the following is an encore presentation of louisiana public square support for this program is provided by the foundation for excellence in louisiana public broadcasting and from viewers like you [Music] hello and welcome to louisiana public square i'm beth courtney president of lpb and joining me for tonight's discussion on healthy living is family physician and author dr ronnie whitfield welcome ronnie thank you so much beth it's great to be here you know obesity is a condition that i see more and more in my practice in fact the latest state of obesity report by the robert wood johnson foundation ranks louisiana first in the country for adult obesity unfortunately that's not a surprising in a state where every social event becomes a food event and our cuisine attracts the tourists from all around the world well that's certainly true but you know if living a healthier lifestyle is one of your new year's resolutions tonight we're here to help ever wonder which diet is the most effective for shedding extra pounds what weight loss surgeries are available and how safe are they how much exercise do you need and how can you eat healthily if you live in a food desert well we've brought together doctors nutritionists researchers and weight loss success stories to help you learn how to have a healthy new year my name is denisha thomas since that last summer i've lost about 12 pounds and i've also lost about four percent of my body fat denisha thomas is a senior at lsu in the pre-med kinesiology program during the fall semester she participated in a trial weight loss program with pennington biomedical research center called healthy detours it was designed by dr valerie myers the summer before i started using the app i was actually at the heaviest weight that i had ever been in my entire life that came with back problems that came with problems with self-esteem people in my family were noticing it was overall a little embarrassing through an app on her phone thomas was prompted to eat healthier sleep better and get more exercise during the study the app was centered around the restaurants on and around campus there were icons beside each restaurant's name that showed you if that restaurant had low fat options if that restaurant had options with a great amount of fiber or a nice amount of vegetables on their menu she also learned to pre-plan her meals for the week i would say before the study i would say exercise was kind of like a cramp in my schedule the resources on the phone actually made it very easy to completely understand what type of workout you were doing how much was needed so i realized if i go and jog around the lake i only need to do that for 15 minutes or five days out of the week which is completely and totally feasible kate blumberg is a research dietitian at pennington she says this kind of education is key to making a diet sustainable and not just a short-term solution the biggest problem people make when they are planning a diet is they don't have a maintenance plan what are they going to do after they lose the weight there are many diets to choose from but most have the same principle almost any diet can work if it is reducing the amount of calories that people are consuming you know if you were eating whatever you wanted to begin with and now you're following something most of the time you are reducing the amount of calories that you have one trend is the low carb diet the premise of low carb diet is that if you focus more on eating proteins and fats and less carbohydrates your body is going to have to use your fat in your protein stores to burn energy but if too few carbs are taken in the body can go into something called ketosis which you know can help you burn calories quicker but also can make you irritable fatigued tired those type of things but carbs are not the enemy bloomberg says a lot of diets they are seem to be the enemy but i think it's more the quality of the carbs that you are having so you know processed foods chips and you know a lot of foods with sugar in them and things like that no we don't need those but our body does need fruits and vegetables and whole grains bloomberg says there are pros and cons to meal replacement diets like slim fast or nutrisystem because a lot of times when people want to go on a diet the thing they say is well i just don't know what to eat and this just kind of eliminates that the problem with meal replacements is that again there's no plan for afterwards it doesn't teach people anything it doesn't teach them portion sizes or which food groups are healthy and which ones they need to stay away from pennington meal replacement studies often include education components that teach participants valuable nutrition lessons for after the study is over bloomberg promotes the dash diet developed in part by research at pennington the dash diet stands for the dietary approach to stop hypertension so it basically was designed to try to see if they could reduce people's blood pressures but over the course of the studies that they've done they have found that it not only reduced the blood pressures but it reduced the risk of heart disease diabetes certain cancers and of course also help people with weight loss dash requires decreased sodium and saturated fats along with more fruits and vegetables whole grains and low-fat dairy if you're looking to start a diet consult a dietitian for official advice i truthfully believe that it is not one size fits all someone who loves to cook who likes a lot of variety in their food and things like that they are going to do terrible at a meal replacement type diet where they have to eat the same things over and over and they really don't have much time you know they don't really prepare them themselves in louisiana a state where one in five residents live in poverty it's not always easy for those of low socioeconomic backgrounds to get access to healthy options monica mcdaniels is clinical services manager of the state's wic program in areas where there are high incidence of food deserts the accessibility to appropriate foods can be quite the challenge transportation to the grocery store a full-line grocery store may also be one of the challenges that our participants face the wic program or the special supplemental nutrition program