Don't Let the Dog Eat It!

By Benjamin Gonzalez, MD

I heard a wonderful story at a conference I attended recently.

A businessman in health, wellness, and optimal aging product sales related a story about growing up in a household of six kids, of which he was the youngest. To make it easier to get everyone fed during dinnertime, his mother created an assembly line.

One evening she made hamburgers, cooking the patties in an open pan, the grease popping and hissing as they cooked. Each child received their burger in chronological order, from oldest to youngest. As each child in turn held up their plate to accept the burger from the pan onto their bun, it finally came to the narrator of the story.

As the last hamburger was lifted out of the pan, the grease popped onto his mother's hand and she dropped the meat patty onto the floor. As the family dog ran up to grab the burger off the kitchen floor, his mother yelled, “Don't let the dog get the burger! The grease is bad for him!”

One of my favorite questions to my weight management patients is, “Would you allow your child to eat what you eat or how you eat?” Inevitably the answer is usually no. What are the three most important things that prevent disease? Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Yep. That's it. What you eat and how you eat does only two things it either feeds disease or prevents it. Period. All else is detail. The detail is in what types of foods and how you prepare them. If each individual thought this way every time they made their diet choices, our country's obesity rate would not be climbing as rapidly and alarmingly as it is. Your life would be better because your health would be better. And our country's per capita spending for health care would not be the single biggest contributor to our debt and deficit.

I love this quote from Hippocrates “Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food.” It's how we should all think of food, but rarely do.

If you got in a car accident and had to go to the hospital, where would you rather be in your health? Optimal or already in a diseased state? Overweight or at your ideal weight? Prepared to heal fast or set up for a longer hospital stay and acquire more disease? The choice is yours and yours only to make, so choose wisely. Your very life depends upon it.