March 28, 2024

Sitting, Sugar, Sun

THE NEW VICES
Jan. 8, 2016

Some vices are easy to name: sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Others slip seamlessly into people’s lives without much noise, but they can be just as dangerous – especially because they’re so easy to ignore.

Sitting too often, eating too much sugar or spending too much time unprotected from the sun can have harmful or deadly effects equal to more obvious dangers. The Northern Express talked to experts about how we can redefine these behaviors as vices in order to live healthier lives.

Northern Express: Is it useful to consider behavior like eating too much sugar or sitting too much as vices?

Dr. Chris Moran: I think people should be aware of sitting too long. Like every hour, at least, you get up and move around. And certainly diet has probably the single most effect on our health. So, looking at it as vices, there are ways you can look at diet – being aware, I guess, and then changing some of those habits. I don’t know if I’d call it vices, but being aware. But then again, it’s so easy, I guess it could be a vice.

Joseph Sanok: I think it’s helpful if it helps produce change. For healthy living, reducing sugar and carbs and increasing your omega- 3s and nutritional content, increasing your sleep, your exercise, those are things we know are beneficial from a health standpoint – from reducing cancer, reducing all sorts of diseases, but also from a mental health standpoint. So if the word vice helps produce change, then I’d say it’s helpful. If it makes people turn away from it and not take it seriously, then I’d say it’s not helpful.

Sherry Davis: I don’t think it’s useful to look at them as vices, no. I think we should look at them with compassion because I think our food system is so poor right now that people can get cheap food that doesn’t have the nutrients we need to function and that starts the cycle of poor health, depression, lack of energy. And once you get that stuff going, you’re not going to exercise, you’re not going to be able to quite find the motivation to get yourself on track. And the food addictions are so serious and people are starting to learn about this – that meat, cheese, sugar and chocolate are the same as cocaine and heroin on the brain. A vice can be considered a poor habit. I just don’t like the word vice; I think it’s too strong.

Craig Cottrill: I don’t know if vice is exactly the term, but you know, anything you consider a bad habit or a character defect that can hinder your wellness or happiness, like poor diet, definitely I would call it a vice. It’s definitely very detrimental.

Express: How would you address someone you are working with if you detected that, say, they are consuming way too much sugar?

Davis: I start off with, "˜Oh my gosh, you know I just found out that the more sugar that we have, the more our brain wants sugar," or whatever fact it is that piques your interest – share it in a way that makes them curious and makes them want to learn more, instead of, "˜Oh my god, you’re eating a ton of sugar. Do you know what that does to you?’ That’s just such an awful way. So I try to share what I know in a way that piques curiosity.

Moran: What I do in my practice is we sit down and we talk about goals: what are important to the person, what do they want to achieve, what do they look forward to? So then we can broach the subject that way, and that seems to be more personalized, rather than saying, "Oh, you should exercise." People already know that they should exercise. People already know that they should eat better.

Cottrill: What we do is we’d have a dietician come into our meeting, or people who have suffered from eating disorders, and share their experiences, how they’ve overcome and straightened out their diet. And so we just try to get people that we’re aware of that can try to help these individuals, try to find things they can do to help them get off the sugar, things like that.

Express: We also have a way of talking about these things that minimizes bad behavior or makes it light or cute, like, we might say that someone who consumes way too much sugar has "a sweet tooth," making it sound like a funny quirk, when in fact it can be something serious.

Sanok: Absolutely, when we say something like "sweet tooth." Or look at our national traditions, like what we eat at Thanksgiving. We eat a whole bunch of carbs and sugar and meat and, if someone brings a salad to Thanksgiving, nobody eats it. Look at Christmas or New Year’s or Halloween. Most of our national holidays revolve around unhealthy eating. So what we’re doing to ourselves is we are slowly killing ourselves, and our and our children’s capacity to have our brains be optimized, by having that not just be a holiday thing, but how we live our lives outside of the holidays as well.

Davis: What used to be a "sweet tooth" was, "I’ll have an orange and, man, does this taste great and sweet," but now, yeah, there’s just more and more and more of it and it’s now paired with the understanding that it’s an addiction. And it’s not funny and it’s not cute, and it’s as serious as a serious drug addiction. And these poor people that are getting bigger and bigger, and are out of control more, they feel like crud about themselves. They don’t feel good.

Moran: I would agree. We use euphemisms so we don’t feel bad about ourselves, but I think we’ve become too sensitive. Call it for what it is in stark terms. Hit us right in the face. Maybe that will make some people change – maybe not others.

Express: How have you seen people’s lives change when they’ve made positive changes in their diet or by increasing physical activity?

Cottrill: I’ve seen a lot of people make changes for the better. It’s tough at first, but over a period of time, they’ve always seen a pretty good improvement in their health, the way they feel about themselves, energy levels, everything. I think, any time, you start one step at a time, just work toward the right direction, don’t beat yourself up even if you have a relapse. You may go back to sugar for a couple of days, whatever it may be. We try to encourage people to stay upbeat and not to quit. Don’t give up. Take it one day at a time.