for women infants and children helps mothers who qualify choose healthy foods the wic program targets iron nutrients vitamin a vitamin b vitamin c and zinc calcium vitamin d and we have food prescriptions and with that though there are only certain foods that the participant will be able to purchase no matter who you are losing weight is about learning to make healthy choices because it is a lifestyle change if you really want this to be long-term you have to learn how to make changes joining us to explore some of those changes is our studio audience it includes individuals who are at different points in their healthy lifestyle journey we'll hear what diets have worked for them what fitness regimens they follow and why some of them chose weight loss surgery we'll also hear from folks who help underserved communities eat healthier thanks to everyone for being here i want to toss out a few things before we get started we created an online survey about this month's topic among the more than 125 respondents we discovered the following of those taking the survey 71 percent consider themselves overweight 28 percent a normal weight and less than one percent underweight after using a body mass index chart 43 fall under the overweight category 25 fall under the obese category and 15 in the extremely obese category 17 come under the normal category when it comes to carbohydrates 24 percent eat four or more servings a day 34 of the respondents eat three servings a day 33 percent eat two servings a day and only nine percent eat one serving of carbs daily for vegetables 14 have them four or more times a day 26 percent consume vegetables three times a day most respondents about 34 percent eat two servings a day while six percent of respondings don't eat any vegetables during the day at all forty two percent of respondents haven't tried dieting but twenty five percent tried their own plan the most popular diet is weight watchers tried by twenty one percent of respondents followed by the atkins and sugar busters diet at thirteen and nine 9 respectively some respondents have tried multiple diets so let's start here guys what have you done to get in shape and what motivated you to start we'll start with monica absolutely my motivating factor was uh not uh working so much i chose the field of nutrition i'm a registered dietitian by trade so i chose the field of nutrition to keep me accountable uh quite honestly and uh when life happens uh childbearing years start uh you see the freshman 15 and i think you see the the married 20. so uh with with everything going on once the children were independent enough to you know complete their own homework having a supportive husband i was able after several years of you know being a nurturing mother and wife to redirect my and rechannel my energy back to exercise great great yeah so and that that is where my journey with increasing my uh physical exercise uh began very good point we're female dominated on this panel but elmo i'd like to ask you about your journey to to weight loss and fitness how did you get involved in this well first of all i give a lot of credit to uh the people at pennington because they have educated me over the years i've been on a number of their studies probably the one that's been the most beneficial to me has been e-mechanic which basically was exercise okay and that helped a lot uh it helped me to develop a routine for working out and even today a couple of years after i've finished that study i'm still working out in the gym three to four times a week in addition to that i'm a lifetime weight watcher so i've been very conscious of what i've eaten although the struggle is still before me so it definitely was a lifestyle change for you yes lindsay you you had a different path you you were a little more strategic or surgical might i say how about your weight loss journey um well being a new mother and gaining weight of course i got to my uncomfortable weight and i wasn't um i guess you say confident anymore um i tried several diets and they just didn't agree with me i don't know if i just didn't stay with the plan or you know how um my lifestyle was especially with my husband's good cooking i went to the aspen clinic i knew a few people that went there and they had very good success with it i went i had a good success with it the pounds started dropping off immediately they helped me with my diet plan um my grocery list and everything i needed to do and um here i am great well from the surveys and talking to you guys i know structure is important but i'd like to also know what are some barriers david what do you think of some barriers to weight loss what do people talk about i always hear time is the is the biggest barrier but what berries might some folks face uh i'd have to say food number one louisiana cooking that's right but uh i i had lost about 25 pounds myself i i have a hard time i i admire and respect so many of these folks that you know uh count calories and carbs and i just uh to be honest with you i'm that's kind of a barrier to me i i i'm able to um uh to control my my diet just by cutting down on uh the amount of food that i eat in uh less alcohol uh you know we're kind of a party state i guess those empty calories and a wonderful uh way of life here but uh i can cut down on calories by doing that and uh my family's pretty supportive we don't eat a lot of processed foods but but anyway i i think i think those alcohol food uh those things are sort of barriers uh yeah you hear that more calories you know in and less calories out and that's how people continue to gain weight nurse row uh we have some nurses in the building and we have a different experiences we are battling with these patients constantly what do you think the motivation for the patient would be as a healthcare provider what can you do to motivate the patient well i actually you know started my journey you know because i was listening to you tell patients say hey look you know you could do this that you can decrease your carb increase your activity increase your water intake and i thought okay one day i went home and i said well i can listen to what dr whitfield said and do the same thing and it started to come off and patients started to notice i didn't notice but patients started notice