When most people think about preventative medicine, they think about health screenings, vaccinations and other methods widely used to prevent disease.
Dr. Jennifer Cho-Escalante, a family medicine doctor within Beloit Health System, also has lifestyle improvements at top of mind. She encourages consistent, healthy eating choices over fad diets. For example, stick with heart-healthy eating plans, which are less restrictive and more about flavors and cooking methods. The Mediterranean diet, for example, is one that emphasizes traits of this region: vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans, nuts/seeds, olive oil, herbs and spices.
The Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension – or DASH – diet is very similar.
“It was made for people with high blood pressure,” Cho-Escalante says. “Patients have lost enough weight on the DASH diet that we could take them off their blood pressure medications. It’s a very heart-healthy diet.”
Other lifestyle changes, such as proper sleep and exercise, also come into play.
A mix of aerobic exercises and weight training is the best way to reach the oft-touted goal of 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week, Cho-Escalante says. But even little things can help, like parking far away from a store entrance or taking the stairs instead of getting on the elevator. That 150-minute benchmark is just to maintain your weight.
“One hundred and fifty minutes is a good starting place to maintain, but if I’m actually talking to patients about weight loss, it’s 300 minutes a week to lose,” Cho-Escalante says.
These preventative health measures, and others, can help individuals lead healthier lives and reduce the burden of chronic diseases on health care systems. ❚
Ways to Prevent Disease Before It Happens
