9 to 5 Wellness
Do you have the knowledge you need to help your organization get the best return on the time and capital invested in employee wellbeing? Are you a busy professional or C-suite leader looking to introduce wellbeing program at your work?
Discover the art and science of helping organizations grow their most important resource, their people. In this podcast we discuss how organizations can utilize the potential of wellbeing programs to deliver high return on investment (ROI) to employers. We talk about the radical impact that holistic employee wellbeing programs can have on overall quality of work and productivity. We will be sharing insights on investing in human capital. Such as:
🌟 What has helped their organizations gain a competitive advantage?
🌟 How they see the future of employee wellbeing?
🌟 Misunderstandings that are out in the corporate market today
🌟 Advice to other leaders to create a happier, healthier, and more productive workplace
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9 to 5 Wellness
Metabolic Syndrome and Your Health
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Did you know that metabolic syndrome affects a lot of people in the United States? Around 1 in 3 adults have it. But the good news is, you have the power to prevent it. By understanding the risk factors and making healthier food choices, you can reduce your chances of developing metabolic syndrome and the related health issues.
In this episode we will take a deep dive into:
What is metabolic syndrome?
The physiology of metabolic syndrome.
How common is metabolic syndrome?
What causes metabolic syndrome?
Diet as a risk factor for metabolic syndrome
How to avoid and reverse metabolic syndrome?
Tune in to listen to thsi episode and reach out if you have metabolic syndrome and need help.
#metabolicsyndrome #diabetes #weightloss #insulinresistance #obesity #metabolichealth #healthylifestyle #health #inflammation #nutrition #prediabetes #healthtips
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🌟 🌟 🌟 If you liked this episode and would like to learn more about wellness training and workshops offered by 9 to 5 Wellness, email us at info@aeshathair.com. You can learn more about our programs at: https://toneandstrengthen.com/workshops-trainings/. 🌟 🌟 🌟
Aesha Tahir is an award-winning author, keynote speaker, corporate trainer, and columnist. She delivers high-energy presentations that challenge audiences to leverage their focus to what matters most at work and in life, their health. Audiences love the practical strategies she shares. She helps the organizations create a culture of wellness by implementing health programs that put organizations’ biggest asset, the employees first.
Aesha earned her Master in Exercise Science from Concordia University. She is a distinguished Toastmasters, a designation held by less than 1% of professional speakers. She engages groups from the moment she steps in front of them and leaves them with empowering tools that they can use for the rest of their lives. She has presented workshops and spoken at organizations such as Salesforce, Coffman Engineers, Pyramid Club, Voyager Media Group, National Libraries, 92NY, and Coaching4Leaders to name a few.
🌟 🌟 🌟. You can learn more about Aesha Tahir at https://www.aeshatahir.com and follow her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aeshatahir/. 🌟 🌟 🌟
🌟 🌟 🌟 If you liked this episode and would like to learn more about wellness training and workshops offered by 9 to 5 Wellness, email us at info@aeshathair.com. You can learn more about our programs at: https://toneandstrengthen.com/workshops-trainings/. 🌟 🌟 🌟
My passion is helping organizations create a culture of wellness, and I do this by setting up health programs that prioritize the most important asset they've got – their employees. Cheers to a healthier and happier journey ahead!
🌟 🌟 🌟 You can learn more about ME- the host at https://www.aeshatahir.com
Follow me on IG and LI to learn more
Welcome to the nine to five wellness podcast, a show about corporate wellness solutions with innovators and forward thinking leaders who are at the forefront of the workplace wellness movement. I'm your host Ayesha Tahir.
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of 9 to 5 Wellness Show. After last week's episode on kicking sedentary habits to curb, I received a lot of messages on social media about metabolic syndrome because I had talked about metabolic syndrome like very briefly during that episode and a lot of the questions that came through were very interesting and I wanted to talk more about metabolic syndrome and answer those questions.
So I wanted to answer your questions and explain what metabolic syndrome is. And the reason I really want to take time to talk about this topic is because I coach a lot of clients who have metabolic syndrome and they are not aware of the symptoms and the causes and the physiologic responses that are happening within their bodies because of the metabolic syndrome.
Because metabolic syndrome is linked to obesity and it really greatly raises the the risk of developing diabetes, heart disease, stroke, or sometimes all three inpatients. So when I see those clients and we work on their dietary and nutrition intervention, it's sometimes It's very surprising for them to find out that they have metabolic syndrome.
