The Mediterranean Diet

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Transcript

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Welcome to Prescribed Listening. I'm your host, Tessa Lackey. So in this podcast we interview different doctors from the University of Toledo Medical Center. In this episode specifically, we're going to dig into the Mediterranean diet with Dr. Rajesh Gupta, who works with cardiovascular medicine at UTMC, and also talk about ways that you can improve your heart health. Some of the things that were really interesting to me in this episode that we're about to get into, not only do we talk about different recipes you can try, but we break down each different food group from fruits to veggies, meat, nuts, and talk about what is special about these foods and what you should be eating to benefit your body and for this diet specifically. We also dig into olive oil. We spend a good amount of time talking about it. Dr. Rajesh Gupta describes it as liquid gold and one of nature's best health foods.

So I'm excited for you guys to learn more about this. I think it's really interesting. We've had a lot of doctors of different specialties who've previously come on with us that have brought up this diet and how it's a really good one to look into. So if you're someone that looks at a lot of these diets and isn't sure what to try or your doctor has told you that you need to consider the Mediterranean diet, this episode is going to be really informative and really good for you. So without further ado, here's our interview with Chrissy Billau and Dr. Gupta.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Can you stay healthier? When we're talking about heart disease, I'm sure you deal with a lot of patients who have a wide range of issues. When we talk about someone like me who's about to turn 40, fairly healthy, but wants to live long and play more with her children and grandchildren someday, what are some things you think people need to know about?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

I spent a lot of time dealing with emergencies and problems in the heart and vascular system. You could think of it as putting out fires or emergencies like heart attacks, congestive heart failure, heart rhythm problems, other issues. And I wanted to take this time to really dig deep into what can people do to give themselves a good chance of living a healthy life, aging in a healthy way, and avoiding some of these heart and vascular problems that tend to crop up with aging. So I hope this is a resource both for any of your listeners and potentially even patients that I can direct this way to get a high yield information on the changes they can make, practical changes they can make into what they're eating every day to protect their body and their heart and vascular system.

So I guess to take it off the top, there's a lot of fad diets, there's a lot of confusion about diets. There's a lot of things that come and go. I would say the thing that's been pretty steady in the last 30 or 40 years has been the what's called the Mediterranean diet, and we have to get into the details to know what exactly does that mean because people say the term, but then they don't actually know how are they going to change what they're doing or what they're going to eat tonight.

So first you want to know, it's generally plant-based. So if many of your foods or most of your foods are plant-based, then you're going to be on the right track in general. So it doesn't have to be a 100%, but you want to know that in general, plant-based foods are associated with longevity, lower risk of cancer, lower risk of diabetes, lower risk of heart disease. Okay? So now related to that, you really need to get a good healthy servings of vegetables and fruits every day. And I know that it sounds obvious, it sounds like something you've heard every day, but people just don't do it. And maybe you just need practical tips on how to do that every day.

So Mediterranean diet is plant-based and the backbone is vegetables and fruits. Within vegetables, I really want to highlight something called the cruciferous vegetable family. So we probably know these ones, but this is broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, cabbage, cauliflower. So these things are nutritional powerhouses. They have very strong anti-cancer and anti-aging properties and we should be eating them frequently. One common thing is maybe people haven't really had tasty versions of these dishes and they maybe don't feel like they want to make that every night or a couple times a week. So I wanted to give a tip on one of the things I do and hopefully during this podcast I can give a couple different tips along these lines.

So my favorite way to have broccoli and Brussels sprouts is pretty simple. You can actually just get it. It's already pre-chopped in the bag now, so it's super convenient. I just toss it with olive oil, salt and pepper. I put it in the oven at 400 degrees for 20 to 25 minutes until you start seeing the crispy brown parts on the edge of the flora of the broccoli or on the Brussels sprouts. Then I take it out and I finish it. You can finish it with either a mix of olive oil and an acid. The acid can be lemon or a vinegar. For example, balsamic vinegar, red wine vinegar, or just fresh squeezed lemon. The other variation on this is a little Dijon mustard and honey mixed with olive oil.

But basically, now you have a nice roasted vegetable and you're putting a tasty, tasty sauce on it, whether it's balsamic vinegar and olive oil or fresh squeezed lemon and olive oil or mustard honey and olive oil, and that's going to be a nutritional powerhouse. If you're eating that a couple times a week as your side, one-third of your plate at dinner or one-half of your plate that has this cruciferous vegetables, that's going to go a long way in keeping you healthy.

