The advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.

Hello, I'm Kimberly king, and welcome to the mother's Market radio show, a show dedicated to the Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the human condition. On today's show, it's something most of us struggle with our entire lives, the battle of the bold, and if you're overweight, tune in and listen how you can trim the fat and get the body you want.

Plus later, we'll tell you what's going on around town, but first up, we're joined today by another prominent physician when it comes to alternative medicine... That's Dr. Allen sasson, he certified in Internal Medicine and nephrology. The study of kidney disease, he is the founder of the Institute for progressive medicine.

Dr. sasson is experienced in the traditional methods of diagnosing and treating disease, over the last 30 years, he has developed a system of Nutritional Lifestyle and alternative therapies, he specializes in management of heart disease, diabetes and hypertension, bio-identical hormone replacement and platelet-rich plasma and prison for joint pain and we welcome him back to the mother's market radio show, Dr. says, and how are you?

Good, Tim, how are you doing?

I'm doing great, thank you. Before we get to today's topic, please fill us in on your mission and of course, your work... Well, I've been working in alternative type medicine for about 30 years, I'm traditionally trained and did that kind of work for quite a long time before that.

So I do believe in conventional ways of diagnosing, I believe in doing the laboratory studies and stress testing and bone density studies, and a lot of those conventional studies are very useful in evaluating people, or I break away a little bit from conventional medicine is not liking to use all of the drugs and all of the surgeries that are commonly out there for people, because I've seen a lot of adverse effects from them and the lack of benefit. So in my opinion, anything you can do from a lifestyle standpoint to prevent or treat disease is the way to go... Very good, and of course, elongate your life, it sounds like. I'm really interested in today we're talking about the effect that obesity can have on our health, so Dr. saws, and how do you define what overweight is? What is it? The BMI being over 25. what is overweight?

No, there's actually a sort of scientific definition of overweight, which they use body mass index for it in a way that's kind of artificial to me, but it's... Kilograms divided by meter squared. And you can look that up on the internet and do it for yourself, it's not really that accurate because a person who's very muscular is gonna have a higher body mass index 'cause he has more muscle, and a person who has a lot less Mussolini just has a... More abdominal fat and may have a body mass index that's on the lower side, but clinically, they're overweight because they lack the muscle and they have too much fat, and they're buying... There's ways of assessing the amount of fat in the body and the amount of muscle in the body, which is probably more accurate, but a body mass index using that formula of greater than 25 is overweight. And a body mass index of greater than 30 is obese. And a body mass index over 40 is watch out.

Oh, but there's some other ways of looking at it, the ideal is somewhere between 18 and 25 kilograms per meter square. There was a law passed in France very recently, stating that models who had a body mass index less than 18 could no longer be hired as models because they thought that would set a bad example for young women to be too skinny because when your body mass index is too low, then your risk of other kinds of problems goes up... That's true. And so hopefully they're setting the example of the bar a little differently now for young women, for young girls, because of the nutrition aspect of it. Yeah, well, there's problems with women getting things like bulimia and anorexia and that kind of stuff, all of which relates to a person's image of what their body should look like, and unfortunately, the majority of young women think they don't look quite right because they look like they have too much on them.

Absolutely, which I don't think I agree with, and there's a lot of societies, or used to be a lot of societies where being a little bit plump was quite okay.

Right, right. Well, what are the conditions that are more common than they used to be as far as obesity... Well, obesity itself really does create a lot of medical problems when people are more overweight, they tend to have higher blood pressure, they tend to have a higher incidence of heart disease, a higher Innes of stroke, higher incidents of something called sleep apnea, which is now being diagnosed more and more, it used to be like rare for a sleep app need to be diagnosed, and actually we just weren't diagnosing it, and it was there all the time, so the percentage of people who have problems with their breathing when they're asleep is probably somewhere between 20 and 40%, depending on how you set up the definition, and that's a lot of people, and if you have sleep apnea and you don't sleep very well, those people actually tend to get hungrier because they lack energy, they wake up feeling tired, and how do you get energy you eat... Eating is the main source of energy. So we get into this vicious cycle of people handling their problems by eating more food, which gives them more problems, so high blood pressure, diabetes, a number of cancers are also connected with being overweight, like cancer, the prostate cancer, the colon cancer, the Brest... All directly connected with being overweight, and Is this twice as common now as it was 40 years ago, are you seeing more incidents of... This is twice as common as it was 40 years ago, and the other side of it is that people are actually living longer, and they're not living longer, I don't think because they way more...