So that's why I wanted to dig deeper into this topic. And I want to start right here because a lot of people ask me. The first question that came up was, what is metabolic syndrome? Metabolic syndrome refers to the presence of a cluster of risk factors which are specific for cardiovascular disease. We are going to talk about those risk factors which are involved in metabolic syndrome, but before I go into the metabolic risk factors, or I like to call them physiologic biomarkers, I want you to know that you already have the measurement of these biomarkers on your last blood test. If you saw your internal medicine physician in the last year and they ordered a blood test for you on that blood test results, you will see all those physiologic biomarkers that we're going to talk about in a few minutes.
If you haven't had a blood test for a while, it's a good idea to schedule one now and take a look at these biomarkers. I highly recommend going back, pulling up your blood test results, and then listening to this episode along with those results. So let's talk about what those physiologic biomarkers are that contribute to metabolic syndrome.
There are five of them. The first one is abdominal obesity, or visceral fat, high blood pressure, impaired fasting blood glucose, high triglyceride levels, low HDL, or good cholesterol.
Now let's talk about them in detail. Abdominal obesity or high visceral fat means that you have a waist circumference of more than 35 inches for women, or more than 40 inches for men. An increased waist circumference is the form of obesity which is most strongly tied to metabolic syndrome. And that is your visceral adipose tissue or VAT for short.
So the visceral adipose tissue is your fat that is wrapped around your organs , and that leads to diseases beyond the cardiovascular diseases. If you think of it, it actually Raises your risk of. a lot of different forms of cancers and autoimmune diseases.
Because you have literally like fat wrapped around your liver, your stomach, your intestines, you don't want that. Second is the high blood pressure, which means that if your blood pressure is higher than 130 for systolic and 80 for diastolic, you have a high blood pressure. And high blood pressure is strongly tied to obesity.
It is found in people with insulin resistance, which brings us to the third risk factor, which is impaired fasting blood glucose, which means that you have fasting blood glucose levels. equal to or greater than 100. High triglycerides means that if you have your triglyceride levels are higher than 150 milligrams, that means that you have a lot of triglycerides floating around in your blood.
It's a type of fat that you don't want floating around in your blood. And then lastly, The low HDL cholesterol means that if your HDL cholesterol levels are lower than 40 milligrams for men and lower than 50 milligrams for women, it is considered low and that's the fact that cholesterol or fat that you want to have in your bloodstream.
So if an individual has three or more of these risk factors, they have metabolic syndrome. All of these conditions individually increase your risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and stroke. But when you have three or more, your risk is significantly increased, so you should see a diagnosis of metabolic syndrome as a warning sign to start changing aspects of your life so that you can have healthy life, and you can lower your risk.
Second most common question that I received was the physiology of metabolic syndrome. So I'm an exercise physiologist, and it makes sense, people wanted to know more about the mechanism of metabolic syndrome, what's happening within your body. So let's talk about that. Most people who have metabolic syndrome have insulin resistance.
Now, what is insulin resistance? Insulin resistance happens when your, the cells in your muscles, fat, and liver don't respond as they should to insulin, which is a hormone your pancreas makes that's essential for life and regulating blood glucose sugar levels. The body makes insulin to move glucose, or sugar, into cells for use as energy.
Mainly it's the sugar that you consume from food. When you are overweight and have metabolic syndrome, it makes it more difficult for your cells to respond to insulin. If the body can't make enough insulin to move the glucose, or the signals between insulin and glucose are broken, where your insulin is not sensitive, to the sugar regulation anymore, the blood sugar levels increase in your bloodstream.
So now you have all this free sugar moving around in your body, which causes you to have type 2 diabetes. Even if you're not diagnosed with diabetes yet, and you have high fasting blood sugar levels, it means that it's the start of the development of type 2 diabetes, or we like to call it pre diabetes.
This is the mechanism of metabolic syndrome, that you become insulin resistant, and that leads to metabolic syndrome. Now, how common is metabolic syndrome? This was another question that I received, and I thought it was a really good question. Metabolic syndrome is very common in the United States.
about one out of every three adults has it. So I like to give an example of if you were sitting at a concert or you were attending a show and you were sitting, the person to your right and the person to your left, if you look at them one among the three of you will have metabolic syndrome.
