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Helping patients build healthy habits, such as creating a dietary plan based on well-balanced nutrition, helps them on the path to good health and longevity.
Are we what we eat? It is a realization that careful consideration of what we eat and how we consume it impacts our health in the short, intermediate, and long term. Good sleep, regular physical activity, and well-balanced nutrition initially rely on conscious decisions that become habitual practice. Helping our patients with this in a meaningful way, as they define it, helps set them on the path of good health and longevity.
Counseling Patients on Nutrition
The overarching goal of healthy eating is to improve health and quality of life while lowering the risk for disease. Studies confirm that healthy dietary choices reduce the risk for high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, neurocognitive disorders, and cancer among other chronic conditions.
Helping our patients understand how they choose what they eat is conceptually more difficult than teaching them why we should follow a healthy diet. Choosing a dietary pattern is not as prescriptive as presenting a general menu of options.
The Mediterranean Diet: A Health Model
Numerous studies carried out in recent years on the Mediterranean diet have highlighted the protective role it plays against a significant group of diseases, including heart attack, stroke, peripheral vascular disease, diabetes, certain degenerative diseases, and various cancers.
Building on traditional food pyramids, a proposed Mediterranean diet pyramid follows the following pattern: at the base, foods that should sustain the diet, and at the upper levels, foods to be eaten in moderate amounts. Moreover, social and cultural elements characteristic of the Mediterranean way of life are incorporated as the goal is not just about prioritizing some food groups over others but also paying attention to the way of selecting, cooking, and eating.
