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Diabesity: What if our best practices are the wrong practices?

The Daily Beast:   "...what if we are coordinating the wrong kind of care? What if our best practices are the wrong practices? Our toxic industrial diet, our sedentary lifestyle, chronic stress, and environmental toxins cause diabesity and its attendant downstream ills (often mislabeled as something else, such as hypertension, cancer, heart disease, dementia). Drugs and surgery are feeble, ineffective, costly, and often harmful treatments for lifestyle-induced illness. They are misguided efforts at best, dangerous at worst. Mounting evidence proves that the solution to lifestyle- and diet-driven obesity-related illnesses won’t be found at the bottom of a prescription bottle; they will be found at the end of our fork."

[...]

"Health it seems happens outside the clinic, where people live, work, play and pray. We need to rethink how we treat chronic disease. It is not only better medical management, which often just barely if at all staves off complications and death, but with high science, low cost, high touch innovations. A comprehensive integrated strategy can solve this problem. Start with revised screening guidelines to identify the 90% of pre-diabetics and the 25% of diabetics never diagnosed. Build new practice models and reimbursement for group visits to deliver lifestyle medicine in more effective and cost efficient ways. Support and scale proven community-based peer-support models of lifestyle change. Over 20% of Americans are out of work. Train a new army of 1 million community health workers like the barefoot doctors of China who can support their peers in creating health. Set a national goal for America of losing 1 billion pounds in a year."
Read the whole thing.  Then go outside and get some exercise!

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