 

Chrissy Billau:

That sounds really easy to make.

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

It is, and the good part is if you make a big tray, you basically you have leftovers. So you could eat it for two days in a row or two or three days, something like that, and it's on autopilot. Once you put it in the oven, it's 20 to 25 minutes. You can do other stuff in the meantime.

 

Chrissy Billau:

I love it.

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

So then the next part is the fruits. Fruits, you could say it's like God's gift to us or nature's gift. They're basically the only form of candy that actually has a nutritional benefit. You could say nature's candy, and I really want to highlight the red, purple and blue fruits are again, nutritional powerhouses. So I'm talking about all the berries. So blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, apple, red apple, pomegranate turns out to be super healthy and really great for parts of our blood system that clean our arteries, like the HDL system of our blood. HDL is conventionally called the good cholesterol, and pomegranates have compounds that actually improve or help HDL function.

So all fruits are good, and the fruits that are maybe super are going to be the red, blue and purple ones. They say eat the rainbow. So when you're looking in the supermarket, you want to pick up some of those things like blueberries, apples, pomegranate, raspberries. You want to get those red, purple and blue pigments. So why is that good? It's a really interesting thing. So plants have these compounds called polyphenols, and it's a quirk of nature. So plants use these compounds to help themselves or defend themselves. It might be from UV radiation from the sun, it might be bitter compounds to avoid pests like insects, and it's a quirk of nature but these plant compounds, when they go into our body, they really react with our biology in a very beneficial way.

So this family of plant compounds called polyphenols, I'm going to mention a couple times throughout this podcast, and if any of the listeners want to do research on this, just read about polyphenols, plant compounds, red pigments in fruits. And this stuff has a lot of evidence that it interacts with our biology in really beneficial ways.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Does it matter if it's frozen fruit? Because I know sometimes we buy the frozen fruit and we use it in a smoothie.

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

I don't think it matters. Yeah, I think as long as you're getting it, getting healthy fruits, maybe couple servings per day is going to be a key thing. And if frozen works for you, then that's going to be great because sometimes you can't always get fresh or the fresh one goes bad after. Especially the berries, like raspberries and blackberries, they're only shelf stable for short period of time. So frozen works for you, that's great. If you like smoothies, that's great. If you like using the frozen berries and just thawing them for a dessert, that's fine. As long as you're getting a couple servings per day of these healthy fruits, especially the ones that have these pigments, the red, purple and blue pigments, then that's going to be doing a lot of good work for your body.

 

Chrissy Billau:

For people who hear that, "Well, I shouldn't eat so much fruit because they're high in sugar," what do you say to those?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Yeah, so I'm going to talk about sugar and sugar is really dangerous, but I'll give a pass for any natural sugar or any sugar that's naturally in fruit and in general, we'll say this about vitamins and also, but food is like this complex thing. It comes with its own structure, it has fiber, it has water, the way our stomach handles it and so on. So I would say a natural sugar that's in its own fruit form, say the sugar in an apple or the sugar in orange, I'm going to say is okay, and I'm not going to spend so much time in this podcast talking about particular diseases like diabetes or heart failure. And maybe if you're diabetic, you might want to watch. There are certain high sugar fruits that you have to be aware of like mango and banana and so on, but in general, for the general population, sugar is not great, is not good at all. But sugar in fruit, I'm going to say is totally fine.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Yeah, it's easier to get my kids to eat fruits and vegetables. So sometimes I'm like, "Okay, fine. Just have the strawberries."

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Yeah, young kids are a tricky thing. I have two at home and that's a tricky thing.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Yes. So we've covered veggies and fruits. What other foods?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