and then i walked into the office one day and it was like wow i got on the scale and i said just those simple things of just saying hey look you can do it i'm gonna do it with you right so if if i could do it they could do it too you know so that was my attitude yeah and a lot of times patients being someone who went through my personal journey hired a nutrition coach and lost those pounds i sometimes expect the same thing for my patients didn't always get that i want to shift tracks for a minute lisa there are some folks and i think in this room we're all okay but there are some folks who just don't have access to healthy foods what are the options how can we how can we help those individuals well i think mainly the fact that you know i do i am with the red stick farmers market and we provide markets in north and south baton rouge areas the ones that have been mostly challenging are the ones in the food desert areas so i think education is is key to getting the word out about the the food travels less miles then it's more nutritious than if it's coming from you know across seas or other countries or things like that but access has been one of our major issues in the north baton rouge and the south baton rouge community with the mayor's healthy city initiative there was a quite a few programs that came out with that and that was break on the go to increase the physical fitness in the school systems and also we came with the mobile farmers market and the mobile food pantry just so we could provide food in those low income areas or the low food access areas so there have been different things put into place it's just that you know the community buy-in is the most important thing like once they adopt that idea that hey we need to change our diets and think about their family members who suffer from diabetes and high blood pressure then that's how we kind of tackle that situation great great so we do have some options out there by show of hands does anybody use anything unique a fitbit calculator a higher personal trainer to help them in their process other than surgical procedures by show of hands okay not as many as i thought mona what what what approach did you use to lose weight um that was a good answer i've actually had the gastric sleeve okay um what prompted me to have the surgery is i have 11 year old and a 17 year old and i've watched my mother die from diabetes at the age of 62 and it was very difficult and i didn't want to do that to my kids so i decided after being diagnosed with insulin resistance and also being diagnosed with some other health issues and i ended up being 40 bmi i said i had to do something and you took something all my family and friends were like oh you you look great you look great and i guess the way i carried my weight and stuff i was evenly distributed over my body however i was breathing very hard i was very wheezy i couldn't do physical exercise like i used to and i always been a gym rat and i mean i was in dance team for 18 years i was a cheerleader growing up i mean i was always very active but once i started having kids back to monica's you know use that child bearing and everything and you get complacent in life yeah life so i decided to do this and it's been the best decision i've lost over 60 pounds in just a few months and um i highly recommend it if those individuals can do it if the other options don't work well congratulations weight loss sorry about your mother's loss but when we when we address obesity we can reduce our or increase our life span by by reducing our risk of diabetes and heart disease so it's very important that we use natural approaches as well but sometimes those salvage procedures are necessary that's kind of all the time we have for that section and i really appreciate you guys we're coming back with some more questions when we return we'll be joined by our panel to further explore how to have a healthy new year we'll be right back welcome back to louisiana public square tonight we're discussing how we can live healthier in the new year joining us now is our panel of experts dr drake bellinger is a bariatric surgeon with the weight loss surgery centers of louisiana since 1997 he has performed over two thousand weight loss surgical procedures including gastric bypass and gastric banding dr catherine champagne is a registered dietitian and professor at the pennington biomedical research center she helped to develop the dash diet which has been ranked number one by u.s news and world report for seven consecutive years wow rudy macklin is the director of the governor's council on physical fitness and sports for the past 23 years rudy has served as an advisor on health policy issues affecting underserved immigrants refugees and ethnic populations and stephanie m elwood is an extension associate with the community and school garden programs at southern university ag center her current work includes building nutrition education sites across the state and working to eradicate food deserts before we go to our audience i'd like to ask you each briefly if you could give louisiana a leather grade on its health dr bellinger i'd give us uh c-plus c plus a little higher than i thought dr champagne i'd give us a c-minus c-minus okay rudy and f and f and miss l wood i would give us a c because we have lots of potential lots of potential lots of potential to grow uh if you ask dr whitfield i'd probably give us a d a d plus and i think that's dealing mostly with the obesity epidemic that we have in our state i want to talk some questions out to the audience now so you guys help me out a little bit bianca you had a question about the resources uh could you could you could you tell us a little bit about what you were asking um well i work with lsu ag center with the healthy communities project in rural st helena parish and sometimes we find that there may not be enough resources because it's not necessarily a food desert but there's lack of access to different fresh foods fruits and vegetables for the community there okay so just wondering what type of resources are offered by the governor's initiative um specifically with nutrition and physical activity correct anyone in the panel would like to take that question oh i guess it was directed toward me with the governor's