Better Being Series: Why Nutrition Matters

October 25, 2024 14 mins

Better Being Series: Why Nutrition Matters

Our Aon expert and guest discuss why nutrition is essential in wellbeing.

Key Takeaways

This episode discusses the direct impact of nutrition on productivity.
The episode shares recent findings from landmark health studies.
This episode shared the importance of sustainable and healthy lifelong choices.

Intro:
Hi everyone, and welcome to the award-winning “On Aon” podcast, where we dive into some of the most pressing topics that businesses and organizations around the world are facing. This week in a special series on resilience called Better Being, we hear from Rachel Fellowes, Aon’s Chief Wellbeing Officer, with her guest, Dr. Michael Greger, on why nutrition impacts wellbeing.

Rachel Fellowes:
Hello and welcome to Better Being with me, Rachel Fellowes. I'm the Chief Wellbeing Officer here at Aon. And unsurprisingly, I'm passionate about wellbeing and human sustainability in the workplace.

Globally, an estimated 12 billion working days are lost every year to depression and anxiety at a cost of over one trillion US dollars annually in lost productivity. Only around 30 percent of colleagues around the world identify themselves as resilient, and burnout is also on the rise everywhere.

As a result, wellbeing has quickly moved to the top of companies' priority lists – with 83 percent of companies now saying they have a wellbeing strategy in place. How organizations prioritize and integrate wellbeing can have a profound impact on employee engagement, talent, recruitment and retention, as well as overall business results. So, it's important – more important than ever – to get this right.

A great wellbeing strategy needs to include personal wellbeing for the physical, emotional, social, financial and career elements, as well as focusing on team and organizational wellbeing, and I take a look at what makes for better being at work with thought leaders and subject matter experts.

And in today's episode, I'm specifically going to talk about a subject that's absolutely critical to all of our wellbeing, and that's nutrition. According to the World Health Organization, poor diet is a leading risk factor for disease such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and certain types of cancer. In fact, diet-related chronic diseases are responsible for more than 70 percent of all deaths globally, which is huge with cardiovascular diseases alone accounting for about 17.9 million deaths annually.

So, my guest today is Dr. Michael Greger. Dr. Michael is a renowned physician, best-selling author and internationally recognized speaker on nutrition, food safety and public health issues. He's also the founder of nutritionfacts.org, a science-based public service providing free updates on the latest in nutritional research.

His groundbreaking work includes his best-selling book, How Not to Die, what a fantastic title, that empowers countless individuals to improve their health through better nutrition. He's also got a new book coming up, which has the rather wonderful title of How Not to Age: The Scientific Approach to Getting Healthier As You Get Older. I love the idea of actually getting healthier as I age, not something many of us think about.

So, Dr. Greger, thank you so much for joining us today and I know we've got a short, sharp show to give people a dose of nutritional insight. So welcome. I would love to cover three topics through our discussion, so I'll just outline them for our listeners today. We're going to dive into why nutrition is important to wellbeing, how it impacts productivity as many of us are in the workplace at the moment, and how we could take away some important tips from you as our guru on how we improve our health.

So, can we start with the first one? Can we go back to basics? I know many of us understand the broad concept of nutrition, but with your lens and expertise, what do we need to know a little bit more about? What is it?

Dr. Michael Greger:
Well, according to the Global Burden of Disease Study, the largest study of human risk factors for disease and death in human history, the number one cause of death in both the United States and the UK and the world more broadly is humanity's diet, killing more people, so for example, here in the States, cigarettes only kill about a half million Americans every year, whereas our diet kills many more. So it's the single most important decision we can make in terms of our health and wellbeing of ourselves and our family. And the good news is that we have tremendous power over our health, destiny and longevity and that the vast majority of premature death and disability is preventable with a healthy enough diet and lifestyle.

Rachel Fellowes:
I mean, it sounds awesome and I kind of want to listen to you again because you sound like this amazing advert. You could just narrate that to me and my family through my everyday life. I think it's fantastic. Can I be a little bit sort of almost pedantic with the word diet, Michael? Is this what you eat or is it how you eat or is it a combination of both when we're thinking about diet?