I think they're living longer because of other kinds of lifestyle changes and advances in medicine and getting away from cigarettes, those things are helping people to live longer, but the obesity problem has become a much greater problem in the last 40 years. Good. It really has just about doubled... Oh my goodness. And I guess the question varies is Why is it... Of course, we're talking about the diet or what people are eating, lack of exercises that the type of work we're doing now that we're into, the age of the computers were sedentary. What are some of the other thoughts that you...

I think that's most of it, is the change in the requirements for what we do day-to-day, people who can drive for a half a mile instead of walk for half a mile, well, they save a couple of minutes, so let's just drive the car.

But I think the business of what's occurred with communication has vastly affected us in a negative way, 'cause what do people do when they're sitting around, they're on their telephone, they're on their email, they're on there, or whatever, their computer... I have many, many patients who are on computers throughout the day, so that's 800 M to 6 PM or 8 AM till 8-80 PM, and they're just on the computer all day long, they don't get up, they don't get... They know an exercise. They're just there. And this is a very large number of people in that situation. And then you hear a lot about, Well, we need to exercise. We need to do this, we need to be at 24-hour. Fitness is all over the place, a lot of people go there. And that's true, but it's not everybody, and some people are only able to exercise, they say once or twice a week, which is not enough, so if your daily habits are... I walk 70 to 10 miles a day, because that's the way I live. I climb stairs whenever I possibly can, I walk a mile from my car to get to a... Right. Work who does that? Almost nobody.

So they find the closest parking spaces and... Yeah, you wanna say... Yeah, Park is far away as you can to get to, but then you know, oh yeah, we have groceries or whatever it is, we always were that society to make it simple, but you have good advice to walk or to climb those stairs.

Now, when I drive to work in the morning, it's about 10 minute, 10 miles for me, about 20 minutes, and there's more and more traffic, 'cause they're buying California just growing by leaps and bonds, and I pass these bicycles, and I say a prayer every time and go past a bicycle, hoping that I'm not gonna hit him and somebody else is not gonna hit them, 'cause it's actually pretty dangerous to be riding your bike in traffic, but from a health standpoint, it's... Otherwise, if you don't get it, it's a much better thing than driving your car to work... That's true, it's true. And bless them on the roadways there, what diseases... And you've talked a little bit about cancer, but are also connected with overweight and obesity...

Well, high blood pressure is probably the most important one in one of the main ways we work on getting people to bring their blood pressure down is to have them lose weight, the blood pressure medications are effective to a degree, but a lot of times they don't work and most of the people who have high blood pressure are not controlled with medication, and we find that if a person can get on the right kind of program, lifestyle program with the changes in food choices, with exercise, with reduction of salt, that blood pressure will come down and you can oftentimes get it down, even 50-60 points just by changes in lifestyle without medication, which I greatly prefer.

They've kind of been working on changing the criteria for what's a good blood pressure, and it used to be 140 over 90, before that it was 160 over 90, now it's 120 over 80 that everybody should be down to, and I can see all kinds of problems happening with that, if it's done with medication, because medication will bring down the blood pressure and also make it more difficult to compensate for when your blood pressure goes too low.

On days when it's hot, when you're sweating, you know you get up, you feel dizzy, you're out in a couple of blood pressure medications, what's going on where they're not drinking enough water, they're sweating too much, their blood vessels are dilated to get rid of the heat, and blood pasture flaws when they stand up and some people will pass out and break a hip, I see lots of problems with that if medication is the way that you used to control blood pressure, if you do it with lifestyle, that does not tend to happen way... That's true. You are painting a really clear picture for what really can go wrong, especially when you put in the nauseous or that being dizzy. What about depression and obesity?

Oh, that's an interesting one.

I think it connects very closely... Again, you can get into a vicious cycle situation because when people are depressed, how do they handle their depression, the Ethan...

