Dr.BETHDiDomenico ND

Modern Lifestyle's Effect on Health

As a naturopathic doctor, I’ve been treating patients for over 25 years. That isn’t very long in the scheme of things, yet in this short time, I’ve observed many relatively new lifestyle factors that are adversely affecting the health of patients. Whether technology-related or cultural and social habits, much has changed in health in the last quarter century. Read on to decide if modern living is adversely affecting your health.

 

1. Sleeping with electronics.

Insomnia and anxiety have become the most prevalent of symptoms for my patients. Why don’t we sleep anymore? Could it be the streetlight in front of our home that stays on all night? Or perhaps the murder show we watched before bed? Or perhaps the latté we had after lunch. While these can affect a good night’s sleep, there is a new culprit on the list. A new question I ask my patients with insomnia is whether they sleep with their electronics. I didn’t ask this 20 years ago, because then, we’d all have thought it a ridiculous question. But now we may have our laptop, electronic reader, and cell phone all within inches of our heads. Most of us don’t need a phone at night. You grew up without a phone next to you and you made it this far. I suggest you put the phone more than 6 feet from your head and on airplane mode at night, or turn it (and all the other non-alarm clock electronic devices) off.

 

2. If it doesn’t exist in nature, don’t put it in or on your body.

This seems simple enough, but if you’re using body care products that were not homemade or purchased from a health food store, or eating “food” out of a package with a lengthy paragraph of ingredients, you are feeding your body unnatural substances and expecting it to act naturally.

 

Nature has been pretty good to us, yet we constantly look for ways to improve upon it. The chemical industry has provided us with a host of artificial ingredient options in the last 15 years, but one thing remains true: few, if any, are better than natural ingredients. For example, sucralose (Splenda®), saccharine (Sweet’N Low®), and aspartame (Equal®) are rampant in our food supply. Research shows a direct correlation between the consumption of these “diet” foods and weight gain. Despite their advertising, these chemicals don’t taste better, satisfy more, or lower obesity or diabetes. Organic cane sugar is fine in moderation for most individuals. Stevia, a naturally derived sweet plant substance is even better.

 

3. Unless you live on a farm, activities of daily living do not count as an exercise program.

Going shopping and doing the dishes and laundry are all important things to do, but it doesn’t count as credit towards cardiovascular or even functional exercise. Exercise used to be a thing we did during our daily activities of living – things like walking to school or work or the store, or milking the cows and toting the jugs. Exercise was outdoors and required more than a few minutes, some occasional heavy breathing, or technical work using our fine motor skills. This is a big reason why obesity was almost non-existent just decades ago. If your routine never involves fresh air, some unpredictable terrain (ie. stairs or a mountain trail), sweat, effort and hard breathing, or some physical skill that can be developed, then find a way to move your body on a regular basis to push it's limits and build muscle and cardiovascular health.

 

4. Our convenience has become our pathology.

A woman visiting the U.S. for the first time from Tanzania was recently asked what she thought about her time in Seattle. She said she was amazed at how many things we have and are able to buy. She was initially impressed by how independent we are. But then she noted that we seem very sad and alone as people. When you have access to everything and can get what you want by the click of a keyboard, then you don’t need to participate in society. You don’t need to rely on others or ask a favor or even talk to your neighbor. When she makes a cake in Tanzania, it’s a village event. One neighbor has the chicken eggs, another brings sugar from the city and a third has the oven. Here, instead of the old corner store to catch up with the locals, we now are all busy behind our laptops- even if we're out at the coffee shop. It is a recipe for isolation. Even when humans have all the food and comforts imaginable, they still need human-to-human interaction. I don’t think she meant meeting the pizza delivery person at the door, either. Which leads me to my next modern maladaptation…

 

5. We need an intimate relationship with our food.

Michael Pollan’s book Cooked: A natural history of Transformation, reminds us of our past nurturing relationship with food. “The rise of fast food and the decline of home cooking also have undermined the institution of the shared meal, by encouraging us to eat different things and to eat them on the run and often alone. Survey researchers tell us we’re spending more time engaged in ‘secondary eating’, as this more or less constant grazing on packaged foods is now called, and less time engaged in ‘primary eating’– a rather depressing term for the once-venerable institution known as the meal.” Research shows that, by simply spending time touching or preparing our food, our sense of satisfaction and ability to digest and absorb go up measurably. How many of you have known a child that has little interest in vegetables until they help in a garden, working the dirt and watching their seeds grow? Children understand the best food is that with which your own hands had the privilege of working.

