 Beat
diseases: Change your lifestyle
 |
| Dr Ranga Sriram, Dr Ramesh Chandrasekaran, Dr Prahalada Rao |
There was one major theme that emerged from the talk by three doctors on a cool Saturday evening (December 16, 2006) at Eldams Road, Chennai: We need lifestyle changes to manage the civilisation diseases of diabetes and heart diseases.
It was an informal, interactive meeting organised by journalist and Chennaionline columnist N Meera Raghavendra Rao with three doctors on the panel: Dr Ranga Sriram, MD, FACC, Interventional Cardiologist, Wheaton Franciscan Heart Care, WI, USA, Dr T N Prahalada Rao, MD, Kalyani Hospital, Chennai, and Dr Ramesh Chandrasekaran, honorary consultant and director of Diabetes Research Project, VHS, Chennai. The audience comprised mostly the friends of the Raos. People eager to know about heart diseases and diabetes and quick to grasp at an opportunity where they could pick the brains of the best doctors in the business. The oldest person in the audience was an 83-year-old woman!
Dr Prahalada Rao gave a step-by-step approach to leading a healthy life even if you were diabetic. He started off with what ails us: lack of adequate exercise, fast food and a tension-filled life. To tackle the multi-factorial diseases, one needs to take control of the disease. How does one do that? He had a regimen ready for us and called it lifestyle management.
The first step is to mind the body weight. And then find ways to reduce weight to achieve the ideal weight for oneself. He gave some simple mathematical calculations to find out the ideal weight of a person. How does one lose weight? Eat less and spend more. Calories, that is. To lose one pound of weight, we have to burn 3,500 calories every day. So, the fewer the calories, the better your chances of losing weight. Spread the meal over seven sessions, he said. Three major meals and four minor ones. And when you feel hungry, turn to fillers like water, buttermilk, lime juice, slices of cucumber or tomato or onions. Your best bet would be black coffee he said, without sugar. Quite a few dainty noses turned up at his suggestion of drinking coffee without milk or sugar.
Dr Prahalada Rao suggested exercise – whatever be the age – as the best way to burn calories: brisk walking, cycling, skipping, aerobic exercises…everyday or at least five times a week. “The regime works, but slowly. Discipline and perseverance can bring down your weight,” he assured the audience.
Dr Ranga Sriram, here in India on a holiday, agreed with Dr Prahalada Rao that lifestyle changes were needed to tackle some diseases. One of them was heart problems. He said diet and exercise could help prevent heart problems to a large extent. Heart attacks occur mostly from 6 a.m. to 12 Noon as this is the high pressure period when people are most active and are subject to tensions. And heart attacks can occur in any person, man or woman.
He had a word of caution for those who suffer from sleep apnoea – deep snoring with breathing arrests in-between – that could lead to tiredness and make one feel sleepy during the daytime. It could even lead to sudden death, he warned. He asked people to also treat fainting seriously and not brush it aside even if it is a one-time affair.
Dr Ramesh, trained in the UK and now into diabetic research, felt that there was a needless alarm over the disease. “There is nothing that cannot be controlled in this with some lifestyle changes.” He felt the media had a role to play as it was now filled with doomsday predictions about India becoming the diabetes capital of the world. “But a World Health Organisation study says that only 35 per cent of the deaths in India are going to be because of diabetes. This is much lower than other countries like the US,” he said. With lifestyle changes, dependence on drugs by a diabetic could be brought down, he argued. Dr Ramesh believes that there is overdrugging for diabetes in India. (You can check out their site
www.diabetopaedia.com
for more details.)
The audience grilled the doctors with some knowledgeable and some basic questions about diet and the diseases and some interesting points emerged from the interaction:
-
Heart blockages can be reversed
-
Water is a great filler for in-between meals
-
There is invisible fat in carbohydrates
-
The body needs fats to absorb four vitamins
-
6 gms of salt – a teaspoon – is the daily requirement
-
Cholesterol is of animal origin as no vegetable contains cholesterol
-
The body makes its own cholesterol
-
Even without diabetic genes you can become diabetic
-
Diabetes is not always a silent killer
-
Mixing different types of oil is good
As the group dispersed there was animated discussion about what the doctors had said and everybody agreed that it was an evening well-spent.
R
Chitra
|