council on physical fitness and sports you know we concentrate on obesity instead of all the other health issues because when we deal with obesity it cross walks with a lot of other diseases and death hypertension diabetes upper respiratory problems even cancer so if you can get a handle on obesity you know you really help reduce all the other diseases and sicknesses around this around around this state now i travel the entire state and the thing that really gives me a great caution is the children when i see children at 10 11 years old with high blood pressure when i see them with respiratory ailments you know that tells me that upcoming with our our youth coming up to become adults they're really going to be sick when they become adults and so that really makes me really concentrated put a microscopic microscopic view on the rural areas in particular right right theresa i think you had a question that dr bellinger could probably address could you could you ask dr bellinger that question yes as an hr professional i'm always looking for opportunities to allow people to have good work-life balance what if any programs does the state offer that might give businesses an incentive a tax incentive to offer more work-life balance programs in their work establishments well maybe that was for for rudy instead of not developing okay well we have uh what we call employee wellness programs uh sometimes uh with your employer if you're involved in an employee wellness program they'll give you a break on your premiums on your on your health insurance and we have a program called own your own health where you can track your own physical activity and nutrition programs online as well as we have a city versus city uh challenges going on like we have monroe versus alexandria baxter versus tallulah and we're working on new orleans versus shreveport and to give people different ideas and and motivate them to be physically active and move more but from the employer's standpoint studies will show you that health employees are the better employees it reduces absenteeism it boosts morale and so when you have an employee wellness program in your workplace you have better employees and profitable employees as well and so there are a lot of state companies around now that are really going to that particular thing when it comes to employee wellness and we do it at the louisiana department of health as well and so you can just call my office and i'll help you get started stephanie i think you now you're familiar with resources as well what other options are there available um well i can tell you about the programming that we do at southern at the ag center we work with different usda grants one of them was with dr tiffany franklin eradicating food deserts through the development of school gardens so teaching health consciousness also having gardens on campus teaching the skill of how to grow you know from the seed to eating the broccoli we've also worked with incarcerated and adjudicated youth teaching gardening skills as well not only for eating healthy foods but also landscaping and other opportunities and we're also involved with the healthy communities grant in several parishes madison tencent st helena and um southern university um focuses on the food desert neighborhoods and um making more fresh produce available through gardening efforts great great dr champaign you you've done a lot of research were there any programming or things that you may have encountered during your research that are resources that may be helpful as well well mostly we've done diet studies um looking at different types of diets comparing diets comparing strategies and along with many of our we we do know that people can lose weight the problem is maintaining the weight loss so any strategy that you can use the one that i think is the most effective for people who don't want to have surgery is to record the food that you eat because and i will tell you based on our participants in the past that's the most hated strategy but the most effective strategy it creates awareness of what you're putting in your mouth and i think the concept then is that you actually can know how many calories is physically in there we did that with a pounds loss study where we gave participants menus and the concept was follow these menus but the the the more long-term message was that when you see how much of each food group is on the plate then you could take that a step further and substitute other foods to make a difference make a difference i want to shift gears a little bit dr bellinger i do my best to keep my patients from coming to see you but i have been unsuccessful in that obesity is truly an epidemic could you elaborate on that patient that comes in that you have to address in many cases i have patients that i don't think need to procedure but there are many cases now that you're you're having to do these surgical procedures they're salvaged procedures uh yeah i think one of the greatest indications in one of the best indications for weight loss surgery is diabetes so diabetes not only are we getting a person to lose weight so things like high blood pressure and sleep apnea tend to go away as well makes the overall health of the patient better but there's an intrinsic process within the operation that starts the reversal process of diabetes so not only does the weight loss help lessen the impact of diabetes but something within the surgery well uh the operation reverses some of those effects by the chemical changes that it causes wow so reversing diabetes uh reducing blood pressure i've had patients that have come off all their medications after a salvage procedure and it's done wonders um we have one of your patients here and i just tiffany i tell me i'd like for you to share maybe a little bit of what happened but uh you had a question as well so you you had surgery by dr bellinger what led you to that and and um how are you doing i did thank you for having me here yes ma'am uh um i had the gastric sleeve uh three years ago this past august and i guess my motivation was i was tired of comfort eating um my child was called home coming up on seven years and um it just it just it was just a a horrible eating habit you know i was trying to comfort myself with food and i just