What if you could give yourself a good chance at living a healthy life and aging in a healthy way and potentially avoiding some heart and vascular problems?
Dr. Rajesh Gupta, with UTMC Cardiovascular Medicine, says he spends a lot of time dealing with emergencies and problems in the heart and vascular system. He recommends the Mediterranean diet to make practical life changes for your health.
In this new episode of Prescribed Listening, Gupta with host Chrissy Billau, breaks down the diet, offers recipes to try and suggests how to implement even small changes into your diet.
The plant-based Mediterranean diet utilizes a mixture of vegetables and fruits. The episode also discusses how to incorporate nuts, oils, drinks like coffee and alcohol and sugar intake into your diet in a healthy way. Gupta says the diet’s popularity, amid all the fad diets available in the last 30 to 40 years, has remained steady.
Gupta also stresses the value of good quality olive oil in your cooking and how it can benefit your health.
“Olive oil I can say is liquid gold,” he says. “Olive oil is one of nature’s best health foods; so rich in polyphenols, which again are those plant compounds that are designed to help the plant, but through a quirk of biology interact with us and our biology in such wonderful ways.”
He also says that if your olive oil has been on the shelf for over a year based on its harvest date, then it’s losing its important health benefits. He suggests, then, that you should be incorporating more olive oil into your meals.
Gupta also says we should not be drinking our calories: “100 pounds per person per year is the average sugar intake in the United States. Imagine putting that on a wall — a 100 pounds, like those bags [of] domino sugar are a one pound bag. A 100 of those in a year is what we’re getting into our bodies, and that has really toxic effects for obesity, diabetes and other diseases.”
When it comes to fruits, however, he offers a pass for any natural sugar from fruit and in general.
To review this episode and the podcast’s entire library of episodes, go to the UTMC Prescribed Listening website.
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