So that's a lot of people. And one of the reasons why we think that the metabolic syndrome is so common is because the population of the U S is aging and metabolic syndrome is more likely the older you are. . One of the factors for having metabolic syndrome is your age.
If you're older, you're at a higher risk of it. However, I've seen a lot of young clients with it, too. And we're going to talk more about why. We are seeing this in young clients. So the American Heart Association has estimated that metabolic syndrome will soon become the main risk factor for cardiovascular disease, which means that it would be ahead of cigarette smoking.
So it's more harmful. than smoking. What causes metabolic syndrome? Thanks for asking this question. Several factors are interconnected and the first one we talked about, it's smoking. The age. If you're an older adult, you're at a higher risk for it.
So it's a risk factor. But then we also see younger people having metabolic syndrome. Especially nowadays, I see a lot of clients who are younger than 40 years old and have metabolic syndrome. And that can be attributed to obesity. plus the sedentary lifestyle that we have adopted. And it contributes to all the risk factors for metabolic syndrome, including high cholesterol, insulin resistance, and high blood pressure.
Because metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance are closely tied, We believe that insulin resistance may be a cause of metabolic syndrome, but we have to Yet find a direct link between the two that if you are insulin resistant That's the only reason why you have metabolic syndrome. There are other reasons behind it, too Hormonal changes caused by chronic stress is another reason Why you can have metabolic syndrome because chronic stress leads to high cortisol levels and high cortisol levels we know lead to abdominal obesity, insulin resistance, and high blood lipids or triglycerides and cholesterol.
So other factors could be genetic changes in a person's ability to break down fats in the blood. and problems in how the body fat is distributed. So in order to understand the distribution of body fat, we recommend going for body composition scan. And I'm going to talk more about body composition scan on another episode, but But I recently got my body composition scan done.
I highly recommend getting a DEXA body composition scan because it's the most accurate way to know how much body fat percentage you have. How much lean muscle mass you have and where is the body fat distributed? So what we are looking for in terms of the metabolic syndrome is how much fat you're carrying around your abdominal region and how much visceral adipose tissue you have.
And DEXA scan would give you those numbers. So I highly recommend going for that. And if you have Hi, visceral fat. It is time to take action. And that brings you me to the next question that I received, which was if diet is a risk factor for Metabolic syndrome and it is. I'm gonna share a very recent tightly controlled study with you
this study was published in Journal of Clinical Investigation and it shows that carbs themselves are harmful. And they can be a risk factor tied to insulin resistance. So if you avoid insulin secretion by limiting carb intake, you would be able to avoid insulin resistance and you would be able to avoid and prevent metabolic syndrome.
In that study, each individual was randomly assigned a low carb diet, a moderate carb diet, or a high carb diet. Protein levels were fixed, so think of low carb and high fat as synonymous here. And the diets had the same same caloric content. That would not lead to the weight changes in individuals.
The scientists were not looking for it to be a weight loss diet. This was not a weight loss intervention. It was a pure dietary change intervention. After four weeks on the diet, researchers measured a bunch of biomarkers, and they found that fasting glucose levels and triglycerides were significantly lower in the low carb diet group, while the HDL, which is your good cholesterol, was higher.
Another surprising finding was that More than half of the individuals on low carb diet no longer had metabolic syndrome after following four weeks of low carb diet. So, low carb diet can be used to get rid of and prevent metabolic syndrome. When we talk about low carb diet, we are talking about avoiding simple carbs, which are your starchy foods, including white rice and refined wheat, because they have a high glycemic index, which means that they spike the glucose levels in your bloodstream.
Another reason why this relationship can exist between a low carb diet and metabolic syndrome is because when you have a high intake of refined grains high It is often accompanied by low intake of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and healthy protein products, which can have protective effects on your metabolism.
Over the past five decades, Carbohydrate consumption among Americans has skyrocketed and rates of metabolic syndrome have shot up along with it. So the data clearly shows that eating high carb, simple carb diet or starchy food diet or processed food diet leads
Now, I want to answer the final question, , that can I use diet? To avoid metabolic syndrome, to cure and treat metabolic syndrome. And the answer is yes. But you will have to clean out your diet of some foods. So you will have to avoid some foods. And those foods are Refined carbs that we just talked about, such as white flour, sugary snacks, sugar sweetened beverages.
