How You Add Years To Your Life And Life To Your Years

Intro

we have to realize that it’s appropriate that we have a finite period on this planet but we in addition to just making that as long

Focus on the big picture

as possible we want to have it be the best quality as possible and it’s i agree with what others have said about the uh general direction of diet that we’ve that has been described is uh clearly well established well uh based on strong evidence i uh and i think uh we as pamela says we need to uh focus on the big picture where there’s strong agreement there’s always going to be some disagreements about some of the details maybe not always but at least for quite a while i’m sure there will be and that’s where we tend to focus our discussion but we shouldn’t lose sight of the commonality it naturally is there’s no interest in talking with each other about the things where we agree because we don’t learn anything it’s just not it’s boring um that’s where we disagree it’s more interesting and it stimulates science and advancement and and there are lots of details we don’t know not all vegetables maybe it’s very possible that not all vegetables are healthy even whole vegetables because those number one have been bred to be they’re all not none of them are natural the things we eat except wild blueberries and a few other things they’ve all been distorted to be most attractive to our taste and yield and things like that so it’s not automatic that everything is healthy and the other thing is that there david is quite right that uh we we can’t forget smoking physical activity and a lot of those do converge to uh in terms of overweight being a very big risk factor and then there are some things on your list like multiple sclerosis we are learning now that there’s almost surely an environment a viral component to that but now very strong evidence that inadequate vitamin d is part of the picture of multiple the etiology of multiple sclerosis as well so a diet isn’t going to cure everything but it does as david said put the odds strongly in our favor now we had a paper just published this past week looking at how much healthy life expectancy we could gain by adopting that simple set of healthy behaviors we had earlier published that we could add 10 years to our life by that simple set of behaviors where the causality is well established i think through multiple kinds of studies uh in particular not smoking being physically active uh maintaining a healthy body weight and adopting a healthy diet what we i just published uh this past couple in the past few days was these added 10 years are all healthy 10 years it’s not that we’re just headed toward more years in a nursing home or something like that with dementia and so it does seem that the that there is a huge opportunity for putting the odds of having healthier years in our favor but any one of us could have something really bad happen to us next week we could be diagnosed with a lymphoma that we don’t know how to prevent yet and things like that so we there’s still a lot to learn uh but with what we have in hand uh we as pam says this is better than any medicine on the shelf

The lifestyle picture

a couple of things i i think it’s great that we’re talking about you know dr campbell you’re the father of holism in our movement right whole food whole whole food diets but there’s a bigger hole and you were talking about it last night the importance of rest and water and exercise and that sort of thing so talking about the whole lifestyle picture because you can watch every morsel you put in your mouth and if you spend your life sitting you’re going to have problems and so you probably aren’t going to be living to an old age independently if you do that so the first thing is i think this focus on holism with this panel is maybe a taking things to another level when it comes to risk i don’t think we can promise anybody anything but people ask me all the time so if i do this if i do everything you’re talking about you know does this is this a guarantee that i’m not going to get sick it’s not but i teach through analogies so i tell people i want you to think about your health like driving a car okay i drive a car keep it in good working order i have insurance i pass on my seatbelt i observe the speed limit laws almost all the time and i and i watch i mean i’m very careful i don’t drive when the conditions are terrible and i don’t drink and drive and do stupid things like that now having said that i could on my way home from the airport on sunday get hit by a bus the proverbial bus there’s nothing you can do about that the problem is if you get so worried about the bus which is not likely to happen you don’t pay attention to the things that are most likely to happen which is degenerative disease and that’s where the habits that we’re talking about here become so important so i don’t think we have to give people a guarantee i think we have to put the promise that we’re making in perspective that way and it’s the best shot you have it isn’t perfect but it’s the best shot you have and i don’t think if anybody really understood the statistics like the group of us do that they would opt to do anything else because from a statistical standpoint it’s your best shot of living to old age independently not in the home so i like mnemonics so i always give my patients the deep mnemonic diet environment activity and psychology those are the areas that you

