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Meet Dr Elizabeth Klodas, a board-certified cardiologist, author, and founder of the Preventative Cardiology Clinic near Minneapolis and the founder and chief medical officer of Step One Foods. For over twenty years Dr Klodas worked diligently as a cardiologist in the UK and United States. She was successful and respected by her colleagues. She was a by-the-book cardiologist with impeccable credentials.
Then one day her nurse assistant called in sick. Dr Klodas resigned herself to shepherding patients into treatment rooms. And that was when everything changed for Dr Klodas and her cardiology patients.
As she came into the waiting room to call another patient, for the first time she was seeing them sitting in a group. They all looked pretty sick. She was puzzled. On paper, everybody's numbers were great! Cholesterol's perfect. Blood pressure was perfect. Blood sugars? Check! But it was undeniable, as a group they did not look healthy.
So as each patient filed in, she started asking them how they felt. They told her they didn't feel very good at all. In fact, they told her that all the medications she had them on made them feel worse.
And that is when it hit her.
“I had this moment of like, what am I doing? I didn't go to medical school to create a never ending revolving door of follow up visits and endless prescriptions of meds that made people feel worse. I went to medical school because I wanted to cure people, but I realized I wasn't curing anybody”. Dr Elizabeth Klodas
So she started on a journey to radically change her approach to treating her patients. In so doing created “Preventative Cardiology. And that is what brought her to the attention of the team here at Nutramedica.
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Key Take-Aways
Standard Medical Practice: Don’t ask. Don't tell.
Standard medical practice focuses on “the numbers”. Doctors are not trained to inquire “why” patient’s health metrics are abnormal. They don’t ask. They just move straight to medication.
Dr Klodas was shocked to find out that none of her patients had ever been asked about their diet. So she asked about their diet and was even more shocked.
She realized that her patients were eating food that was completely counterproductive to their care and was actually contributing to their disease.
The medical system is still blind to the nutrition/health connection
From the University of Toronto to the Mayo Clinic and Johns Hopkins, Dr Klodas spent 14 years in education to become a cardiologist. How many hours were devoted to nutrition? Zero.
In spite of her patients experiencing high cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar and excess weight, all conditions that are driven by diet and leading to heart disease, she wasn't taught to take a dietary history or to think about nutrition.
It’s the 21st century. Everybody knows on the planet that good food equals good health. Yet what it o pervasive in the culture is not pervasive in doctors offices.
Corporate medicine and the challenge of best practice.
In the US, medicine has become very corporate. Most physicians actually are owned by systems. As a result they are not free to spend more than 15 minutes with a patient. Also, due to their lack of training in nutrition they are unlikely to take a holistic approach to health and as a result health care is very transactional.
Doctors don't get paid to talk to people about diet. They get paid to prescribe pills. Unfortunately, much of the time patients don’t require more meds, they require more broccoli.
Key Quote
“We are surrounded by hyper-palatable foods that are nutrient poor, calorie dense, and made to be addictive. I mean, specifically formulated to make every dopamine receptor light up.
However, even if you hand out recipe books and send people to dieticians, the number of people who succeed is almost zero. That's in part due to the food environment that we live in.
On the physician end, it's lack of awareness. And a lack of emphasis along the whole chain of reimbursement. We don't get paid to talk to people about diet. We get paid to prescribe pills.” Dr Elizebth Klodas MD
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The opinions expressed in this Nutramedica program are those of the guests and contributors. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Nutritional Fundamentals For Health Inc.
This video is intended for licensed or registered health professionals and students of health professions only. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. Information contained in these programs is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
