Did you know that the average American consumes 57 pounds of sugar per year? Learn more about Nutrition Protocols for Psychiatric Symptoms with Dr. Shelese Pratt.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
We can have a diet that is working for us or against us, right? If we think about lifestyle, the diet as a lifestyle, and this is the hardest part is when we start converting people to eating in a different way.
And the first thing they want to put on it is, this is a diet, right. And this is going to have a negative connotation, if it’s an adult, and they had a parent, or some kind of person in their life that told them they had to eat a certain way in order to be accepted.
We have to get past a lot of these barriers, or we were rewarded with certain behaviors. We were rewarded when we did really well, we got a Snickers bar at the end of the day. And so, we’re working against some of these rewards or acceptance models. And so, we really have to think about this as a lifestyle, we’re really changing and thinking about this as something we do every day, not because it’s a diet, but more that it’s a function of our health.
Microbiome
When we’re talking about the microbiome, there’s more genomics in your microbiome than you have in your body. And what makes up the microbiome is every situation that you’ve been in since you were in your mother’s utero.
Sometimes taking a long history around what their early life experiences were with, whether it’s with food, or whether what their parents’ food was like when they were just dating their mother. That is all going to influence that microbiome. And specifically, we need to look at whether they were on lots of antibiotics and things like that, because that’s going to influence how that microbiome was built as well.
If they were a C-section baby and they didn’t go through the vaginal canal, they weren’t seeded with a lot of really amazing bacteria that we really need them to have in order to manage the foods that we eat. So, we’re not only eating for ourselves, but we’re eating for our microbiome.
Sugars
The average American consumes 57 pounds of sugar per year.
That’s a lot of sugar. And the average child eats 49 pounds. I mean, you go to the grocery store, and even if you get organic Horizon milk, it has sugar in it, because that’s the way they’ve learned that they need to sell products now – we need to add sugar. Regulating blood sugar is a huge part of all of our practices. Not everyone has the ability to eat that much sugar and be able to tolerate it and metabolically be able to manage that.
Mediterranean Diet
This is probably the most widely researched as well as highly supported diets that we have. What’s good about it? It’s high in really good protein. It’s really high in fiber, it’s going to balance blood sugar, it’s going to really diversify your microbiome by all of these really amazing, colorful vegetables that you’re going to add, great oils. It has you exercise I mean, on some parts of this Mediterranean diet, they also say, you know, you’re social, you’re more social, you’re spending more time, you’re exercising.