So the other parts of the Mediterranean diet include olive oil as the main source of fat, of added fat is going to be olive oil. And I want to talk about what's considered a high quality, high potency olive oil. Fish or lean protein as the source of meat. Beans actually are very healthy. So lentils, red kidney beans, black-eyed peas, any source of beans where you have a recipe that you like or a soup or something that's going to work for you. But eating beans multiple times per week is good. They have these fibers that are really good for our what's called gut bacteria or microbiota. That's the trillions of bacteria that live in our intestines that help us digest food. So beans are healthy and then tree nuts, nuts are a very important part of a healthy diet.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Okay, what about hummus?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Hummus is great. So hummus is basically ground up chickpeas plus sesame seed sauce called Tahini. Hummus is great. It's a great snack. What I like to do is get a piece of pita or bread, hummus, and then I make a little dimple and fill it with olive oil in the middle. So I have a little bit of bread, hummus, and then a really good high quality olive oil.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Okay. What is so magic about olive oil?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Yes. So olive oil, I can say is liquid gold. Olive oil is one of nature's best health foods. So rich in polyphenols, which again are those plant compounds that are designed to help the plant, but through a quirk of biology interact with us and our biology in such wonderful ways. So olive oil, again, is liquid gold. It's a very polyphenol rich source. It's a healthy source of fats. The trick is, it's kind of a little tricky. You want to get a high quality olive oil, and it's not so simple. It doesn't say high quality on the label. How do you identify what is a good olive oil? And there have been a couple books and stories about what's called olive oil fraud, where certain products on the supermarket shelf can have either mixed with a different kind of oil or not be a potent or high quality olive oil, basically an adulterated or fraudulent product.

So I want to give the listeners tips on how do you find a high quality of olive oil? How do you eat it? How much should you eat? And why this is so important?

 

Chrissy Billau:

Should I just drink it?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

So yeah, actually, when I get a new bottle of olive oil, I take a spoon and slurp it and taste it just because I want to know what is the natural taste of this thing? And it's up to you. It depends on how much you love olive oil. I love olive oil. So let's talk about how much per day? So the Americans do not eat much olive oil, and in general you want to be... I'm talking about olive oil. You're putting on your food after you've cooked it. Okay? So you can use olive oil in your cooking, but I'm talking about finishing your vegetables or your meat or your soup or your beans or your hummus with a high quality olive oil that has really powerful natural properties.

In general, I personally eat, just because I love it, I would say two to four tablespoons per day of a high quality olive oil. Most Americans probably, I think the data I've seen is maybe a teaspoon or definitely less than half a tablespoon of finishing fresh olive oil added on top of food before eating. So one is how much did you eat? Another rule of thumb is olive oil is a fresh product, so it should be fresh, and once you open it, it should be eaten. If it's sitting in your pantry for one year or two years, it's losing its power and you're not eating enough to get any health benefit from a high quality olive oil. So let's talk about freshness. How do you know if an olive oil is fresh? A good quality olive oil should have a harvest date.

The harvest date tells you from that farm or that producer, when was these olives picked and then crushed to make the olive oil? In the Northern Hemisphere, so in North America and Europe, the olive oil harvest season is fall winter. So you're talking about October, November, these months. The olives are harvested from the trees and then crushed the same day and made into olive oil and then bottled. So right now we're sitting here in March 2023. So if you're finding the freshest olive oil you can find in the United States of America should have a harvest date of fall 2022. So October, November 2022 would be the freshest olive oil.

And in general, the idea would be if the harvest date is one year or less from the time that you are going to take it home and eat the olive oil. Some people say one to two years, but if you have the choice, I would say one year or less. So again, this is maybe high yield information, a detailed tip. When you're shopping for olive oil, the bottle should have a harvest date on it. Ideally the harvest date is within less than one year.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Okay. Well, I know there's a lot of... Everyone's like, "Oh, you should have more this or more that," but if this is your thing, if you think everybody should be having more olive oil, then yeah, I want to learn more about it and become a nerd about it too.

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Yeah, I have a lot of nerdy information about olive oil. So we talked about the freshness of when you're getting it, the harvest state within one year. Then the next thing I briefly mentioned I want to hit again is you should be eating enough that the bottle doesn't sit in your house for a year. So I typically go through a bottle, which say it's a liter or a 750 ml bottle, a three-quarter of a liter, I would say one to two months, it should be finished. So that's a lot of olive oil. You can imagine, I think probably many of the listeners have their one liter bottle of olive oil that's sitting in their pantry for one year, and that means number one, it's losing its power as it's aging. The power I'm talking about is the natural plant compounds, the polyphenols that are in the olive oil.

They are going away, decaying over time, especially once the bottle's opened. And second, if it's sitting there for a year, probably your daily intake is minimal. So I typically finish the bottle in one to two months and how do I use it? So I put it on everything. So say I'm having broccoli, okay, that's getting olive oil. Say I'm having potatoes, that's getting olive oil.

 

Chrissy Billau:

At the end.