Dr. Michael Greger:
It's a combination of both, but there's no way you could eat a donut and make it healthy. There's ways you can make it less unhealthy, ways to eat it. But yeah, I mean, I do in my book How Not To Diet, I talk about how a number of factors in terms of timing, various factors that impose not just what we eat but how and when, but it's really if we stick to healthy foods, it's less important to all these other factors.

Rachel Fellowes:
Could you also then just expand a little bit more detail about how nutrition directly influences our overall wellbeing and why it's crucial to prioritize a healthy diet, which I particularly heard that the weighting is more on the what rather than the how?

Dr. Michael Greger:
Well, I mean, essentially our entire body, every cell in our body pretty much is replaced every year. And what is it replaced with? It's replaced with food, water, air, sunlight. There's really not, I mean, we are what we eat literally, not figuratively, literally. And so how are we going to build our body up? What kind of building materials are we going to use? Are we going to some kind of shoddy stuff we get in the drive-thru or are we going to build it based on the best available materials? And so, it's no surprise that what we eat, since our body is made with what we eat, it's no surprise of what we eat has such a dramatic impact on most of our leading killer diseases.

Rachel Fellowes:
So, I'm going to do a little scenario for you, almost an audio role-play. I'm knocking on your door. I'm a woman in my mid-40s. I'm a mother. I work full-time. What sort of guidance would you give me from a nutritional perspective?

Dr. Michael Greger:
I would encourage you to eat healthy, right? Based on studies of identical twins, only about 25 percent of the difference in lifespan between people is due to genetics. So, for what we can do over the majority of which we may have some control, we can look to the Blue Zones, areas of exceptional longevity around the world, where they center their diets without exception around whole plant foods.

So, I would encourage you to minimize processed foods, meat, dairy, sugar, eggs, salt, while maximizing fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, your beans, split peas, chickpeas and lentils, nuts and seeds, mushrooms, herbs and spices, basically real food that grows out of the ground. These are our healthiest choices.

Rachel Fellowes:
I love that. And I actually live in a rural community, Michael, in the middle of England. And I have a very fortunate ability to control my supply chain – so I can go to local farmers, and I can… it’s strawberry season so I can actually take my little girl and pick strawberries.

Dr. Michael Greger:
I'm jealous.

Rachel Fellowes:
So jealous. But how would you advise those, especially if we're living in urban centers, to think about the quality and the source of food as well as all that brilliant list of actually what we eat?

Dr. Michael Greger:
Well, I mean, frozen fruits and vegetables are available year-round wherever you are, and sometimes they can even be healthier than fresh since so-called fresh has been on a ship from New Zealand for a few weeks, whereas most frozen fruits and vegetables are frozen the day of picking actually may maintain higher levels of nutrition. They’re pre-chopped. They’re pre-washed. There's no food waste. They're cheaper, and convenient.

Rachel Fellowes:
Such a good suggestion. So, if we can just shift a little bit, and brilliantly, we've also had Blue Zones as a guest in this podcast.

Dr. Michael Greger:
Ah right, Dan. Wonderful. Yeah, great.

Rachel Fellowes:
Exactly. So, it was wonderful to be able to make that connection. And he talked about almost the design in the workplace, but I know you're going to talk about the impact of the food that I eat as Rachel, bearing in mind it's tea time here in the UK. What should I be thinking about and how does it affect my ability to do my work well?

Dr. Michael Greger:
Oh, tea is an excellent choice. Yeah, no, no. The Brits have it right, three cups of tea a day is associated with 26 percent decreased risk of all-cause mortality. I mean, tea drinkers tend to live longer lives than non tea drinkers. And look, I mean, in terms of productivity and diet, it's really all about health.

Rachel Fellowes:
Can I just pick up on a couple of little nuances just so that we can bring it to life? Sugar, carbohydrates, protein, is there any recommendation around that?

Dr. Michael Greger:
Oh yeah. Recommendations for sugar intake is less than 10 percent of daily calories from the World Health Organization with a suggestion towards moving towards less than 5 percent a day with disease relationships going down all the way to about 2 percent of calories from added or so-called free sugars every day, so we try to minimize their intake of added sugars. In terms of protein, 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight up to age 65, then 1.0 gram per kilogram body weight comes out to be about 45 grams a day for the average height woman, 55 a day for the average height man.

