Fix Your Metabolic Health
Improve your diet and save lives
What have we learned from the Corona pandemic regarding the health status of the population?
Growing evidence shows a metabolic and endocrine link to the COVID 19 disease process. More than half of the patients who died of the virus had three other diseases, almost 25% had two and nearly 25% at least one chronic condition. The most common comorbidities are high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, overweight, and obesity.
These diseases caused by the metabolic syndrome are associated with a ten-fold increase in mortality of COVID-19. Poor diet is the most important contributor to overweight and obesity and obesity alone is the single biggest risk factor of dying of COVID-19.
Excess body fat compromises the immune system while processed, unhealthy food causes chronic low-grade inflammation even in individuals with normal weight. If people get an acute infection on the top of these, the outcome might be much more detrimental than with healthy people.
These non-communicable diseases are extremely frequent in our modern world and they are caused mostly by bad nutrition and unhealthy, sedentary lifestyle, which lead to insulin resistance. There is a lot of evidence that with a healthy, whole-food-based low-carbohydrate diet, we can improve insulin sensitivity and overall health in a fairly short time.
I am convinced that now it is time to focus on prevention. Public Health professionals and all healthcare providers need to educate people on how to improve their metabolic health.
So, what should we, nutritionists, physicians, and other healthcare professionals do?
Let’s have a closer look at the official recommendations on healthy diets.
The USDA recommends us consume 60-70% of all calories as carbohydrates. The Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for protein is a modest 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight. This is approximately 10% of all daily calories. They recommend up to 27g a day of “vegetable oils” (which are actually industrial seed oils) that have been linked to insulin resistance.
The recommendations of the Swiss Confederation are more or less the same. It is a high-carbohydrate (62%), a moderate protein (about 20%), and a low-fat diet. The recommended fat intake is 2-3 tbsp vegetable oil, 20g nuts or seeds, and 1 tsp butter, margarine, or cream occasionally added to all this. This altogether is about 30-40g fat, which is about 270-350 calories. Roughly calculated, it is about 18% of the daily calories (with a 2100 calories/day diet).
Most of the people have been following the official recommendations for a long time and as we can see, the outcome is catastrophic.
In Switzerland, 42% of the population is overweight and 11% is obese.
In the US, 44% of the adult population under 60 years of age have a BMI over 30, which means that they are obese. 70% of them are overweight or obese, 88% are metabolically damaged. This means that only 12% of the adult US population is metabolically healthy.
These are facts we cannot ignore. The time to act is now. Do not let bad food and sedentary lifestyle ruin your life.
Be proactive and improve your health!
Everyone can reduce their risk to get ill massively just within a few weeks by fixing their metabolism. Cutting out processed food, sugar, and refined seed oils and choosing unprocessed, local, seasonal, mostly animal-based whole-foods instead help enormously improve metabolic health.
If this is not enough and you are still suffering, just contact me. I am here to help and support you to become healthy and energetic again.