wasn't getting anywhere and i needed a major jump start and um i i was back and forth yo-yo you know dieting and it just wasn't helping at all and i had uh encountered several people who uh dr bellinger himself uh had performed weight loss surgery on them and um you know i just took a look at myself my life you know and i said you know god may have called one of my uh children home one of my girls home but i have two other girls to live for and um i'm not i'm not going to live very long if i continue with this weight you know and then it was um you know high blood pressure and the fear of going to the doctor and say well congratulations miss larry you you're you you're successful on becoming a diabetic so i said you know i deserve it i need a quick jump start and um i saw dr uh met with dr ballinger and um from there i've just i've just taken off i've done it i've maintained it i've changed my eating habits i've even um learned how to cook uh healthier for my family and um so you so you'd recommend dr bellinger i kind of got the feeling that you would so it's just been a great it was it was just a great great decision i i am very glad that i made that decision to do that because it just wasn't working trying to do it on my own you know i'd lose weight gain it lose weight gain it and um it it just you know i just wasn't living a healthy life you know i exercised 15 20 miles a week and i watched my carbs you know um so it just and dr bill and she said she had a key point it's not just a surgery after the surgery there's life after surgery what recommendations are you giving patients what happens after the salvage procedures uh we like to follow our patients we follow them very closely for the first year while they're in the weight loss phase right after surgery and then we want to follow them for an additional five years wow and part of and most of the programs here around the state have been accredited as centers of excellence to perform bariatric surgery and weight loss surges bariatric surgery and one of the things that you must show that you want to do or you have to do is follow the patients for five years because that's when they hit the mark where you know that chances are that weight loss will be maintained for a very long time if they make it through five years awesome awesome robert i haven't heard from you um you had some questions about uh educational programs and eating healthy and also we mentioned cooking but before i get to robert how many people cook show pants lindsay we gotta give her this fast food thing so so mr robert what was your question in regards to healthy eating well i think it like rudy alluded to it has to start at a young age with education educational programs um in the times when i was growing up you know we just ate pretty much anything we wanted to my mother would always say you're eating too many starches to get off the starches and i'd say well no you know i was hard-headed and now i'm paying for it because i'm diabetic so we just need more education in this state because we all love to eat i mean we just it's just a happy uh drinking eaten state and so we need to just with a new mayor and the new governor we need to come up with more programs pennington's been great timmy i'm a project at pennington so right right tiffany you you went a little different right i think you tried some exercise and died first and could you could you share your story uh yeah um i back in 2010 was in an accident where i broke my ankle bilaterally and i was in a wheelchair for a year we didn't know if i was gonna walk um and i got really depressed and i gained a lot of weight my highest weight was up to 367 pounds and after that i tried working out i tried using local parks local facilities that were available to us i work for breck so we have many wonderful facilities around here that you can utilize and it just wasn't working because it was a mindset that i had gotten into and until i was able to correct my mindset i wasn't able to get to that but the catalyst was when my husband got sick he has had diabetes since he was two and four years ago he was diagnosed with kidney failure and that kidney failure his doctor told me he said ma'am you are not going to be around long enough to help take care of your husband because we don't know if your husband's going to make it to get a transplant he needed a kidney and pancreas transplant and apparently that's rare so um i did the surgery that was the route that we decided to go because i needed something that was and it's not a quick fix but i needed something that was permanent that was going to be more lasting something that i could wrap my mind around instead of things that to me just weren't working and in the long run since then my husband and i both have been successful with that and he has since gotten his pancreas and kidney transplant wonderful due to himself having weight loss surgery um so together we've lost almost 400 pounds total together but because of that that's giving us a new lease on life we've been able to be more active together now this past september for our anniversary we hiked to the top of mount conti in gatlinburg wow and without that without the um experience of changing our mindset changing our lifestyles realizing that we got to those places because of things that we have done or not have done um that's why we're here that's why we're able to be here right i mean motivation seems to be key in everyone's conversation dr champaign any experience with individuals that just can't get motivated can't get this done well we actually when we do a lifestyle intervention motivation and relapse prevention time management stress management all of those concepts are embedded into the the the intervention um one thing that's important is that um and and i know this is sort of off the subject but you know when you talk about diets almost any diet will work if you follow it there's you can lose weight on low carb diets high carb diets low fat diets higher fat diets but the key is counting calories and the unfortunate thing about some of the low carb diets is that if you restrict carbs you restrict fiber and so therefore you may be more prone to colon cancer so the american diet unfortunately is too low in fiber and it needs to be much higher