I see this in so many people, especially people who have substance problems, someone who has a problem with alcohol, someone who has a problem with other kinds of drugs, they eat, and a lot of times they'll get pretty heavy unless they're using a large dose of the wrong kind of drug, and then they get kind of skinny, but there's just lots of problems with depression and weight gain, and people who are depressed often times don't sleep well, and as we know, if you don't sleep well, you get up in the middle of the night, then you'll eat a banana or some ice cream or something like that so you can get back to sleep again. So depression tends toward weight gain and being overweight tends toward depression again, because you have physical problems associated with that, and also the medications that we use to treat blood pressure and to treat other problems often deprive people of energy and sometimes create depression. I've seen depression in particular with people who are on beta blockers that are used for blood pressure control and cardiac disease, beta-blockers suppressed the adrenal glands, and they take energy away from you and they oftentimes create depression, and a lot of times the patient doesn't know what's happening, and sometimes the doctor doesn't know what's happening, and this is medication related... We talked a little bit about this too. Obesity, does it cause cancer? It certainly can lead to cancer, I suppose, statistically, breast cancer is connected with three lifestyle abnormalities, one is overweight when his lack of exercise and one is too much alcohol. I don't know the exact percentage for each of those things, but women being overweight will increase their risk of breast cancer pretty substantially, Collin cancer and prostate cancer are the same way, I don't know the exact percentage of increases related with weight, and I don't know how much weight you have to gain to significantly increase your risk of cancer, but it tends to go just like that, so if you're 20 pounds too heavy, then you have somewhat of an increase in risk, and if you're 80 pounds to have... You have much more of an increase in risk, it goes up as weight goes up.

There's some interesting information here. We have a lot more to learn from you, Dr. sasson, so please stay with us, we'll be right back when you to take a quick break.

And welcome back to the mother's market radio show, and we wanna take this time to remind you that if you missed any portion of today's show, you can find us on iTunes by searching mother's market or download us from... Or download from the website, mother's market dot com, put the link from radio and listen to past shows was download healthy recipes and money savings coupons, all available at mother's market dot com. And now back to our interview with Dr. sasson, and we're talking about the effect obesity can have on our health, and Dr. sasson, what's the best diet to lose weight? There are so many out there there's low sugar, low grains, low dairy, the Paleo diet and Mediterranean. What's the best Italian?

There've been a lot of studies done on the best die after weight loss, and they all work.

Earth high protein diet works, the low sugar diet works, the Paleo diet works, the Mediterranean diet works. Vegan diets work. They all work. If you do them, if you follow the St typical pattern with all of these diets, is that a person, the average person will lose about 10 pounds in the first three to six months, in the next six months, they start to gain... And at the end of the year, they're kind of where they were when they started.

So the real point with diets is to do them... There are certain points, I think that are really important and highly effective, and the first one really is to have a very active physical program, the more you're doing, the more able you're gonna be to lose weight, one is because when you're physically active, you build more muscle, and muscle uses more calories than fat does, so the more muscle you have, the better able you're going to be to handle the food that you eat and not gang weight also when you're... It's pretty hard to be eating while you're running a marathon, most people can't do that, so if you can exercise instead of sitting around and watching TV and your time off to go swimming or go ride your bike or go dancing or something like that, that works pretty well, I think physical activity, even though in the studies, it has not been shown to be important in weight reduction, I think somehow they're missing the boat because I see this over and over again, my wife is a dancer and she's older than she used to be, but she dances every day, and she's lost 25 pounds in the last couple of years and had gone on for a number of years, 25 pounds heavier, and she wasn't dancing at that time, so no, she picked up this activity, which she loves to do, she lost the weight and she keeps it off now, and her body proportions are very, very different, she still has a little more Valley fat than she wants they have, but it's a lot less than it used to be, and her shape is really good, and it's the dancing that has done that, but certain food choices are good things to make one, and so far as getting rid of refined sugars, cakes, cookies, candies, no question that those items increase weight and they don't provide any benefit, they don't make you a healthier person. And I found with a lot of patients that we have worked with, elimination of grains, particularly gluten, which is kind of a fad thing these days, but it really is effective, the farther away you can get from breads, past those pizzas, those kinds of items, the easier it is to lose weight. And the more you have in the way of high fiber, the easier it is to lose weight, so the more you have in the way of vegetables, like I make a smoothie for myself every morning, which used to be mostly fruit and some protein potters, now it's mostly vegetables, and I can tolerate that, but I know that vegetables are the highest in fiber and they'll fill you up without giving you a lot of calories, and that helps with weight reduction, also the more fiber there is... The more water there is, water has no calories, and the more fiber, the greater the volume, the greater the volume, the more filled you are, and you don't have to eat as much, and things like breads and bakery products are colorectal dense, and you see these things like the PIE in the shop that tells you how many calories is in one slice of pie, 1170 calories is like you're getting me... And actually, you hit home a good point is why then why even have it when it's nothing, you don't need it, it might taste good, but with all those refined sugars, it's a waste because it's not doing anything for you.

