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Nutrition prescription is one of the Core Lifestyle Medicine Competencies. Dr. Dennis Burkitt emphasized on the major dietary changes that followed the industrial revolution causing the major increase of chronic disease incidence and prevalence whenever there is reduction in starch foods and fiber intake, and a great increase in consumption of animal fats, salt, and sugar.
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Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn also noted that coronary artery disease is virtually absent in cultures that eat plant-based diets, such as the Tarahumara Indians of northern Mexico, and Papua highlanders of New Guinea, and the inhabitants of rural China and central Africa. Hundreds of thousands of rural Chinese live for years without a single documented myocardial infarction.
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The first Blue Zone identified by Buettner was Sardinia, Italy. There have always been centenarians in Sardinia, but in the most mountainous inland region called Barbagia with nearly 58,000 population, a cluster of villages in the island is linked to exceptional longevity. This is due to geographic isolation, and the undiluted genes of the residents. But even more importantly, Sardinians of this area are culturally isolated, and very traditional.
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Ikaria, Greece is another Blue Zone, a relatively remote island with only a little more than eight thousand inhabitants. It’s in the Aegean Island that is found to be one of the world’s lowest rates of middle age mortality and the lowest rates of dementia. Ikarians exercised mindlessly. They eat a variation of the Mediterranean diet, with lots of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, beans, potatoes and olive oil.
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Okinawa, Japan is another Blue Zone with a unique outlook in life. They’re capable of letting difficult early years remain in the past while they enjoying today’s simple pleasures. Okinawans has one of the highest ratios of centenarians, about 6.5 in 10,000 live to be 100 lower rates of disease than Americans in every given category.
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Another Blue Zone is Costa Rica’s hilly Nicoya region, the mestizos (people combined European and American Indian descent) reach the age of ninety at two and one-half times the rate of northern Americans and have much less cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.6 The Caribbean nation is economically secure and has excellent health care and Nicoyans have also stayed relatively free of the diseases of affluence that afflict Costa Rica’s city-dwelling populations.
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HEALTHIEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD
In the 1970’s and ‘80s the first Adventist study was conducted in Loma Linda California with more than thirty-four thousand people who were followed for fourteen long years. It is uncommon in epidemiological studies that researchers can survey a group of people with very similar lifestyles and practices. |
The Seventh-day Adventist church view health as central to their faith and that made them one of the most interesting groups to study, from the perspective of diet. They have such a similar overall lifestyle. Active members of the church are not smokers or alcohol consumers, they have a strong religious faith and community, and they exercise regularly.
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Dean Ornish, MD had been curious about how diet and lifestyle – a whole foods, plant-based diet, moderate exercise, meditation and social support – might impact heart disease since his medical school days. In 1980 he began with a new study – a randomized controlled trial of forty-eight patients.
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In Cleveland, Essenstyn was also developing a study. He had encountered some resistance from the establishment. Most senior cardiologists at the Cleveland Clinic, he writes, “did not believe there was a connection between diet and coronary disease. Nevertheless, in 1985, the Department of Cardiology agreed to participate in his first proposed study.
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One person who certainly appears to have the health of a Seventh-day Adventist – or of the rural Chinese he studied – is T. Colin Campbell. Today, in his eighties and still robust and active, he runs a nutritional center, teaches at Cornell, and lectures around the world on the benefits of the whole foods, plant-based diet.
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Everyone should never forget that the CELL is the ultimate destination of the nutrients found in food. It would undergo a lot of tedious course of action including digestion, absorption, and metabolism that are the three interrelated processes that act on food in many different levels to prepare it for use by the body. Then last process is excretion, where elimination of undigestible or unusable substances takes place.
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