaughter and her other grandmother. He calls diabetes/pre-diabetes "a tsunami of suffering" and reports that one in every three Medicare dollars is spent on diabetes.

The Standard American Diet has been given the acronym SAD for a reason. In one of "Dr. Mark's Minutes" available on

http://www.drhyman.com, Dr. Hyman claims our poor nutrition, what he calls an "industrial toxic diet," is a "major cause of every chronic disease of aging-heart attacks, strokes, cancer, dementia." He says our diet also causes "depression, sexual dysfunction, infertility, and even acne."

Even though doctors are not trained in medical school to think nutritionally, he says, we are moving into an era of an emerging science of nutrition he calls functional medicine where the cause of disease is treated rather than the symptoms. Dr. Hyman says chronic disease is a food-borne illness. The cause of much of our disease is the poor quality food choices we make and the "food-like substances" we consume rather than fresh food.

We may assume that diabetes primarily affects adults 40 and older, but that's not true. Our 10-year-old granddaughter was recently diagnosed as pre-diabetic. My daughter's family has begun to follow the diet her doctor recommended for her. She's started to ride a bike. She no longer drinks sodas and has cut out her regular snack foods, and in a few months has already lost ten pounds. Change isn't easy, but if a 10-year-old child can pass up French fries, Dr. Pepper, candy bars, and snack cakes, the rest of us can do it, too, to avoid or reverse chronic diseases.

In the United States, people ingest 150 pounds of sugar per person per year. If you buy sugar in five-pound bags, that's the equivalent of 30 bags per person in your shopping cart. You don't bring all of that sugar home in bulk. Most of it is hidden in processed foods under names like maltodextrin, high-fructose corn syrup, sorbitol, fruit juice concentrate, and 50 other names.

Most of the sugar we ingest comes from "liquid calories." For instance, a 20-ounce soda has 17 teaspoons of sugar. That's a little over 1/3 cup of sugar. A soda a day for a young person increases his or her chance of obesity by 60 percent. A soda a day for an adult woman increases her risk for diabetes by 60 to 70 percent.

It's not in the food industry's interest for us to choose a healthy diet. The more unhealthy choices we make, the more money they make. Most of us are happy for the convenience the food industry offers us. We are too busy to cook from scratch. It's too easy to drive through or rip open a box or a bag when we're tired and hungry. We choose convenience over physical well-being, and we pay for it.

The health industry isn't eager for us to take charge by feeding ourselves and our families quality nutrition, either. How many fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole grains can you buy for the price of one of your meds?

In his interview with Dr. Hyman, Smiley asked which was more important, food or exercise. Food, Dr. Hyman answered that food was most important since we can't exercise ourselves out of a bad diet. We'd have to run four miles every day for a week to burn off calories we consumed with one cheeseburger, an order of fries, and a soda.

You might say, "I could never live without ______________________" (fill in the blank). Yes, you can, if you knew your life or the quality of your life or a loved one's depended on it. If a 10-year-old can live without Easter candy and white bread, you can, too.

When given the option of improving health through diet and exercise or taking pills, most of us opt for pills because they're easier. In many cases, pills don't make a lot of difference if we don't change our lifestyle. And if we change our lifestyle to include better nutrition, we may not need the pills. That's a lot to think about.

Jean Davis has published inspirational stories, humor and devotions. She is author of Slices of Life: Couch Potato Pie and eight other books. Her website is jeandaviswrites.com. She lives in Delaware with her husband Vergil.