probably double what normal people what people normally would consume but you're right motivation um just a case in point we had a study going on at pennington right around hurricane katrina and a year after hurricane katrina people were still finding excuses not to be able to stick to their diet because they had to they had people in their house and they couldn't be unkind and not let them cook bad food for them so it was it was it was an interesting um time but you know family pressures and a lot of those really factor in you know we know people can make a change but like i said sustaining the change and carrying it forward are the key things well you came up doc with a wonderful diet the dash diet which i would like for you to define it for our audience but many of my patients battle with busy schedules children and eating out um every now and then dr whitfield eats out but we try to cook at home um i'm i'm newly married so my my wife enjoys cooking so i'm very fortunate what are your thoughts on eating out preparing food we had a discussion about that a little earlier we did have a discussion about that um you know we had a study where we told people they could only eat out once or twice a week and that was not a very good message but you know the reality is when you eat out you really need to know what you're eating and there are strategies that you can use you know you can order food that doesn't have added fat you could have your salad dressing on the side you know there are many many other strategies that can be used but you know in terms of the dash diet the dash diet was designed to be a healthy diet and for the seventh year in a row it is still the healthiest diet by us news and world reports it is not the first diet for weight loss although if you count calories and you know about the food groups you can make very positive changes and it could be a more nutrient dense as opposed to an energy dense diet um i'm gonna switch tracks we have someone from breeda here i'd like uh i'd like lisa to tell me a little bit about breta and just define what you guys are doing to help our community stay healthy well um bretta is uh i'm sorry bretta right yeah bretta's a non-profit and we support small local farmers here in louis in the state of louisiana and they have opportunity to bring their products to our markets so they can reach the individuals here in the baton rouge area and also some of our producers go out to markets in the crescent city area it's not statewide though the is it statewide the program well bretta's part statewide we're just here located here in baton rouge north and south baton rouge and um one of our main goals with the once we receive the the funding to do the mobile farmers market which were to target the food desert areas we went out into those areas like scotlandville and um maybe it's glen oaks area south baton rouge uh even over near gush young star hill church we we provided a pop-up market there and uh we targeted uh mostly you know seniors who because our markets come between times between eight and two o'clock so we would have a lot of seniors a lot of retirees some folks that were disabled but the key to that is that if we had those who work during those hours we have the saturday market downtown okay so it's an opportunity for everybody in the state in in baton rouge area to have access to local fresh produce here and that you know that comes from here in louisiana so fresh is best and try to eat seasonal yeah yeah mainly that's my thing i'm a seasonal person all right uh it's a lot of times when i it's if things are not in season or either we'll have a bad weather conditions and our farmers aren't growing a lot of vegetables and we may have to go out to other places to get our fresh vegetables but for the most part if it's in season that's what my family is going to have that's going to eat that yeah what you you work around the state can you first of all i want to define to our audience what food deserts are but what are you doing around the state to address um well i work with our snap-ed and fnet programs um teaching nutrition education we have nutrition educators throughout the state southern new york ag center nutrition educators and what i do is i go in if it's a fitting site i help them build a garden to have on their site maybe at a council on aging maybe at a head start where they can actually learn how to grow actually harvest and you know continue it seasonally we have a lot of presence in baton rouge and infused food desert areas as well are you surprised that we don't know about this anymore that we just become too urban people aren't growing and living as they should well um i've taught maybe close to 2 000 students you know maybe more and a lot of times i have a lot of resistance to i don't want to get my nails dirty i want to get my shoes ready but i am telling you right here right now that once a student or an adult touches the soil with their hands there's no going back they enjoy it they love it and it's something that we all have in common it's something that we all have in our ancestry and it's something that we all should reconnect with if we haven't and having that skill of knowing how to grow your own food can go a long way you can take it with with you for the rest of your life but a food desert according to the usda a food desert in urban areas is a neighborhood with low low access to fresh produce so you don't have a supermarket within walking distance in an urban area that's within one mile okay and in a rural area it's within 10 miles often times within food deserts you have low access to transportation so if you can't walk to the supermarket within one mile you're taking the bus it's very very difficult to retrieve fresh produce so one one idea one creative way to combat that is learning how to grow your own food in your backyard if you don't have to go to the store to get those collard greens if you can have them in your backyard and have a continuous flow throughout the fall then that's a blessing my dad had a farm a little mini guard in the backyard and we'd shoot basketball take those tomatoes rinse them off and eat them eat them like apples so i think we need to get back to that monica you you you are very resourceful and uh what i would just