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Yeah. Finishing, right before eating. So if I'm having green beans or asparagus, I put olive oil on that. If I'm having eggs, I put olive oil on that. If I'm having a meat like chicken or fish, it can be olive oil on that. And then we talked earlier about snacks, like hummus. I love putting olive oil on that.

 

Chrissy Billau:

[inaudible 00:16:28].

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

You can. Yeah. So basically, we should be using olive oil every day. We should be getting a high quality olive oil that's rich in polyphenols, that's fresh, and we should be putting it on our food as a finishing, flavoring and natural enhancer right before we're eating it. The other thing I should mention is... So a couple of things. One is cost. In general, if you're paying less than $10, it may not be high quality. So I look for bottles that are between typically say $12 to $25 for a bottle. And that may sound like a lot. Let's say you're paying $20 for a bottle, but people pay $4 or $5 at Starbucks for one day, one beverage. So you're talking about a two months of daily natural product that was harvested from a farm, that's fresh, that's of high quality and giving you a lot of health benefits for say $15. So in that perspective, it's actually quite a good deal.

So again, if it's less than $10, I wouldn't trust it. One bottle, whether you're buying a 500 ml bottle or 750 ml or one liter, I would aim somewhere between $12 and $30 or $12 and $25. Another thing. In the United States, the California olive oils are actually very good because there's been a lot of attention paid to quality, freshness and avoiding some of these problems with these fraud or adulterated oils that have happened in the olive oil marketplace. So I think I like California olive oils. There's something called the California Olive Oil Council. It's cooc.com, cooc.com, that has great information. You can check it out after this podcast. There's a seal called... It looks like a little olive tree, and it says COOC on bottles that have been tested and certified by the California Olive Oil Council.

So again, if you're getting a high quality... How do you know you're getting a high quality olive oil? I would say the cost is going to be around $15. It has fresh, it's less than one year from the harvest date. If it's California olive oil, which I prefer, it has the COOC, California Olive Oil Council seal on the bottle. So if you do those things, you're going to get a good product.

 

Chrissy Billau:

So should we be replacing butter with olive oil?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Yeah. So I think the general question is which fats are good? So I would say butter is okay. I think there was a big scare in the '80s about butter and heart disease, and then people started pushing margarine as a butter replacement. And then it turns out that these industrial margarines are much worse than butter itself. So butter is okay, which sounds a little funny because I'm a cardiologist, but I guess in moderation it's okay. But I think the main source of fat that we're putting into our foods should be a high quality olive oil. And I would say the other seed oils are not so good. So for example, soybean oils, not so good. Some really bad things are cotton seed oil, that's not even really a food. It's an industrial byproduct, but it's in our industrial food.

So if you have a shelf stable muffin that sits on a shelf for a month and doesn't rot, that often has bad seed oils that are pretty toxic for us. And other things, I don't use corn oil. The only oils I use are basically high quality olive oil. I've tried recently, I have a little bottle of avocado oil sometimes if you're cooking at a high temperature. But generally, I just use olive oil as my oil. And I would say butter in moderation is okay, but that's an important topic that these other oils I don't prefer. So corn oil, sunflower oil, soybean oil, and then especially the industrial oils that aren't really even food, like cotton seed oil is really bad.

There is this topic of hydrogenated fats that we should talk about that. So when you fry deep-fry things, that oil turns really toxic, especially if you're starting with an oil that is prone to this thing called hydrogenation. So it's, "bad oil." And then frying at high temperature is putting really toxic compounds into our body so that's something to be avoided.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Fast food and oil, are there any dangers there? Are they using the good olive oil?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Yeah. So fast food a can be a dangerous thing. So for example, I had this epiphany. It dawned on me that at McDonald's, probably the most dangerous thing is actually the French fries. And I know people love French fries and McDonald's French fries are tasty, but the oil they're using and it's sitting there in that fryer and it's roasting and boiling and frying for either many hours or many days, I don't know. And then the potatoes go in there, they get fried, they soak up all that oil, that's not going to be healthy. So if you really want to have French fries, I would say homemade is going to be the way to go.

So just take a potato, chop it up, toss it, like I said, in a bowl with olive oil, salt, pepper, if you like pepper or just olive oil and salt and then put it in the oven and bake it. 20 minutes, 400 degrees. And for kids, kids like French fries. So if that's the way, if you're going to do French fries, then that's the way to do it is get a real potato, chop it up, douse it or cover it with good olive oil and a little bit of salt and then bake or roast it in the oven.