Davis: Oh, it’s so exciting and the best part of it is it’s so fast. If they took even a week eating the diet their body was designed for – that means whole, plant-based food – they will feel so much better. They don’t even know how bad they feel until they start feeling good. I’ve had people in a month drop their cholesterol down from 250 to 198, get off of high blood pressure medicine. I’ve had people with Type 2 diabetes, within three months, get off of close to 10 medicines. Nobody quite understands, and nobody’s telling them, how powerful food is, just good clean, real food – not in a package.

Moran: That’s what keeps me waking up every morning and coming to the office. People come in with symptoms. It can be heart disease or cancer or arthritis. A lady came in with rheumatoid arthritis; she couldn’t lift her arms up, she couldn’t do her hair, she couldn’t type. It really affected her life. We changed her diet around and her lifestyle a bit and I think it was two-and-a-half weeks later she was able to lift her arms up and move her hands and make a fist. Everybody at work noticed it; her husband noticed it. That was life changing.

Express: What about people who fall into a sedentary life. What are the consequences? What if if ’s clear someone you work with sits too much and doesn’t get enough exercise. How do you approach that?

Moran: One of the lifestyle strategies we employ is, immediately after a meal, get up and exercise. That may be contrary to what our mothers have told us, certainly mine: "No, sit down, relax, let the food digest." That turns out to not really to be the case. Exercise is important, especially right after a meal.

Davis: My focus, and the way I am certified, is really to promote plant-based food, but, I do know, and every doctor I’ve studied and read says, certainly exercise, even a half-anhour-a-day walk is important. It’s important to get your digestive processes working. So they’re always going to say, "Get some exercise in." My doctor, the doctor I am certified with, bone density is discussed. It’s important to get some weight exercises in to give your bones a reason to live. So it’s huge. It’s very, very important to exercise, but that’s not a focus of my class.

Express: Would you say that spending too much time unprotected in the sun could be another thing that could be understood as a vice?

Moran: Absolutely. If someone’s out sunbathing, yeah, you definitely can get too much sun. Now, in order to get vitamin D, you have to be pretty much without sunscreen when the sun is between 10am and 2pm, so it is the hottest, most intense part of the day, but usually, just to get a pinkness on the skin, could be five minutes, could be 15 minutes per day. That’s necessary, but really over and above that, you should have some protection.

Sanok: As a vice? I don’t think that sunbathing in and of itself is a vice. I think that whenever you’re exposing yourself to things that will produce cancer, if you’re doing that without wearing sunscreen, that’s not healthy, but I would have a hard time labeling that as a vice. In most situations, we know that sun exposure, if done properly, increases the positive effect on mood.

Cottrill: Well, I personally have a hard time with that myself. That’s a good one. That’s a vice, really. There’s a balance – not enough, not good; too much, not good.

Express: What’s your best advice to motivate a person to make a change to a healthier lifestyle?

Davis: Be nice to themselves and say, "Look at what I did good today. I really did that. I ate oatmeal for breakfast." Every time you do something great, something that’s different, that’s an improvement and was a goal of yours, give yourself credit for it. It’s not a "should." If they can get rid of "should" and say, "this is a choice. I can eat anything I want, 24/7," that takes the stress away of, "Oh, I should never." Because, as soon as you’ve got, "I shouldn’t. Don’t touch it," you want it. So get rid of "should" and say, "I choose to do this."

Moran: I think education is very big. Of course, diet and exercise are the big ones we always talk about, but emotional health is huge. If you’re angry all the time or tend to go off the deep end, that raises cortisone levels and some resistance, that does a lot of negative things to the physiology. Education is very important. If people understand a little bit more, then they can make good choices, they can understand the bad choices a little bit more and modify just a little bit. And finding an individual’s goals and their plans for their life and their family, that’s the best motivator. I can’t give them the motivation. I can provide them with a roadmap.

Cottrill: To try to get themselves with a group. We encourage and motivate people to get up and have the courage to make a change. Find a group or individuals who can help you. Don’t try to do it alone. It’s tough to try to do things alone.

Sanok: Find small habits that you can do individually each day. I would say, also, don’t set a New Year’s resolution. Instead, make lifestyle changes, so it’s not pass/fail, but instead it’s viewed as progress. And, I would say, get more sleep.

Our experts are: (Clockwise from top left) Sherry Davis, certified instructor with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine who offers classes on healthy diet in Traverse City; Dr. Chris Moran, chiropractor at Whole Health Traverse City; Craig Cottrell, one of the founders of 311 Spiritual Wellness Center in Petoskey, a community which uses the principles of the 12 steps to peruse wellness; and Joseph R. Sanok, MA, LLP, LPC, NCC, counselor at Mental Wellness Counseling in Traverse City.

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