By Hugh Fisher
hfisher@salisburypost.com
Live a long healthy life. Keep your mind and your energy. Die with a minimum of disease and pain.
If you eat right, exercise and cut down the number of toxins in your living environment, those could be the positive results, according to a Salisbury doctor who is trying to change locals’ living habits.
Dr. Christopher Magryta, of Salisbury Pediatric Associates, shared a mix of healthy directions and cutting-edge science at Catawba College’s Center for the Environment last night.
His lecture, “Nutrition, the Environment & the Genome,” filled the room with about 200 adults, young and older alike.
Magryta’s talk emphasized the big picture, suggesting that health is much more complex than knowing your family history, taking diet supplements or cutting out just one food or ingredient.
“My understanding of disease is that it’s not just based on one system,” he said.
And Magryta told the audience several times that nature and our bodies’ design ó which he called “the book of life” ó should help dictate our choices.
“I think ‘natural’ leads us in every way possible to the right answers,” he said.
“Who thinks God would put something in (our genetics) that’s garbage?” he asked.
But today’s modern life is filled with processed foods, chemicals whose long-term side effects aren’t known and a lifestyle with too much stress and not enough emphasis on exercise.
To help offset these negatives, Magryta said, exercise and avoid the stress that comes from innate “fight or flight” responses.
He showed the audience a deep-breathing exercise designed to slow the heart rate and relieve stress.
Understanding the body’s natural processes and working within what’s natural will increase health and happiness, Magryta said.
“Our body was intended to deal with problems.”
Diet is essential. Magryta suggests eating more brightly-colored fruits and vegetables, cutting servings of meat down to a few times a week (but don’t cut them out entirely) and having more fish and whole grains.
Processed foods should be avoided as much as possible.
He’s also attentive to science suggesting that certain ingredients and staples of other cultures ó green tea in Japan, turmeric in India ó could have lasting health benefits that haven’t been fully explored.
He used humor to drive home this point: after a montage of pictures showing traditional foods from different cultures ó rich in those ingredients ó he showed an American family smiling next to a spread that included sodas, bacon, pizza, chips and beer.
In another surprising moment, he used a color-coded map to show the increase over time in the percentage of obese adults in the United States.
Between 1986 and 2007, one state after another changed from blue or white to yellow, orange and red as the percentage of obese people climbed to as high as 1 in 3.
The benefits of diet and exercise, he said, include not only more strength and freedom from disease, but a much less painful end to life.
“I want to live, live, live, talk to my grandkids and have my mind, and drop dead,” Magryta said.
The alternative is the lengthy mortality that comes from cancer, diabetes and other illnesses that can be avoided or reduced by the right lifestyle.
“We’ve got a lot of problems, but nutrition is one we can fix, and quickly.”
The audience for Magryta’s talk included Catawba College President Craig Turner and his wife, Annette, and Beverly Jordan of the North Carolina Research Campus in Kannapolis.
Jordan praised Magryta’s work, noting that the Research Campus is also studying the impact nutrition has on health.
Some audience members said they came because of Magryta’s interest in natural foods and their effect on health.
“We’ve been studying the very things that he’s been discussing,” Ben Ribelin said.
Ribelin said his wife is a cancer survivor, and in dealing with her illness they underwent a complete lifestyle change using some of the same techniques Magryta discussed.
Lyn Wilson said she was impressed by how easy it is to have a healthy lifestyle. “It’s basic diet information, and it’s so important,” she said.
Magryta said he and Center for the Environment director John Wear had been planning this talk for a while to better address the issues he was seeing in the community.
“I want them to walk away from this saying, ‘What did nature intend?'” Magryta said.