And then the other thing on fast foods, there are some good fast food options that I personally prefer. So I'm not trying to endorse one company or the other. I'm just saying what food do I feel when I'm eating that I feel reasonably safe or reasonably good about? So I would say Chipotle has done a really good job using generally fresh foods. So the food that they make it in their kitchen is generally fresh, and I feel generally good about that.

They do have a lot of salt in their rice and the calories can be a little bit much. So I tend to get a bowl instead of the whole burrito because that burrito shell adds a couple 100 calories on the meal, but I think you can eat healthy at Chipotle. There's something called core life, which is a then mommy. They have one of these... Again, those are like, you could say, I think it's called fast casual or upscale fast food, but basically they're making real food. It's not deep-fried in a bad oil. It's relatively fresh. It has food groups in it like leafy greens, vegetables that are going to be healthy. So if you have to get fast food, these things are probably better choices.

Before we leave olive oil, I wanted to give a recommendation. So it's actually confusing to find high quality olive oil and you can go into a rabbit hole about searching online and all this kind of stuff. I wanted to mention, the brand I found in the last six months that I like, it's available at Kroger, it's available at Walmart. It's called Cobram Estate, C-O-B-R-A-M Estate. It has a 100% California olive oil. It's reasonably priced and it's high quality. So if you wanted to keep it simple and you're like, "This stuff is too confusing, what do I actually buy?" Just get the Cobram, C-O-B-R-A-M from either Walmart or Kroger or whatever your supermarket is. Hopefully they carry it.

 

Chrissy Billau:

If it says extra virgin olive oil, is that high quality?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

So I would say extra virgin olive oil is a starting point, but it doesn't guarantee you got the good stuff. Okay? So definitely, no other category of olive oil is really good. So the other category is virgin olive oil, light olive oil, just skip, just avoid. Those are not having the good stuff in it. The good stuff I'm talking about is those polyphenol plant compounds. Okay? So you want to be in the extra virgin category, but extra virgin itself doesn't guarantee you got the right stuff or the good stuff. You have to use those tips that I told you. So it has to be harvested within a year. It has to have a harvest date on it. The price point I would say again, is between $12 to $25 for a bottle. If it's California, it should have that stamp from the California Olive Oil Council, COOC.

And again, if you want to make it simple, I'm just giving you what I use personally at home, is Cobram Estate, C-O-B-R-A-M Estate. And if you do that, then you'll know you're getting a good quality olive oil that has powerful plant compounds that will protect our health.

 

Chrissy Billau:

I think nuts are one, if we could talk about those, just walnuts or pecans, things like that. That's sometimes a little more difficult to add in aside from just putting it in a little bag and bringing it in as a snack to work.

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

So there's actually a really good body of nutrition research saying that tree nuts are healthy for our vascular system, our blood vessels, our heart and our brain. The tree nut family, the big four that I recommend to my patients are walnuts, almonds, pecans, and pistachios. So I call these the big four. We should be eating some of these every day. I usually consider what's some, I would say a handful. If it fills the palm of your hand, whether it's five, 10, 15, 20, whatever you feel is a good serving for you. How do I do it? I have roasted salted pistachios. They now come shelled. So you can decide if you like the traditional kind or you like the shelled, but sometimes when I don't have time for a breakfast, I'll have a handful of pistachios and my coffee in the morning and that fuels me until lunch.

Sometimes in the afternoon, if you're hungry, walnuts are a great snack. Walnuts and apple. Sometimes, same thing with pecans. Those are super, super tasty. Just alone, plain pecans are a very tasty snack. So these four tree nuts are very healthy. And there was a study called the Predimed Study that had 7,500 people. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and it found that the Mediterranean diet with supplemented olive oil or with supplemented nuts were both associated with reduced risk of heart attack and stroke. So I recommend both, basically Mediterranean diet with plenty of olive oil and plenty of tree nuts.

Now, one caveat or limitation, people feel a little disappointed with this one, but I have to tell them, so peanuts are not a tree nut. Peanuts are legumes and they have different properties. And from the research I've seen, the real health benefits come with these tree nuts. So again, the big four are all almond, walnut, pecan, pistachio.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Normally the big four, I'll throw some of those in a salads because I struggle to have them on their own.