want you to mention some things about the wic program and what you have going on we partner and collaborate with a lot of the the panelists are here we work with the snap ed and the snap educators coming to the wic clinics and provide services and teach our wic participants from time to time across the state of louisiana we also work with bretta with the farmers markets where we and highly encourage our wic participants to come and participate and purchase fresh fruits and vegetables there's a matching program that we have with the market umbrella in the greater new orleans area and we're also expanded into alexandria lake charles as well as shreveport at this point with assisting our wick participants in securing and purchasing fresh fruits and vegetables in 2009 the usda approved the wic program to serve or provide whole grains so whole grains are added to the food package as well as the fresh choice of fruits and vegetables the state of louisiana opted to provide fresh only wow fruits and vegetables because we are agricultural state and we you know from the from infancy to adulthood with our childbearing age women we want them to have the opportunity to be able to purchase fresh and prepare fresh for their families to introduce to the children because like rudy said it starts very young with regard to introducing uh new food ideas and getting our children acclimated to healthy exercise as well as healthy eating right right we had a very interesting uh dialogue prior to the show and i just wanted david to to share a little bit of his his story uh it was pretty amazing and we're just glad that you're doing well that was a great journey um having my wife has stated at two years old i was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes which is juvenile juvenile right learned how to take my own insulin shots so supposed to learn how to eat like i was supposed to never did want to do that because going through the teenage years i rebelled family issues i didn't have my mom around my dad worked so i just did whatever it took to get by okay and 2013 i got diagnosed with end-stage renal disease what so i had kidney failure how old were you then dude i was 32 years old and it was in november of 2013 and one of the vascular surgeons she had performed what's called the av fistula so they can connect the major artery and a vein together to do dialysis in my arm when i started that high blood pressure um sleep apnea um and then i got told by the doctor you can you're not allowed you're not able to get a transplant unless we do a kidney and a pancreas because just a kidney my diabetes would tear my kidney up automatically but you had to lose weight and i was at 289 pounds and they said i need to be down to at least 170. wow i've tried different diets and the problem i had was being a diabetic on a diabetic diet i didn't necessarily need being on dialysis due to high phosphorus levels calcium different foods that i would eat would contradict to the other diet and that diet would contradict that one and i ended up getting sick more than i did losing weight and i've spoken with a doctor out of hammond louisiana who agreed to do a gastric sleeve he done the gastric sleeve kept extra watch on me called he personally called every month just to check on me see how i was going see how the healing was going the nutritionist worked with me on the shakes to see which would work good with me i ended up going from 289 pounds down to 167 pounds awesome and i received a kidney pancreas transplant december of 2015. you look great david i feel great since then um the road recovery is hard but i find that eating right having to live for my sister to watch her graduate high school in college raising her motivation my wife yeah um i mean i have a service dog she keeps me yeah who's who you have with you there you go exercise this is pc right yeah right p-i-s-c-h-o-u-e-t-t dr bellinger how common is is this story how common is the scenario and how safe are these procedures and maybe even share some of the different type of procedures that you guys are doing for weight loss uh well for weight loss uh the surgical procedures we have are the gastric banding which is fallen out of favor okay so you won't see it as much but the main two are gastric bypass and the vertical sleeve okay uh in david's uh particular situation the gastric sleeve is probably the best because the medications that you're going to need for a transplant patient right have to be monitored very closely and have to be absorbed more reliably and the vertical sleeve is the the procedure of choice for that because it doesn't alter the absorption of medications wow so this is something that's commonplace this is not unusual his situation at all no it's not wow wow dr champagne yes from pennington a question um i said my main problem i tried to die renal diet diabetic diet doesn't necessarily go together has i'm not familiar with penton because i'm originally from texas do y'all have anything i guess researched and specific maybe in files i can look at or anybody going through my same situation can try before having to ultimately forego a gastric sleeve which is that would be a bonus well you know in terms of your particular situation i think that relying on a dietitian who can compare the two diets and that you need to be on like the diabetic diet versus a renal diet could give you a lot of advice in terms of you know what foods would be best for you to consume versus which ones perhaps to avoid but we um it's too bad that we don't have the resources for to cure everyone's you know needs because you know a lot of people who are just a little bit overweight are wanting to make changes and come to see us but sometimes they don't qualify because they're not fat enough which is you know and i i really think that's sort of difficult because you know sometimes people are a little bit overweight and they just want to lose a little bit of weight to make a difference and get to a point where they don't ever have to worry about becoming obese are there any ongoing studies doctors you could reference us to well we have done some studies with weight on weight watchers and the new weight watchers program is changing as a result of a study that was joined between pennington and several other