Nearly 1 in 3 U.S. Teens Have Pre-Diabetes. Food May Be a Key Factor.
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You look at food as medicine.
Yes.
Right.
And so this is, I think this fits into the rubric of nature doesn't lie, right, very well.
But so as we finish up, tell me a little bit about that whole concept, because it's something I hadn't really thought of until quite recently.
But again, it's obvious the moment you start thinking about it, but just tell me a little more.
I mean, I think that food being medicine has been around for a long time.
And then I think that there was a shift in the early 1900s to allopathic medicine and we kind of moved away from nutrition being part of the conversation.
But there's so much evidence emerging or re-emerging that what we feed ourselves really matters and that the mitochondria in our cells and the carburetors of our cells need these certain nutrients to really fire correctly.
And you can't just look at the top fats, carbs, protein, and it can be processed or not processed and it's all the same because there's all of these micronutrients and nutrient density that we're learning more about and the microbiology in our gut and how these are all interconnected.
And we talk a lot about genetics, like, oh, genetically, these people are, this group is more predisposed to diabetes or whatever.
And I'll tell you that my husband came from a village that didn't have a road to the outside world until 1991.
And there was no diabetes and there was no cancer.
And now there's tons of cancer and tons of diabetes and all the women still wear skirts and you can see, I was at a funeral recently and you could look at all of the ankles and see the black spots from the pre-diabetes and diabetes and the necrosis that's happening from that.
And my husband was really taken back by it, but you look at the stores there.
It's very out, far out, and it's mostly 100% processed foods.
And when my husband was a kid, everybody grew their own corn and they ate corn, lard, fish, turtle eggs.
The environmentalists would be mad about that, but it's the indigenous culture.
And a little bit of chicken eggs from a few chickens out in the yard.
But that was their diet, like pork and then beans and corn and pumpkin squash.
And that, and nobody had diabetes.
And even though it's a hot, high-carbohydrate diet and all of that, nobody had any diabetes.
So we look at this ultra-processed food and then we look at how we used to eat and we're not growing the same microbiology.
And so do the people from my husband's village have the genetic to be more predisposed to diabetes?
Probably yes.
But it's the epigenetics that can turn that on and off.
And that's deeply related.
And they're now showing like if there's certain microbiology in your gut, this turns cancer growing off, this turns cancer growing on.
This turns diabetes on, turns diabetes off.
So we want to have a largely diverse diet of multiple different colors of things, the least white things as possible.