 

6. Sitting is the new smoking.

So notes Nilofer Merchant in her TED Talk. We now sit on average 9.3 hours per day (compared to 7.7 hours of sleep) with some significant health consequences. Sitting and inactivity have serious implications regarding back and neck pain, as well as more severe health issues. An estimated 60-80% of our adult working population experiences some level of back and neck pain, at a cost of around $86 billion a year in lost time and medical expenses. This doesn’t include the cost of more significant health complications. Regularly sitting for more than 3 hours watching a screen makes you 64% more likely to die from heart disease. As soon as you sit, the enzymes needed to breakdown fat drop 90%. Each additional hour past 3 hours spent on a screen results in an 11% higher death risk over a 15 year period.

 

Exercising the prescribed 30 minutes a day is just not enough if you are sitting 8+ hours a day. In no other task do we assume that 30 minutes of practice outweighs 8-9 hours of poor performance. In fact, when compared, people that watched more than 3+ hours of TV are equally obese whether they exercise or not. It is the sitting that is deadly, even more than the lack of exercise. Humans are built to move. Going to the gym is not necessarily the solution. Getting up is. Getting up frequently is even better.

 

7. Technology is changing our sense of time and joy.

Anxiety is another condition, like insomnia, that my patients report more often now then 20 years ago. Are you able to live joyously in the present moment? Can you take a phone and computer-free vacation, or even a day to remember (or show your children) what it used to be like in the old days?

 

According to a recent editorial in the Huffington Post, “Over-reliance on technology–constantly checking email and social networks, and being distracted by alerts on our mobile devices–can take us out of both the past and the future, and into a state of heightened “present hedonism” in which we’re constantly focused (in a sometimes compulsive way) on what’s either right in front of us or coming immediately afterwards. We now know that our brain chemistry is changing as a result of technology and social media. My experience as a physician is that patients are feeling more isolated, anxious and uncertain about the future than ever before.

 

8. Instead of recognizing that our physiology is changing for the worse, we label it the new norm.

If you are the rare individual that has maintained your weight for the last 30 years, you’ve probably noticed that your clothing size keeps going down when you shop. Didn’t you use to be a 10? They really have sizes 0 and 00 now. Clothing sizes have changed to both sell more clothes and meet cultural norms.

 

The same thing has happened with lab results. Just 18 years ago it was protocol to run an HIV test on any patient with white blood cell counts below a critical level. Now half of my patients have these low level white blood cell counts. Not only are these patients not HIV+, but, according to the lab, they’re cell count is now in the “normal” range. In other words, when, as a society, our lab values change to a new common number, the lab just changes the reference range. So, while it isn’t healthy or optimal to have low white blood cells, we just change what we call “normal.” The same goes for how we view weight: collectively as a society, our weight keeps going up, so the insurance companies simply change the actuary tables to reflect what is common. Lab results that used to be labelled as diabetic and now normal to "pre-diabetic".

 

What can you do?

Make a conscious choice not to be a lab rat.

It may sound like I am down on technology, but I acknowledge many ways it has vastly improved our lives. Like telehealth medicine. And we have information at our fingertips that allows us to make educated choices. Fifty years ago, when the pesticide DDT was sprayed down the streets filled with children playing to show how safe chemicals were, people had no way of knowing what they were being exposed to. Now we have Wikipedia, the Environmental Working Group (EWG.org), and quality stores like Marlene’s and PCC that do a lot of the research for us. You can choose to know which ingredients change your (or your child’s) hormones, which increase your risk to cancer, and which are not even researched in humans yet.