four or five other centers throughout the state so you know pennington is you know trying to be on the forefront of helping to decide what might be best for people in terms of a a diet we actually did a bariatric study called heads up dr bellinger here was one of our weight loss surgeons and it was it was really a terrific study and i wish it could have gone on for more years but we are able to follow some of the people up to five years and are looking for funding to actually try to continue following those people who had bariatric surgery yes we're kind of we're coming close uh we're going to ask you one real quick and i want some closing thoughts from each of you an obese child makes an obese adult how true is that statement and how important is exercise uh in our young people well the thing is uh parents have to be really cognizant of the fact that there's a time when you have to say no no to certain foods and and sugary uh candy and things like that uh springtime that's true but the biggest problem with childhood obesity to me not only you have to have a good physical education in schools but after school i've always noticed that there are kids who uh travel basketball teams or football teams the kids that don't make it the kids don't are not the best athletes what happens to them okay we have so many specialized sports uh sports are very expensive you know like soccer costs hundreds of dollars baseball costs hundreds of dollars and in low-income communities those kids can't afford to play those sports and so what we do with the governor's council fitness we go in and create sports and tournaments in those areas where they can't afford it because if not then it's going to wander the streets and have nothing to do and eat all the wrong things so we have to make sure that though to keep our kids busy and to find those programs that will allow their kids to have something to do after school and in the summertime which is really when they're vulnerable but we have a lot of programs with the governor's council on fitness with our elementary fitness competition and the governor's game where we address all those things at the same time well i'll tell you guys i worked with rudy for over seven years and he's done some great work and made some changes and he's very old um i would like to close uh missel with any closing words for our panelists and and the group today the audience i i would like to leave everyone with um just a simple sentence and that is if a kid grows kale a kid will eat kale okay mr mackle well i would just like to say let's try to when you start any type of new diet or exercise program do not do it by yourself always have a partner because our partners the more partners you have because there's going to be some days we're not going to be feel like working out or eating right sometimes we fall off the wagon but when you have partners like these two that are working together your diet and your exercise are going to last a long time without champagne to add to that social support is very important in all of our weight loss studies and we are doing some work with child nutrition in the state but i want to stress that a child is at school for a short part of the day so the example set by the parents is key to good child nutrition habits and we have at pennington we have at the farmer's market on thursday awesome very good eight to twelve eight to 12. all right all right dr bellinger um i would say that when you have a big goal of losing weight it's best to achieve it by setting multiple small goals so that you can achieve those goals much more easily in your ultimate goal of losing a lot of weight you recommend journaling yes definitely definitely keeping track and dr whitfield gave you his five points to healthy living know your doctor know your numbers know your family history eat healthy and exercise and we try to emphasize that to our patients but more importantly you got to go to the doctor we can't make we can't diagnose the problem if you don't see the doctor many patients come in with diabetes and high blood pressure and haven't been seen for years after katrina we would see folks five and six years going without their medications and it's very scary when someone walks in david you've had to deal with that and you see what can happen when things go untreated for long periods of time i just want to thank the panelists and the audience you guys were awesome this was a great session hopefully we can do something like this again and keep everyone motivated to eat healthy this year we run out of time for our questions and answer segment we'd like to again to thank our panelists dr bellinger dr champaign mr macklin and miss l wood for their insight on this month's topic when we come back we'll have a few closing moments [Music] well i'm inspired i'm going to go out and try and eat a healthier diet okay i can't i don't promise that i'm going to cook more oh no you got to do it you got to cook my husband's a good cook okay well we'll take that just low cat low low low calorie low fat low calorie low fat but you know it is hard in louisiana because we have such tasty food and as you said you know all of our social activities from tailgating to holidays around that parties bar mitzvahs whatever whatever we're eating whatever we're eating and so consequently we really have to just keep that in mind i think portion control is perhaps one of the biggest things we've been talking about as well don't want to deprive anyone of healthy or good eating but we got to limit those things and and make healthier choices well fresh is best go to those fresh markets on the weekend i buy them i don't necessarily cook it that's my problem although well that's all the time we have for this edition of louisiana public square we encourage you to visit our website at lpb.org public square while you're there comment on tonight's show and we would love to hear from all of you thank you for joining us this evening and thanks for being our guest host it was great awesome good night everyone good night [Music] [Applause] [Music] for a copy of this program call 1-800-973-7246 or go online to www.lp support for this program is provided by the foundation for excellence in louisiana public broadcasting and from viewers like you [Music]