South Coasters are far too familiar with the scenario of turning the tap to run the bath, or have a shower, or wash the dishes or clothes, and find only a trickle of water.
This means another bout of water restrictions; another few days of having to cart water from the rain tank and buy bottled water for cooking and drinking.
Once again, a fragile fibre-cement pipe has burst, wasting thousands of litres of precious water. A harassed Ugu water department team once again must come out to repair the defect.
What is the solution? Employing more workers? Having a better response time and more rapid repair systems? Or is the long-term solution to deal with the underlying cause – replacing old fragile pipes with modern PVC systems?
A similar principle applies to chronic diseases of lifestyle – diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, auto-immune disease, dementia, and cancer.
We can throw medicines and medical interventions at these, often at great expense. We can build more hospitals and employ more nurses and doctors and establish cardiac lab facilities at our hospitals to put in stents for narrowed arteries.
As a patient’s health deteriorates, we can give them a shopping list of different medicines – sometimes as many as 20 different kinds – to address each symptom or sign.
How about if we looked for the root cause – the common denominator of all these different conditions plaguing the current health care landscape.
Even Covid-19 is influenced by this common denominator. We are very aware that those at greatest risk from the virus suffer from the co-morbidities mentioned above.
Many factors contribute to this chronic inflammation.
These include ultra-processed foods which are deficient in fibre; a diet lacking in fresh fruit, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes; foods with high levels of cholesterol, saturated fats, trans fats and animal proteins; obesity; inactivity; insufficient sleep; stress; loneliness and social isolation; chronic low-grade infections; smoking; alcohol excess; family or work conflict; and finally purposeless living.
Researchers developed a Dietary Inflammatory Index by studying the effect of different foods on inflammatory markers. The more pro-inflammatory foods eaten daily, the higher the score. The more anti-inflammatory foods eaten, the lower the score.
It is possible to measure markers for inflammation in the blood – the most common test is the C-reactive protein. This blood protein rises when more pro-inflammatory factors are present.
Dr Dean Ornish, that doyen of lifestyle medicine, puts it simply: Eat better. Stress less. Love more. Move more. It makes sense to address the underlying causes, rather than just the results of chronic systemic inflammation.
Patients find this often eliminates the need for a whole plethora of medicines as general health improves.
Dr Dave Glass. MBChB, FCOG(SA), DipIBLM
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