How to help patients make heart health changes: Q&A with Dr. Rakotz

Dietary and lifestyle changes are difficult to make. Once habits are formed, the effort that is required to change is often overwhelming for both patients and physicians. This week, Michael Rakotz, MD, director of chronic disease prevention with the AMA’s Improving Health Outcomes initiative, provides guidance from his own experience as a primary care physician on approaching heart healthy changes with patients. AMA Wire®: In our Twitter poll, the public thought 2:1 that exercise would benefit their heart health more than dietary changes. Why is that? Dr. Rakotz: It’s hard to know for sure why people voted this way. I think what it may come down to is that people not only associate exercise with heart health, but they also see it as much easier to work their way up to walking for 20 minutes a day than to make a long-term commitment to making significant changes to the way they eat. For many people, that may seem like too much work or too large of a commitment.    Adopting a healthy diet isn’t as simple as adding 20-30 minutes of physical activity a day. It’s more complicated. It means reducing or eliminating a lot of the foods we enjoy eating on a regular basis, like frappuccinos, cheeseburgers, french fries, cookies, and other fast food. And eating more of the things we need for heart health, like several servings a day of fruits and vegetables, plus fiber, whole grains, healthy fats like olive oil, nuts, legumes and fish—those kinds of changes can be rea...
Source: AMA Wire - Category: Journals (General) Authors: Source Type: news