Right.

I usually tell folks, so they don't feel deprived, 'cause a person who says, I can't have this, you know, and I'm upset 'cause I can't have... And I say once a week, not the whole day, but once a week, you have anything that you want.

So you don't deprive yourself.

Right.

Does it matter when you eat during the day, what times of the day we eat or eat the proper healthy foods... It does matter. A lot of people that I see mistreat 'cause they're in a rush, I gotta get to work, I got six and a half minutes. And you need breakfast, it's probably the most important meal of the day, and it's important to get a fair amount of protein, a person should get somewhere in the range of 30 to 40 grams of protein with breakfast alone, and I do that with the protein porters that I put in the smoothie, otherwise the protein wouldn't be there and it wouldn't fill me up and I'd be hungry an hour or two later, so I think it's really important to get a substantial breakfast, and I tell people, if you do the smoothie thing, you don't have to make it before you go, you can make it the night before I stick it in their fridge and just take it out of the fridge and drink it on the way to work, you don't lose any time at all. It's basically what I do, except I do make it in the morning, but I can do it five minutes, a lunch is also an important meal, and some people will miss lunch because they're busy... You know, I got the deadline, I gotta do this, I gotta do that. So they'll lead an apple or they'll have a candy borrow, they'll have nothing, and that's also a mistake, so most people's largest meal is dinner, which is the wrong meal to be the largest meal, and some people will have dinner for three hours, they'll start before dinner, heaven crackers or something in a beer, and then that goes on, and by that time they get to bed, they're full, and they don't sleep as well as when you valleys for you... You don't sleep that well. It's really good to have whatever... You're gonna have two or three hours before you go to bed. Get into that habit. You'll sleep better and you'll lose weight, what are some examples of some lunches and then a good dinner, like proportion-wise, but what would you... What are some examples of lunches, for instance... Well, I'm actually in favor of having high quality animal products, you know, I think that meat, chicken, fish, those kinds of items are quite filling, and as long as you don't have them in a sandwich, and I'm kind of against sandwiches because of the bread situation... Right, have those salads are really good choice, soups are a good choice, so it's really a lot of available that a person can have without getting involved in high carbohydrate to lower that carbohydrate content for the most part, the better... That's good, that's great information.

And we talked about the importance of exercise, let me ask you the difference, or if you mentioned if your wife starting to dance, what about someone that is not a fan of running, but fast pass, walking, what do you suggest about that or what do you think about that or I used to be a runner, I ran for, I don't know, 40 years or something like that. And then my knees told me it's time to stop, and I couldn't run now if I wanted to... And you don't really need that. Even though running is a terrific way to lose it, a marathon runners have trouble maintaining their weight, but almost anything is gonna work. These days I swim, I write a bike. I was dancing for a while, but I haven't been able to keep my mind in that my dancing is a terrific exercise and it's fun, people who like to do it and do it, do quite well with that, and it's good because it also maintains flexibility, which is to me, the most important thing to go, as you get older, you see people who are older who are walking funny, they're kind of stiff, that can't bend over very well, and they have pain, and a lot of that problem is related to the loss of flexibility that occurs and to me, the most important exercise you can do at any age, stretching, stretching is really key, and you see the professional players doing that, you see the basketball players sitting on the floor before the game, stretching their legs and all of that, and they have trainers helping them stretch, really important in the prevention of injury, you've gotta have flexibility in your body, otherwise you get into what the problems of arthritis... That's a good point. What other factors besides diet can cause obesity, with genetics, or stress, fatigue, lack of exercise. We talked about that. Even restaurants, travel, poverty. These are just some suggestions.

