Vibrant viewers, on this week’s Healthy Living, in part one of a
two-part series, we’ll learn some of the key principles of diet and
nutrition from Dr. Jay Sutliffe of Chadron State College, Nebraska, USA.
Dr. Sutliffe is a registered dietician with a background in
health education and public health. He is a popular speaker at health
expos and conferences and is an advocate of the vegan lifestyle.
Given
the seemingly endless array of food choices, some feel it is a
challenge to know which are truly the foods that can keep our bodies
strong and full of energy.
Dr. Sutliffe first discusses the C
Reactive Protein level as an indicator of health status and why this
measure shows that always selecting natural, plant-based foods is vital
to keeping healthy and active.
Dr. Sutliffe(m):
The C Reactive Protein is a protein made in the liver in response to
inflammatory conditions in the body. It’s a better indicator than even
cholesterol to see the likelihood or the possibility of us having a
cardiovascular event, and so the C Reactive Protein is measuring how
much inflammation we have actually within the arteries.
And so
when we have this check, what we see is if there’s an elevated
condition. What we can do is we can change lifestyle factors to actually
bring the C Reactive Protein level down and bring our inflammation
down.
Now inflammation is also synonymous with cancer, diabetes, and
any of the arthritic conditions, because when we become inflamed
internally it starts narrowing off the blood flow in the body.
In
some of the clinical studies that we’re currently doing with some
colleagues of mine, we’re actually looking at using a plant-based
lifestyle to lower the C Reactive Protein.
In our preliminary
findings right now we’re finding that the plant-based lifestyle is a
major benefit in bringing the C Reactive Protein down in the short-term,
even as little as two to three weeks.
Dr. Sutliffe(m):
When we take in an animal- based protein diet, we’re finding that a lot
of the sulfur containing amino acids are causing an inflammatory
response in the body.
When you eat foods of plant origin, that
have plant proteins, they’re typically very low in sulfur-containing
amino acids, and so automatically that’s starting to help reduce the
amount of inflammation within the arteries.
For more details on Dr. Sutliffe,
please visit
www.CSC.edu or
www.FullCircleofWellness.com