They are low in fiber and nutrients and very high in calories and sugars, and they cause spikes in blood sugar levels and contribute to visceral adipose tissue, overeating, and obesity, which are all risk factors for metabolic syndrome. The second food you want to avoid. are the saturated fats found in whole milk dairy products and baked goods.
They increase your LDL or bad cholesterol levels and raise the risk of heart disease. Third is my favorite because this is something a lot of my clients don't realize that they're, it's harmful for them. Cured meats like hot dogs. Bacon. Deli meat. Yep, your sliced turkey and chicken sandwiches that you eat at lunchtime, they are included.
They are all processed meats. They are very high in sodium and , that can lead to high blood pressure and high cholesterol. Processed foods, such as packaged items and fast food, they tend to combine the worst of the worst and contain refined carbs, added sugars. too much salt, unhealthy saturated fats.
So they have everything in it. They, they just pack the punch, in a bad way. Whenever possible, steer clear of processed foods. Now, If you wanted a diet plan for metabolic syndrome, it's easy. I think almost all of you know and understand what you need to eat. I think the problem is how do I make time for myself?
How do I make those foods available for myself? So, For that, I recommend, meal planning. Use your Sunday afternoons or Saturday afternoons to meal plan so that you can go grocery shopping and pack your refrigerator with healthy food items. A healthy balanced diet that can prevent metabolic syndrome should include, Vegetables.
Yep. Add more veggies. That's it. And we are talking about non starchy vegetables like salad greens, broccoli, peppers, Brussels sprouts, squash. All of these delicious vegetables are good for you. They're high in fiber. Also, you can opt for other plant based sources like beans, lentils, and chickpeas, and they have protein too, only it's not as high as the animal based products.
So, in beans, lentils, chickpeas, they have three parts carbohydrates and one part protein. So, it's not as high in protein as a meat source. But it still has some protein and then they're really high in fiber. So, you know, add those to your diet.
Second thing I would like you to add to your diet are fruits. Fruits are a good source of many micronutrients, which include vitamins and minerals. Yes, they have sugar, but those natural sugars are offset by the fiber that you have in those whole fresh fruits or even frozen, fresh frozen fruits. And Because of the fiber, you digest the sugars and fruit more slowly, and you want to opt for low glycemic index fruits like raspberries, blackberries, and pears.
So there are certain fruits that are very high in sugar. Like grapes . You can have them just in moderation. I love eating berries because they have a low glycemic index.
Third is omega 3 fatty acids. They can help you increase your good cholesterol and lower your bad or LDL cholesterol. So you can find those in nuts, seeds, fatty fish like salmon and mackerel. So those are the foods you want to add.
Changing your eating habits is very challenging. I see this first hand, day in, day out with my clients. But trust me, you don't have to do it overnight. Start with baby steps. Identify one small positive change you can make. Change that. And then move on to the next one. So in order to get started, here are my three tips for you.
And those are add before you subtract. Dwelling on all the foods you should avoid is such a downer. Instead, focus on what you can add to make your meals healthier. We talked about a few like, what's your favorite fruit or vegetable? Can you just add a cup of it per day think about where you can add in healthier options?
So that you would stick to it. Maybe it's at lunchtime. Maybe it's at dinnertime when do you eat? a bigger meal where you can add these fruits and vegetables. Second, drink water. Quenching your thirst with water will help you cut down on cravings for soda, juice, and other sugary beverages.
Sometimes your body's just thirsty. But you keep feeding it all the sugar along with the water, and you know, that's not smart. So you want to opt for water whenever you can. Third is to ask for help. If you aren't sure where to start, ask your doctor for a referral. to a nutritionist because a nutritionist or a wellness coach can help you.
People worry that a nutritionist will try to take away all of your favorite treats and that's not true because we are all about realistic goal setting. And I'm also all about having fun, having food in moderation, I don't want you to feel deprived ever. I want you to have treats. I want you to have a slice of cake on your birthday.
I want you to have a slice of cake on your spouse's birthday too. I want you to have drinks on a long Memorial Day weekend. I want you to have drinks throughout summer I will work with you to come up with some manageable compromises to help you achieve your goals at the same time. I want you to also live a healthy, fulfilling life.
So that is my main goal, and we will work together to achieve those goals. So reach out. If you need help with metabolic syndrome or any of the risk factors that I talked about, if you know that you have them, please reach out and we will work together to make sure that your risk for metabolic syndrome goes down. That is all my friends for this week. It was so nice talking to you. I will talk to you next week. Bye.
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