Yeah, there's all of those things you just mentioned are reasons I have patients who travel a lot, that's their business, they go to Europe, to go to New York, the more they travel out of the country and the more difficult it is for them to get the right kind of diet for themselves, and it's really difficult with traveling, also the hours are changing, so they're going to bed at different times, they're not sleeping as well. Again, when you're tired, what do you do for energy, you eat... Right, so a lot of people who travel will gain weight when they're traveling, then they come home so they can lose it again 'cause they're home and they eat at home, but if your kitchens being redone or you have a slab leak and you gotta move out of your house trouble those people will gain weight 'cause they're eating in restaurants and restaurant food, and if you elect, they're not giving you small meals and they're usually giving you some bread before the meal gets served up.

So the best way to control your waits to be eating at home and cooking yourself and the food's better anyway, but not everybody wants to do that, and I don't wanna do it either, so we go to restaurants a couple of times a week just to have that enjoyment of doing it, but I don't need bread in the restaurants, in fact that I haven't eaten bread in three months now and I feel better for it, I talk to patients whose joint pain gets better, and that's not just joint pain, it's myofascial pain, which is an interesting pain, most people don't know what myofascial means, and it means muscle, and I mean soft tissue, and a lot of the pain that people have that they think is arthritis, my knees bad, my hips bad. This is bad, it's really myofascial pain for the most part, they may have a little arthritis going on, but what happens is the muscles around the joints are getting tight and they're getting trigger points, and that creates pain and the pain can feel exactly like a sciatic pain or a knee pain or a back pain, and some of these folks actually go for operations to handle the pain, 'cause the X-ray or an MRI shows an abnormality and the pain doesn't go away after day operation because that abnormality in the study was not the cause of their pain, then they get into myofascial treatments and they get better. So it's a very interesting thing, and I know a lot more about it the last five years, 'cause I've had this several times, and I didn't know what it was or how to get rid of it, and it was always myofascial, it wasn't arthritic, and it always got better fortunately, but I had to do some work and I had to go to someone who knew what he was doing to relieve it, it's not just enough to put Isner, put he in it, and you have to get into stretching and everybody should be knowingly setting themselves up to do stretching, particularly of the lower body every day.

Well, that's a really great advice, but let me ask you another question about supplements, what supplements can cause weight loss... Supplements for weight loss, many have been tried, that's that medical that we're all looking for.

Right.

I haven't seen anything really work very well, are the medication for weight loss save, some of them are safe and ineffective, and the ones that are effective, I think are probably unsafe, there are some of them that affect the gastrointestinal tract and prevent you from absorbing the nutrients that you eat so they go out the other end, which I think is not a very healthy thing for the gastrointestinal tract and can lead to problems, there's a medication out for diabetes that actually works to prevent the kidneys from re-absorbing the sugar that goes through the kidneys, so your blood sugar goes down and your weight goes down, because the kidneys are impaired by this drug, and this is being promoted fairly heavily, I've never used because in principle, I don't believe in damaging in Oregon in order to help a person in his way, I prefer to find some other way of doing it or even control blood sugar, I'd rather find another way of doing that.

And what about the thyroid? How does that affect the thyroid as well?

Thyroid works for weight. If you look after the physician's desk reference is gonna say, Do not use thyroid hormone for weight loss, it's a problem, it's gonna cause difficulty. And I have used it in pretty low doses for a number of years in some patients and they have lost weight, they've had no side effects and they feel better, thyroid is a very interesting area in medicine because most physicians, and certainly in conventional medicine, will not use the Roman, unless the blood numbers are abnormal, the normal range goes from here to here, it's a huge range. So what's best for that person, you know? If he's 01 and then you could raise in to 07, maybe he'd be better off, he'd still be in the normal range, maybe he'd lose weight and maybe you have more energy and maybe be not depressed anymore, and I've used it for that reason. With good effects.

Well, this is all very, very interesting information. And we thank you so much for your time, Dr. sasson, and we look forward to having you on again, but in the mean time, you can catch more of Dr. sasson on his website, I progressive Med dot com, and learn more about his passion for alternative medicine and all kinds of other information, great things he's involved with. We look forward to our next visit. Thank you. Thanks, give the advice and informational content does not necessarily represent the views of mother's market and kitchen mother's recommends consulting your health professional for your personal medical condition.