Healthy Food & Healthy Living by Dr. Ayala

The healing power of gratitude

Practicing gratitude is one of the keys to a positive outlook on life. Positivity may come naturally to some people, or during certain periods of your life, but for the rest it requires practice, habit building, strengthening it like a muscle – because our mind naturally gravitates towards worry and the detection of danger and misfortune. A positive attitude doesn’t sugar coat or deny the many challenges around us – it just reminds us that there’s also so much that’s going well and that there's plenty that's good in our lives.

There’s a large body of evidence showing that positivity enhances mental and physical well being. Thankfulness predicts lower rates of depression, better emotional states, and healthier relationships. 

A review in the Journal of Positive Psychology focuses on interventional studies rather than observational ones – a better way to test the effectiveness of a treatment modality. These studies test gratitude practice in a test group, and compare the outcomes with a control group that did not use a gratitude intervention. Interventions included gratitude journaling (writing regularly about what you’re grateful for), writing a gratitude letter (devised by Martin Seligman – the father of Positive Psychology – constitutes writing and delivering a letter of gratitude to someone previously not properly thanked) and the Three Good Things exercise, in which you writing down three good things that happened within a stated time period.

The review includes 25 experimental articles that tested gratitude interventions and psychological wellbeing symptoms, such as depression, anxiety, stress, negative emotions and aggression and finds some evidence that gratitude may contribute to improvement in psychological well being.

There were 32 interventional studies centered on emotional wellbeing: happiness, life satisfaction, quality of life, flourishing, etc. and the vast majority of studies show that gratitude practices increased emotional wellbeing.

Regarding social wellbeing, consisting of social skills, contacts and relationships, and purposeful employment, the review includes 19 experimental studies: Practicing gratitude helps maintain healthy relationships and the formation of new ones.

The mind and the body are one and the same, so mental wellbeing likely affects many aspects of what we call physical health. There are, however, only a few studies focused on gratitude and physical health, but there’s some indication that gratitude lessens stress, lessens self reported symptoms, may lower blood pressure, cholesterol and inflammatory markers, and improves sleep. 

Gratitude – for the small things in life

Paying attention to the smaller things to be grateful for is central to the practice of gratitude. The bigger gifts of life are eminent and require less practice. It’s the small stuff though, that lightens your heart repeatedly once you notice it.

Food is a useful, yet fraught, way to recognize our good fortune. Many of us are troubled by food, and have an ongoing stressful fight with it, labeling some of it, or some of its macro nutrients as bad and even evil. But food should really be our constant reminder of how lucky we are for the bounties of nature, for the nourishment that comes from the sun and the earth and from the labor of all who participate in the vast network that makes our every coffee cup, slice of bread, and every morsel of food.

As is nature. There’s a sunrise and a sunset every day for you to admire, a flower, a bird, a colorful leaf, and an old tall tree. Gratitude to nature not only improves wellbeing, it may also help us to better protect our environment.

Wishing you a happy Thanksgiving holiday, and grateful for your readership.

Dr. Ayala

Why is the world getting fatter (and what we can do about it)

Barbara Corkey, PhD, has been the editor in chief of the journal Obesity for the past 20 years, so you can trust that she’s immersed in research of the causes, consequences and treatment of obesity. 

In these 20 years obesity rates in the US increased from 30 to 42 percent, and the rates of extreme obesity doubled (rising from 4.7 to 9.2 percent). Diseases for which obesity is a risk factor – such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and some cancers – are correlated with the severity and duration of diabetes, therefore the appearance of obesity at younger and younger ages suggest a tsunami of these chronic diseases.

Corkey writes, in a recent editorial, that we humans “have developed a method to feed the billions of people on the planet, by developing processing of food with preservatives and other chemicals that can make food last longer and make it cheaper to increase calorie density in small packages.”

The cause of obesity, according to the editorial, is the foods that we make, and society overfeeding on them. 

The most consumed foods in the US are highly processed foods, topping the list are things like grain-based desserts (cakes, cookies, donuts, granola bars), chicken dishes, soda and other sugary drinks, pizza, alcoholic beverages, pasta, and beef dishes. Notably missing are fruits and vegetables and whole, unprocessed foods.

We’re now fighting for our health in a world that we humans have changed.

Surgery, drugs and the promise of culinary medicine

What does medicine offer to treat obesity? Key developments, according to Corkey, include bariatric surgery, which according to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine increases life expectancy by 3 years compared to the control group – but it's still 5.5 years shorter than the general population's. As to medications, there’s hope: “Novel drug combinations are beginning to close the gap with bariatric surgery and they appear to be very powerful new tools to treat obesity as a disease.”

The great hope, however: Culinary medicine. This is a new evidence based field, that combines nutrition and cooking know-how, in order to help people prevent disease and maintain health by promoting good eating habits. Culinary medicine has been added to the curricula of more than 55 medical schools, residency programs and nursing schools. The advantage of these kinds of interventions is that they can – and should – be started early, really early, before obesity sets in, and not just when illness manifests itself, and that there are no negative side effects.

Health meets food

Turning to your doctor to address obesity and diet-related afflictions is of course just one of the options at hand. 

Physicians used to get only rudimentary nutrition education as part of their training, and if they do have culinary skills it’s due to personal interests and pursuits, and not their medical education or the hospital lifestyle. Culinary skills can be gained in any number of ways: from friends and relatives, from videos and TV, from books and websites. The only way to get food that’s inexpensive, and that’s healthy for humans and for the planet is by getting cooking and preparing meals.

Much like in dentistry, where a visit with the clinician includes guidance on how to brush, floss, and strengthen your teeth, the visit with health professionals should include wellness counseling, especially nutrition education.

And cooking can also provide comfort and lots of joy. There are too many barriers to simple home food preparation, but to reverse the trend we're on, we'll have to overcome those.

Dr. Ayala