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

That's great. Yeah, whatever works. First having a habit of salad with lunch or dinner or before dinner is a great way to get some healthy vegetables, get some greens, maybe throw spinach in there, maybe throw arugula, put some walnuts in there. That's a great way to start a meal. You can also have your... Relate it to salads. I recommend, I never buy a salad dressing in a supermarket because it's so easy to make. The healthiest salad dressing ever is a high quality olive oil and a vinegar of your choice, whether it's balsamic or red wine or white wine vinegar, whatever vinegar you like. Okay? And that other thing I said about with the broccoli and Brussels sprouts can also be a salad dressing, like olive oil, Dijon mustard, honey is another great recipe, and this literally takes 30 seconds to make at home.

So you have a bowl, you pour in the vinegar, then you take a fork or a whisk, and you're just whipping as the olive oil's drizzling on and it emulsifies or mixes together, and that's your dressing. So it takes 30 seconds to make a fresh, super healthy, high quality salad dressing. So I really don't see the need to buy... The supermarket dressings unfortunately, if you're reading the label, it has, I don't know, 10 ingredients, 20 ingredients, a very long list of stabilizers and other things that your body really doesn't need. So simplicity and natural is going to be the way to go. So if you can make it yourself, and if you get this little bit of tips here and there, and now you have a great salad dressing, that's going to be the way to go.

 

Chrissy Billau:

So we're talking about heart disease and we talked a lot about food, but what about the things we drink, the beverages? We have Coke, Pepsi, coffee, tea, beer, wine. What do we need to know about that?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

I find beverages as a high yield thing I can mention to people because everybody's... You're drinking something, and a lot of times I'm finding that people are drinking a whole bunch of added sugar or added artificial sweeteners, and both of those things are not good for our bodies. So I like to make it simple. The best beverages are water, coffee, or tea. So water is obvious. We all need water. Many people are not drinking enough water. You're going to do fine if you have a couple of cups of water per day, it's going to help your body.

Now, let's get into coffee and tea. So it turns out coffee and tea are actually health food beverages or health beverages. Again, why is that so? They have these magical compounds, polyphenols in them. In tea, the type of polyphenols called a flavonol, but coffee and tea both have these plant compounds that interact with our biology in really beneficial ways. Now, you can take a good thing and you can ruin it also.

So if you add sugar or Splenda or Equal, you're messing up the good stuff. So you want to have the good stuff. So how do you know we have good stuff? I say it should be simple and plain. So coffee, I personally, I have ground coffee beans. I do a pour over, meaning I pour hot or near boiling water over in a funnel. It drips in about a minute, and then I prefer black coffee. You can add milk, you can add cream. I don't have any problem with that. So to keep it simple, there is not a great choice in sweeteners and less is the best.

 

Chrissy Billau:

It's just funny how things change over time because in years past the, "healthier sweeteners."

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

I would say the promise of artificial sweeteners has turned out to be a false promise. So the idea was you can get sweet and you don't have to pay a price and you're not getting sugar, so that's going to be better. So it turns out, there's no... What's it called? Free lunch or easy answer here that you basically need... I avoid all the artificial sweeteners and I limit added sugar. So I don't add sugar to coffee or tea. So sugar is a rare treat. And again, like I said, natural sugar in fruit is the best. If you're going to have a cake, if you're going to have a dessert, if you're going to have, like I said, maple syrup on pancakes, that's fine. But the issue is it shouldn't be a daily thing. It should be like whatever, once a week, once or twice a week. And if you're going to have a Saturday morning breakfast, that's fine. If you're at a restaurant, it's Friday night, you want to have some nice dessert, that's fine.

Nowadays, the label, actually, the nutrition label has a separate line called added sugar. That number should be as close to zero as possible because again, added sugars, they're adding either cane sugar, high fructose corn syrup, or another form of added sugar in.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Well, look at Coke, Pepsi, all those products. As a simple way to adjust your diet, cut those out entirely?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Yes. One way I tell patients is we should not be drinking our calories. So the things we drink, if you're drinking water, coffee, or tea, they shouldn't have calories in them. It is definitely not something that we should be having on a frequent basis. I saw a graph I was reading this morning. A 100 pounds per person per year is the average sugar intake in the United States.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Oh, wow.

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Imagine putting that on a wall, a 100 pounds, like those bags, domino sugar are one pound bag. A 100 of those in a year is what we're getting into our bodies, and that has really toxic effects for obesity, diabetes, and other diseases.

