The Mediterranean Prescription When I was a young college student in New York, my father intro- duced me to a wise, older doctor named Dr. Peter Saita. He was a Sicilian internist who practiced in downtown Manhattan and over time became somewhat of a mentor to me. He used to tell me that being a doctor was the noblest profession, and it was he who inspired me to go to medical school. I kept up my relationship with him throughout medical school and would often accompany him to see patients. He would tell me, "The best thing I can do for my patients is to get them to stop smoking and to help them lose weight." This was in the 1970s, when people didn''t really pay attention to these issues. He personally saw the connection between being overweight and poor health among his patients and took it upon himself to help those at risk.
As a result, he developed a diet that he would describe briefly to his overweight patients, so easy to follow that he didn''t even have to write it down, that he saw work over and over. He handed this down to me, a newly graduated doctor, and I never forgot it--in part because I had so much respect for this man, but mostly because, as I eventually found again and again with my own patients, it worked. Years ago as I was starting out as a physician, I tried to help patients lose weight in a more traditional way. I used to tell them how to eat healthily, would give them papers on nutrition, and would refer them to nutritionists, but they weren''t losing weight. In my frustration, I tried telling them about Dr. Saita''s diet. I said, "Why don''t you try this very simple diet?" They would come back to me for a follow-up telling me, "I tried the diet, but it''s difficult. I can''t stick to it.
" I noticed that my American patients didn''t have the devotion to food that was found in the Italian culture I grew up in. When I told them the diet included all-you-can-eat fish and chicken entrées, they thought fish had to mean salmon or tuna, when there are so many kinds of fish out there. They also didn''t know how to cook it, nor did they have healthy, flavorful recipes for chicken. So I took the time to help them lose weight by writing recipes down on my prescription pad to get them started. I would say, "Look, it''s not hard. You just have to be creative. Here, try these," and I''d scribble a couple of fish or chicken recipes down for them, based on my and my mother''s Sicilian recipes. And miraculously, my patients started losing weight.
They couldn''t believe the easy and delicious meals they could eat while they were losing weight. Initially, I would prescribe the diet to patients who had illnesses that had clear connections to being overweight, such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes (as opposed to type 1, which you''re born with), and sleep apnea. As my medical practice continued, however, it became apparent how much being overweight set the stage for untold numbers of illnesses and diseases, and how important it was to lose weight as preventive medicine. My patient profile is no different from the patient population of doctors'' offices around the country. My new patients are coming in increasingly heavier, and the illnesses related to being overweight and obese are becoming much more frequent. The weight of Americans has been rising at an astonishing rate since the early 1960s due to a combination of diet, meal size, activity habits, genetics, and food industry and media influence. As most people know by now, either by reading statistics or by just glancing around themselves at a crowded location, around two-thirds of our citizens are either overweight or obese. And there appears to be every indication that this trend will continue.
Not coincidentally, the United States is in the midst of major epidemics of heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer, type 2 diabetes, and hepatitis. These conditions are all clearly exacerbated, if not caused, by excess weight and are major causes of disability and death in this nation. They also account for a significant amount of our health care dollars. The Shocking Statistics nApproximately two out of three Americans are either overweight or obese (compared with fewer than one out of four in the early 1960s); around 127 million American adults are overweight, with 44-60 million of them obese, and 9 million severely obese. nApproximately 15 percent of children ages six to nineteen are overweight or obese; this prevalence has nearly tripled in the past three decades. nObesity may shorten life span by five to twenty years. nObesity is currently associated with greater disease and poorer health-related quality of life than smoking, problem drinking, and poverty. nThe World Bank has estimated the cost of obesity in the United States at 12 percent of the national health care budget, according to the Worldwatch Institute.
nThe leading causes of death in the United States are all exacerbated or caused by excess weight. *Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. *Cancer is the second-leading cause. *Stroke is the third-leading cause. *Type 2 diabetes (95 percent of diabetics) is currently the sixth-ranking cause of death, and it recently became the fourth-leading cause of death in New York City. Type 2 diabetes also increases the risk of heart attack and stroke by two to four times and is the leading cause of blindness, fatal kidney disease, and lower extremity amputations. In addition to helping people look better and feel better, which I am all for, it''s terribly important to reverse this trend of health problems in our country. People may be living longer due to advances in medication and health care management, but many diseases can be greatly improved or completely prevented without the use of drugs or surgical intervention.
Take insulin resistance. Highly related to being overweight, it is a condition in which your body fails to respond properly to insulin. Around a fourth of Americans have it, unbeknownst to them, and it puts them at significant risk for developing full-blown diabetes. The first line of defense for this condition is--you guessed it--losing weight. Even a small percentage of weight loss can help appreciably. So, I am sure you want to know, how do you get there? Let me tell you a little bit about the healthiest known diet in the world. In the 1950s, the role of diet in human health was a mystery. Most researchers accepted that there was a connection between diet and disease, but the nature of this connection was largely unstudied in human populations.
In 1958, a young physician named Ancel Keys of the University of Minnesota, along with a team of international scientists, set out to understand one disease in particular, the disease that was killing more people around the world than any other: heart disease. Animal studies had suggested that fats were to blame for heart disease, but there was only anecdotal evidence for humans. During World War II, for example, Keys had observed that heart disease rates plummeted in countries with shortages of meat and dairy products, both rich in saturated fats. In addition, when he and his wife had traveled around Europe and Africa measuring blood cholesterol levels in preliminary studies in the early 1950s, he noticed that affluent people, who were eating more meat and dairy products, had higher cholesterol and suffered more heart attacks than poorer people who could only afford limited amounts of those foods. Keys thus speculated that saturated fat might be the root of the problem and was responsible for increasing the risk of heart disease. To test his hypothesis, Keys and his co-investigators looked at the diets, lifestyles, blood pressures, and blood cholesterol levels of more than twelve thousand healthy middle-aged men from Greece, Italy, Japan, Finland, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, and the United States. For the first time, investigators were actually stationed in people''s homes to monitor what they were eating and sending samples back to their own laboratory for analysis, rather than relying on food-intake questionnaires. They then followed up after five, ten, fifteen, and twenty years.
It came to be known as the Seven Countries Study, one of the greatest and most influential epidemiological studies of our time. Ten years after the study began, men from east Finland were faring the worst: 28 percent of them had developed heart disease. It turns out the Finns were eating more saturated fat than almost anyone in the world--24 percent of their calories. That''s double what Americans eat now. The residents of the fishing villages that were studied in Japan ate the least fat overall and the least saturated fat. Only 5 percent of them developed heart disease--far better than the Finns. But it wasn''t the best. That honor went to the men from the Greek island of Crete.
After ten years, only 2 percent of them had developed heart disease, and none of them had died. Amazingly, the Cretans were eating about as much total fat as the artery-clogged Finns--30 to 40 percent of their total daily calories came from fat. The difference was that their intake of saturated fat was far lower. It was not, however, as low as that of the mostly rice-and-vegetables Japanese diet. When the blood cholesterol of the Cretans was measured, they had the lowest levels of any group. This was a conundrum, because the investigators had been assuming that saturated fat from the diet played a principle role in one''s blood cholesterol level. How could the Cretans--who ate more saturated fat than the Japanese--be healthier than the Japanese, who ate hardly any saturated fat? This mystery was answered when it was learned th.