“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
Medicine today focuses on food and exercise as treatments for chronic illness and long-term outcomes. The most commonly prescribed medications, such as statins, address chronic disease and longevity with no immediate effect on patients. As anesthesiologists, we are studying the exposure of our anesthetics on long-term outcomes, such as cognitive impairment or delirium, months or years after hospital discharge. In nutrition, landmark studies focus on how daily eating habits impact chronic disease. The PREDIMED study, supporting the cardiovascular benefit of the Mediterranean diet, had a mean follow-up of 4.8 years. More recently, a Lancet study identified the relationship between both extremes of dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality over a mean follow-up for 25 years. As a result, recommendations provide patients with nutritional recommendations to mitigate a “remote” event, such as a myocardial event or stroke. These recommendations are without a...
