“The future of our state’s economy depends on solving the health crisis.” – Delegate Matt Rohrbach at Try This

After 12 years living in my state of West Virginia I can now honestly state I live in a Healing Community.

What is a Healing Community?

Emphasizes the social context as key component and carried out in public domain

Community healing is a process, not an event. It is multi-faceted and multi-layered with no set time limitations. Healing proceeds at pace determined by the participants and cannot be rushed

I witnessed the Healing Community of more than 500 last week at the 4th annual Try This WV (trythiswv.com). I co-directed the Inaugural pre-conference Try This for Health Professionals and with a 150 people from multiple health care disciplines all coming together to share successes and create innovative solutions. Diabetes, Obesity, and Opiates were the main targets and so nice to see technology, food, exercise, and brain sciences all integrating. For as much awareness, programs, and dollars being thrown at it, obesity is still undefeated and increasing in the World.

A Study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine showed more than 10 percent of the world’s population is now obese, a marked rise over the last 30 years. Obesity is leading to widespread health problems and millions of premature deaths, according to the new study, the most comprehensive research done on the subject.

The economic burden of just Diabetes to the State of West Virginia is something difficult to fathom. Current direct and indirect costs come in at about 1.1 Billion dollars a year. By 2018 this may increase to 2.4 Billion if we do nothing, a difference of 1.3 Billion Dollars. Diabetes and its complications are enormously expensive to everyone. What could we do with 1.3 Billion dollars?

$250 million pay the tuition of every WV kid who is in a WV college

$90 million wire the state with one of the best broadband internet systems in the country

$19 million spread in-home visiting programs statewide for infants

$500 million guarantee high-quality, high-reimbursement child care for every working family

$200 million start transitional jobs program for 40,000 out-of-work West Virginians

Double the state budgets of the WV Development and Tourism Offices

I could not have been more pleased with the collaboration, conversation, and hope at Try This.

Our local low carb revolutionaries led by Melanie Miller working with friend and colleague Dr. Eric Westman’s Heal Clinics and local running friend and founder of Bros and Bras Kevin Brackens made impact at Try This WV. We welcomed Gary Taubes as our keynote to make the case for how we got into the obesity and diabetes crisis and as Gary humbly states: “if I am right in my hypotheses.how we get out of it.” I for one thinks he is right .

Do a quick youtube search on several of Gary’s talks from around the world which cover his 20 plus years of disruptive work in this field. Here is a recent one from Iceland. (youtu.be/7E7IbEktEr0). Or pick up one of his three best selling books – Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It and Good Calories, Bad Calories (The Diet Delusion in the UK), and The Case Against Sugar.

I gave a talk titled: “How Do You Mean You Can Put Diabetes in Remission? Try This!”. Hundreds in my community are trying this now (yes a healthy real food low carb diet) and do not believe as American Diabetes Association states in their 2017 guidelines: “Diabetes is a complex, chronic illness requiring continuous medical care with multifactorial risk-reduction strategies beyond glycemic control.”

Kevin Brackens shared the health and economic impact to local small business of Bros and Bras. We introduced the WV Running Resource Network.( wvrunresourcenet.com) Check it out! Middle School running leads Ryan McCarthy and Colleen Farrell also part of this group and shared their free coaches guide. Yes you can be a youth coach. And we even had time to Hula 🙂

Last week the American Heart Association yet again positioned itself against healthy natural saturated fats like butter and coconut oil and suggest we substitute margarine and refined vegetable oils. We followed this advice and also added more sugar and went on a low fat diet at their suggestion in 1980 and we followed the advice. Sad news is obesity and diabetes started skyrocketing at this time.

We want the knowledge and experience to be open access. Too bad the American Diabetes Association does not believe this. Read this disappointing article. (www.medpagetoday.com/MeetingCoverage/ADA/66002).

So I close with this quote from Thomas Jefferson “The Field of Knowledge is the Common Property of All Mankind”. Let’s work together to learn from our mistakes and make knowledge grow and advance.

My folder with lecture presentations, patient handouts, HEAL care handbook and sample cookbook, and selected reference articles can be downloaded here for FREE. tinyurl.com/y8gnjtu2.

There is a lot of disagreement in health fields but in the end we mustagree that It’s Up To Us!