Читать книгу The Doctor’s Kitchen - Dr Rupy Aujla - Страница 10

Medical experience

My GP training was brilliant. I was experienced in multiple medical specialities, equipped to diagnose and skilled at providing emotional support. However, I was horribly inept at addressing the root cause of the biggest problems facing primary care across the globe: lifestyle-related illness, including diabetes, obesity and heart disease.

Beyond the ineffective recommendations of a low-fat, low-calorie diet we propose for weight loss and cholesterol control, there are no tailored diets for conditions. From my personal experience, I knew there was much more to food than just a collection of macronutrients and the simplistic view that we eat for energy purposes. I was ill equipped to give advice because nutrition training at medical school was lacklustre. So, to help myself and my patients, I decided to do the research.

I scoured journals, watched presentations, attended international nutrition conferences and began to unravel a magnitude of clinical evidence highlighting the impact of food on disease. I read thousands of papers, studies, editorials and books dedicated to nutritional medicine, and was shocked that medical schools cover this entire body of evidence in just a few uninspiring lectures.

I began to start my consultations by enquiring what patients would eat on a daily basis: how do you start your day? What time do you eat at night? Do you snack incessantly after meals? My clinics were more engaging and my patients loved the emphasis on nutrition. Convincing them that the key to longevity and good health was accessible using delicious recipes that I would tailor to their lifestyle, was motivational. I was able to inspire people to take control of their conditions through food in a way I hadn’t done before with just medications. I began to focus on promoting wellness habits, rather than just diagnosing disease.

My diabetic patients would improve their blood-sugar control, arthritic patients would lose weight and become more active and even those who had no significant change in their body composition felt better in themselves. Realising that I could combine my passion for recipe creating and flavour with a career dedicated to healing people was a revelation for me.

But, I couldn’t keep writing recipes for every patient in my consulting room. I was seeing over 40 patients a day, plus home visits, plus paperwork and prescriptions. It was just not sustainable. And that’s when the idea of ‘The Doctor’s Kitchen’ was born: a multi-platform resource inspiring patients to appreciate the beauty of food and the medicinal effects of eating well. A YouTube channel, Instagram account and blog where I could confidently direct patients to gain evidence-based information, lend my perspective on healthy eating and teach them how to cook their way to health.

An accumulation of poor dietary and lifestyle choices often leads patients to the emergency room and it’s partly my experience in A&E that’s brought me on this journey. It’s often a surprise to patients when their emergency doctor starts enquiring about their dietary habits, but acute care and chronic disease are related in many ways. Sometimes it’s a culmination of factors that results in tragedies like a heart attack, stroke or even a nasty skin infection that’s linked to poor diabetes control. Separating diet and lifestyle from acute medicine blinds us to the solution for our overburdened healthcare systems. I truly believe the answer lies in the quality of our community care where food plays a pivotal role. Practising good nutrition and lifestyle medicine means we can pre-empt disease rather than react to it in the emergency department.