Mnemonics

can do something about and like you said if you can shift the odds to be dramatically in your favor people say well you know what if i would i what if i get old and get hit by a bus my answer is what if you get old and you don’t get hit by a bus and just just to comment at the confluence of what you said walter and what you said pam

The Value Proposition

i i think the value proposition steve isn’t just dialing down the risk of something bad happening at some point in the future yeah you can do that shift the odds massively in your favor but per this paper you just publish walter and when is there a week you haven’t just published a paper let’s be honest i mean it’s really annoying we’re not just talking about adding years to life we’re talking about adding life to years and if if every day you live between now and that unknown future is filled with vital energy and you can seize the day that’s the price it doesn’t get any better than that right nobody knows about tomorrow but if you can live today fully that’s the price okay okay so now my marketing business mind is working and one of the things that i think has

Healthy Old Age

happened in our culture is that old age doesn’t seem very attractive to most people i’ve actually had people say i don’t want to live to be 90. oh my gosh until they’re 88 and sick and then they definitely want to live to be 90. i never had anybody in my office no matter how old they are they didn’t want to live some more right but one of the things that i think we could do from a marketing standpoint is show people what healthy old age looks like look at dr campbell look at dr esselstyn right what great role models dr goldhamer’s just said are you calling them old well but they’re older than me and and i’m i’m understanding how to love people who are older than me now that i’m this age right but uh but anyway i think that would be such a great way to show people what you have to look forward to i mean if you look at people no wonder people don’t want to get old they see family members ending up in memory care and nursing homes i don’t want to do that either but if you show me a way that i could be productive and still living in my own home and working every day and doing what i want to do when i’m 97 i want to sign up for that and most people i think actually do

Marketing Deprivation

glad i have i’m sitting next to someone who’s interested in marketing because i i quite agree that we’ve been a failure in that area and i spend a lot of my time a good bit of my time working with the culinary institute of america for the last 15 years because it’s not going to be an easy sell to telling people what they shouldn’t eat and it’s much better to be able to show them allow them to taste enjoy food that is really good tasting and pleasant and so i think we want to be able to market something that is really aspirational something people want and we have a really a triple win here uh it’s good for you good for the planet and by and it also tastes really wonderful and that’s why chefs and that whole world is those are people we really do need to get on our side we’re not going to sell deprivation that’s a hard sell even though you could make a statistical case for it uh but i think we we can sell this in a very positive way but i’d like to hear your thoughts on a little bit more pamela and the best way to do that i think one of the big most important things you said is we’re not going to sell deprivation we have to sell how spectacular it is how what a great life you can have and the fact the food is delicious and and that it’s easy to do and it’s inexpensive to do and this is sometimes an unpopular thought but i always put it out there anyway and it doesn’t have to be perfect because when people think that you know i always tell people i did not start a company called i want to be like pam i’m not perfect by the way but it’s called wellness forum health and the reason for that is that i again i think we have to i said this last night we have to have a bigger tent to invite more people in and meet them where they are and start them on a progress you know progress toward a better goal and be a little bit more tolerant of people not making great big leaps some of them are ready to do it and they’re fun to help and some of them are not so ready to do it they’re also fun to help but they have to be helped in a different way so i think part of it is making sure that our message isn’t so difficult for people to embrace i’ll tell you something interesting i’ve done a lot of reading over the last few years over about the science of change because that’s as important really as what it is that we’re the fact that we’re asking people to change and what we’re asking them to do the two biggest reasons why people do something is first of all they think it will benefit them my gosh we’ve got that covered don’t we really but the second one and it’s just as important they can see themselves doing it and i think that’s where we have to really work on our message that’s where we have to really work on meeting people where they are not only is this the best thing ever for your health but we promise you can do it or your money back okay we promise you’ll be able to do it and those kinds of i think that is an area we could work on too is making people feel this is doable by anybody let us show you how