 

Chrissy Billau:

That's a good visual way to explain it. Oh, okay. When we talk about beverages, we can't not talk about alcohol, beer, wine, cocktails. Where do you stand on what is acceptable, what's absolutely not acceptable for your health?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

So the jury's still out on alcohol. There was this idea in the last 20 to 30 years, it was called the French Paradox. It was like, why do French people eat a lot of butter and whatever, duck pate and other fatty things and have lower rates of heart disease? And there's been a lot of controversy on that, so I don't want to go totally deep into that. But there was this idea that maybe alcohol has some protective benefits, but then recently there's been more emphasis on the downsides of alcohol. Alcohol intake, daily alcohol intake is associated with liver disease. We all know about cirrhosis or disease of the liver. It is associated with certain cancer risk. Breast cancer is associated with alcohol intake.

So the jury's out. Is it healthy to drink alcohol on a daily basis? Unfortunately, we don't have a definitive answer. There was this idea about red wine having a lot of polyphenols from the skin of the red grapes, but then that's also become a little bit controversial that is it potentially the alcohol or is it really the red stuff from the grape skins that's giving any potential health benefit? But I would say if you don't drink, that's fine. If you like to drink, that's fine, but it has to be in moderation.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Now, these are really, really, really great tips I think that you can easily incorporate one or two every once in a while into your daily routine to make it stick, but if you're someone like me, does UTMC offer any screening options for heart disease? If you're looking at, okay, where am I? What's my baseline here?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Yeah, so that's a big question. Probably the best thing, if you're concerned about heart disease, you're a healthy person, you want to meet with your primary care physician and just they will do your annual visit or once over on your total health picture. So they're going to look at your blood pressure and your heart rate and your body weight and hopefully your diet. Then they're going to do some laboratory testing like your cholesterol levels.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Now, we ask every single UTMC physician this one, same question. And so I'm going to ask you, what is the most common question you get from your patients and what is your answer?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Well, actually, many people want to know what they can do, what's in their control, because I'm going to assess them and I'm going to look at their blood pressure and their medications and their numbers and their labs. And that's my job is to figure out what's the right way to treat and prevent disease for this person, but people want to have some agency and something they can do on their own. And I'm actually glad we did this podcast because it's hard yet you don't have the opportunity really to sit down with this person and talk this long in a patient visit because you're covering a lot of different aspects, including their medications and labs and other factors.

So when people ask what can they do? I think the information in this podcast, if people listen to it, think about it, take some kernels of information, take some tips, whether it's the olive oil, whether it's the nuts, whether it's the beverages, whether it's the avoiding the sugar, whether it's the coffee, the tea, vegetables, all the different things that we talked about, then that would go a long way. And hopefully, I can use this as a resource and refer patients so they can spend some time, get this key information, high yield information, and come back and discuss with me at our next visit.

 

Chrissy Billau:

How can someone make an appointment with you?

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

I'm with UT Cardiology. We have different offices all around Toledo. I'm currently in our UT Comprehensive Health Center in the file zone building. The phone number over there if people want it is 567-420-1600, and you can just call or have your primary care physician can send a referral or you can just call. Yeah, but I hope I generally, this information, you don't necessarily need to see a doctor, but if you use this information on how we're eating and the things that we're putting into our body and the types of daily habits and choices that we're making, then hopefully that can go a long way also.

 

Chrissy Billau:

Thank you, Dr. Gupta for joining us for this. And I think the one thing I'm going to take home with me on this is olive oil is liquid gold.

Guest: Dr. Rajesh Gupta:

Liquid gold. I love it.

 

Chrissy Billau:

I will never forget it.

Host: Tessa Lackey:

Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of Prescribed Listening. That is all for this episode. I hope you learn something about the Mediterranean diet while listening to this interview. And if you have questions about it or you're just not sure if it's something that's right for your body, or you heard something that you have additional questions about, I would encourage you to reach out to Dr. Gupta or to schedule an appointment with your primary care doctor, or even just send him a message and say, "I heard about this podcast and I'm not super sure about it, or I have questions about it for my own body."

And if you're interested in learning more about your own health or your own heart health, I would encourage you to go back in our library of episodes and look at different episodes like, Is a Daily Glass of Wine Healthy For You? Or Are Short Workouts Worth It? Or even different episodes like How to Avoid Sunburn. So all of these are with different UTMC providers that you can schedule an appointment with or get a referral to. So thank you again for joining us. We'll see you next time.