It’s great to see other tech people educate themselves about health and help break the stereotypes of the ramen eating, soda drinking nerd. This story reads almost like what happened to my dad last year. He complained of shortness of breath and went to see a cardiologist. He got an angioplasty done, which showed severe calcification of the arteries. The doctor advised him to have a quadruple bypass the very next day. I flew in from San Francisco to be with my dad in the hospital.
After my dad’s surgery, I decided to get more involved in his health. As someone who’s been following a Paleo lifestyle for over 4 years now, I stayed in NJ for 3 months and nursed my dad back to health. I cooked every one his meals for those 3 months. His fasting blood sugar fell from a borderline diabetic value of 121 to a more normal 92. He lost considerable visceral fat around his waist and was looking better than he has in maybe 20 years. All of his blood markers improved.
Good health is both easy and hard. The easy approach is to understand that modern industrialized food is harmful and try to emulate a diet from yesteryear, like Paleo, or your ancestral cultural diet. The flip side of the coin is to dig into science, as you have done, and understand the intriciacies of various blood markers like cholesterol, the difference between small and large particle size, Ha1bc, the various types of short chain fatty acids, figuring out that fat is not a villain, learning the dangerous of low fat foods, etc. I’ve been studying this stuff independently for 4 years, including learning enough biochemistry to get through medical research papers. Everything I have read so far points to a Paleo-type diet being optimal. As an engineer I’m taking the latter approach as I need to prove things to myself before taking it for face value. But for the layman, it’s not really that hard.
Something is wrong in this world when Tom Hanks, with access to the best doctors in the world, announces that he has type 2 diabetes, when I was able to reverse it in my dad in 3 months through diet alone.
I use DirectLabs for my blood work. Crappy site, but very happy with the turnaround time.
> Something is wrong in this world when Tom Hanks, with access to the best doctors in the world, announces that he has type 2 diabetes
I would imagine that the client relationship in medicine in similar to other industries. Failure is often not a result of the service you provide, but from the fact that the client doesn't listen to the advice they are paying for.
After my dad’s surgery, I decided to get more involved in his health. As someone who’s been following a Paleo lifestyle for over 4 years now, I stayed in NJ for 3 months and nursed my dad back to health. I cooked every one his meals for those 3 months. His fasting blood sugar fell from a borderline diabetic value of 121 to a more normal 92. He lost considerable visceral fat around his waist and was looking better than he has in maybe 20 years. All of his blood markers improved.
Good health is both easy and hard. The easy approach is to understand that modern industrialized food is harmful and try to emulate a diet from yesteryear, like Paleo, or your ancestral cultural diet. The flip side of the coin is to dig into science, as you have done, and understand the intriciacies of various blood markers like cholesterol, the difference between small and large particle size, Ha1bc, the various types of short chain fatty acids, figuring out that fat is not a villain, learning the dangerous of low fat foods, etc. I’ve been studying this stuff independently for 4 years, including learning enough biochemistry to get through medical research papers. Everything I have read so far points to a Paleo-type diet being optimal. As an engineer I’m taking the latter approach as I need to prove things to myself before taking it for face value. But for the layman, it’s not really that hard.
Something is wrong in this world when Tom Hanks, with access to the best doctors in the world, announces that he has type 2 diabetes, when I was able to reverse it in my dad in 3 months through diet alone.
I use DirectLabs for my blood work. Crappy site, but very happy with the turnaround time.