Rachel Fellowes:
If I was to go onto your website, nutritionfacts.org, what would be the coolest takeaway that you think is up there at the moment that would really inspire all of our listeners?

Dr. Michael Greger:
Oh. Well, earlier this month I did two videos about the new Ornish study that just came out, Dr. Dean Ornish. After reversing heart disease, the number one killer of British men and women moved on and was the first to show he actually reversed the progression of early-stage prostate cancer in men, and recently took on Alzheimer's disease and took a group of early-stage Alzheimer's patients, randomized them to either make no lifestyle changes or to center their diets around whole plant foods along with other healthy lifestyle behaviors. And saw in many patients a slowing or even improvement in their cognition in a matter of months, whereas of course all patients in the control group continue to decline as Alzheimer's patients typically do. The fact that we can actually have an improvement in cognition just from a healthy diet lifestyle is something that really just sends shockwaves to the medical community. And so that's one of the most exciting new studies that I profile on nutritionFacts.org.

Rachel Fellowes:
I absolutely adore that. And I'm also curious because there's such a huge leap in anxiety, depression, addiction, other mental health disorders. Do you know of any up-and-coming studies that link nutrition to those three things?

Dr. Michael Greger:
Well, yeah, you don't know upcoming studies until they're published, but certainly in the past I've got lots of videos on diet and mental health. There's only one diet that's actually been shown in a randomized controlled trial to improve mood within a matter of weeks, and that is under that particular study, it was a lacto-vegetarian diet, so a meat-free diet with no eggs. Saw a significant improvement in mood within two weeks. They think it's because of the arachidonic acid, this pro-inflammatory long-chain omega six fatty acid found concentrated in chicken eggs, but they removed eggs, chicken, other meat from people's diets, saw significant proven in mood. They thought it was about decreasing neuro inflammation, brain inflammation caused by these pro-inflammatory foods regardless of the mechanism. It was nice to see that kind of effect.

There are other specific foods that have been shown to decrease anxiety, et cetera, and so any particular diagnosis somebody has, they can go on nutritionfacts.org and type it in and see what the science has to say.

Rachel Fellowes:
So, I'm kind of guessing the answer to this question. So, if you think of, whether it's an alkalizing diet, a 5:2, a paleo, I guess I'm hearing that experimentation on what healthy actually means is a positive, but it's more around the sustainable commitment to being healthy over time. You're less into fad diets, is that correct, or what are your views on that?

Dr. Michael Greger:
Well, I mean, diets don't work by definition because the implication of it going on a diet is that eventually you're going to go off a diet, right? Healthy habits have to be lifelong for them to work. It doesn't matter what you eat today, tomorrow, next week, it's what you're going to eat over the next few decades. And so, if these habits are going to be lifelong, you want them to lead to a long life. And so that's why it's critically important to adopt a way of eating that is going to improve your overall long-term health and wellbeing, and that's a diet centered around whole plant food.

Rachel Fellowes:
So, would you believe it? We're getting close to time already. So if I was to put you on the spot, and I don't know if you have mastermind in the U.S., but it's kind of you're under a spotlight and I say, what three things would you recommend I do for myself based on my diet, my nutrition, that kind of summarize everything we've talked about? What would you recommend?

Dr. Michael Greger:
If there were just three foods I would add to your diet, it would be berries – the healthiest fruits, dark green cruciferous vegetables – the healthiest vegetables like broccoli family vegetables, kale, collards, et cetera, and legumes – beans, split peas, chickpeas, lentils. And if there were just three things to first remove from your diet would be anything with trans fats, these hydrogenated vegetable oils, processed meat, bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, sausage, are known to cause colorectal cancer in human beings, the number one cancer killer of non-smokers. So, we want to stay away from those. And also, third would probably liquid candy. Stay away from soda. We shouldn't be drinking sugar water.

Rachel Fellowes:
I love that. I feel incredibly energized. Thank you so much. And that's it for our show today.

Outro:
Thanks for tuning in to the latest episode of “On Aon” with our episode host, Rachel Fellowes, and today’s expert, Dr. Michael Greger. If you enjoyed this episode, you can get more insights on wellbeing in the workplace and information on future podcasts by following Rachel Fellowes on LinkedIn. In the meantime, be sure to check out our show notes and visit our website at Aon dot com to learn more about Aon.

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