“A Small Bag of French Fries Stays in the Body for 212 Days”: Shocking health facts uncovered at Wolf Hill presentation

The most consumed meal in America every year is a cheeseburger, French fries and a chocolate shake, which consists of eighty grams of saturated fat. This was one of many surprising statistics discussed during Triad of Health: Helping Elementary and Middle School Students Improve Academic Performance with Diet, Fitness and Rest, a presentation that was held last week at Wolf Hill School by healthcare educator Dr. James Proodian to help Oceanport residents and their families “feel better, function better and live longer.”

During the event, Proodian defined health as a “state of complete physical, mental, emotional, social and spiritual well-being and not merely the absence of disease of infirmity.”

“Every day of your life you have to engage in conversation, have emotional and psychological output, you have to use your physical body and you have to eat,” said Proodian. “That’s health. You have use three components everyday.”

The three components that make up Proodian’s Triad of Health are physical, nutritional and psychological.

“I counsel many athletes. As beautiful as they may be, physically, they’re a mess many times [psychologically],” Proodian said. “I’ve counseled women in clinical nutrition who are fifty pounds overweight, but are much healthier because they have this component of their lives together than someone who looks like they could run two miles a day. So we have to be careful how we quantify health because you’ll never hear me quantify health with a scale or mirror.”

Stress is one of the factors that affect the Triad of Health. According to Proodian, the death of a spouse doubles the likelihood the other spouse will die within one year. When one spouse has hypertension, asthma or depression, the other spouse’s risk of getting the same condition goes up 50%. And the number one stress known to a human being is a woman’s risk of dying goes up 400% for three years after the loss of a child.

Proodian said that while this stress kills, day-to-day stress compounds not only the physiological bodies of adults, but children as well. “And make no mistake, their physiological bodies are not mini adults,” Proodian said. “Their endocrine system, their growth system, their GI system and their nervous system is completely different than ours.”

Genetic factors also affect our Triad of Health, as all chronic degenerative diseases (including obesity) have a genetic predisposition, which, for some people, is stronger than others. But, according to Proodian, lifestyle habits will modulate one’s genetic predisposition.

“[Say] three women are born on the same exact day with the breast cancer gene … If everybody with the breast cancer gene gets it, all three of those women should get it on the same exact day of their life. Correct? But what happens? Sally never gets breast cancer, lives a hundred year lifestyle and dies in her bed at 100-years-old. Jane develops breast cancer at fifty, is treated successfully and lives to 80. And Mary drops dead at 30 of progressive breast cancer, stage 4.”

“Genetic expression is classically expressed at certain times in a woman’s life because of stress, so genetic expression is critical when it comes to our diseases processes.”

Because of this, lifestyle habits have the greatest impact on a person’s health. According to Proodian:

• Pizza and donuts are two of the top ten things that men consume every year. “Do you know what a donut is?” Proodian asked. “If we all started a business where we said we’re gonna make donuts, the first thing we’re gonna do is get a big stainless steel vat, and we’re going to fill it up with bubbling cancer—that’s what hydrogenated corn oil is—and once we get it bubbling nice and hot, we’re going to take white flour, which has no nutritional value, dip it into the bubbling cancer, take it out, and we’re gonna take sugar and put it on the top of it.”
• Chinese food is also on the list (“Chinese people in our culture don’t eat our Chinese food [because] its so bad for us”), in addition to hash browns: “[With] the same vat of bubbling cancer, we’re going to take the inside of a potato that has no nutritional value, because the nutrition is in the skin, [then] we’re going to dip it into the vat of bubbling cancer, take it out, and this time we’re going to put ketchup on it. Half of a bottle of Heinz ketchup is sugar.”
• Sugar is the leading cause of obesity in our culture and the leading cause of type-2 diabetes.
• 80% of Captain Crunch is sugar, and 70% of Fruit Loops is sugar. “There’s more nutritional value in the box,” Proodian noted. “You should eat the box and throw away what’s inside of it.”

“Stop defining health by ‘I feel good, therefore I must be okay.’ Really? Anybody ever know somebody with cancer? What’s the last symptom that shows up with cancer? Pain. 50% of all men who have their first symptom of a heart attack…the first symptom of a heart attack is death. We’re going to wait for symptoms to define good heath? Good luck. Osteoporosis. What’s the first symptom? Fracture.”

According to Proodian, pain is the last symptom to show and the first to go.

The United States is currently ranked 37^th in the world in terms of healthcare. France and Italy are 1^st and 2^nd, respectively. Proodian pointed out that both countries have outlawed high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated corn oil or white floor. “So we have to look at the fact that our country is first in the world in acute and traumatic care.”

But acute and traumatic care only accounts for 22% of all healthcare expenditures in the U.S. The remaining 78% is for chronic illness. “That means we’re sick our entire lives.”

According to Proodian:

• The five leading causes of death are heart disease, cancer, type-2 diabetes, obesity and high-blood pressure, which are all chronic illnesses.
• 1 out of 3 children born after the year 2000 will develop type-2 diabetes, which is the most expensive condition to treat. “Money would be better spent on prevention, rather than treatment.”
• 55-70% of all claims costs are associated with behavior and lifestyle.
• Obesity levels in children doubled from the 1980’s to the 1990’s. From the 1990’s to the 2000’s, the number doubled again. And from the 2000’s to 2008, the number doubled again.
• 20% of children are currently obese and, within the next ninety years, the statistic will rise to 33% of the whole nation.

To promote health, parents need to remove inflammatory foods from their child’s diet. Inflammation inside the body puts 25-35 million at risk for heart attacks. 90% of the Standard American Diet is inflammatory, while only 10% is not. Proodian says this should be the opposite. Parents need to put a greater emphasis on the 10%, which consists of fruits, veggies and legumes. They should also change their family’s milk habits, as “cow’s milk makes big bodies, while breast milk makes big brains.”

To ensure their family’s proper nutritional intake, parents should do their own grocery shopping and cooking. “This should not be outsourced,” Proodian noted.

Supermarket behavior should be altered as well. “Don’t go hungry, and don’t bring kids when they’re hungry.”

Since exercise is an important part of the Triad’s physical component, children should be encouraged to engage in free play. “’Go outside and play’ are the four greatest words in the human language,” according to Proodian. “We have forgotten them because we’ve moved to organized sports.”