119 Why Healthy Habits Need To Start As Young As Possible: Primordial Prevention

In this week's episode, Dr. Juna discusses the different types of disease prevention - tertiary, secondary, primary, and primordial. She explains what each type means, focusing especially on primordial prevention and the importance of establishing healthy habits from a very young age. Main discussion points: - Definitions of tertiary, secondary, primary, and primordial prevention - Starting healthy lifestyle habits early, especially in childhood, can have lifelong benefits - Healthy habits positively impact wellness, performance, energy levels, and happiness Next week’s guest is ⁠Tom Klisiewicz, CPTD⁠, founder and president of Smart Health, Wellness and Performance. He is passionate about teaching kids tools for resilience and he's championing mind-body resilience programs for youth in Illinois!

⁠⁠⁠Subscribe for more tips direct to your inbox! https://mindbodyspace.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠

The following transcript is automated:

[00:00:00] Prevention is a Hard Sell

Dr. Juna: Hello there. Happy New Year. And wherever you are, I hope that you are cozy and warm and safe.

I can't believe it's the fourth year of the MindBodySpace podcast. It went through a few iterations, but my core values have always been the same, to share evidence based content with you so that you can live your best life. I started this podcast because my best friend from medical school, actually one of my roommates from med school, used to always say to me that everything I told her or everything I recommended, I would say this is the best thing. You have to try it, because I always love to share whatever I'm researching in that moment. And usually it's about prevention. It's about mind body medicine. It's about staying healthy, living our best lives, and also keeping our kids healthy. When I think of the word prevention, and I think for most people, too, it's kind of like, yeah, that's great, but it can wait.

So we have a lot of procrastination around our health, whether it's mental or physical preventative actions that we can take right now in this moment, so that we could be healthy in the future. And as you know, prevention is a hard sell. Why? Because it's so hard for us to think about our future selves. So I've been teaching a class around procrastination over the past two years, and it's really popular with all the students, and obviously, most of us do procrastinate on something. You're human. You've procrastinated. And I did some research as I put this class together, and I found out that thinking about our future selves, connecting to who we're going to be, what kind of life we're going to live, how we feel in the future, is something that isn't really natural to us. In fact, researchers showed that we feel as emotionally connected to our future selves as we would a stranger. So in this class, I taught a lot of exercises on how to actually get emotionally connected to our future selves and just really setting intentions for how we want to feel in the future. So again, it's mental training. You have to think about it, use your imagination, and really see yourself in the future.

[00:02:04] Primordial Prevention: Starting Early for Lifelong Health

Dr. Juna: So, having said that, I want to talk to you today about primordial prevention. Now, most of you have probably heard of the word prevention, and maybe even primary and secondary prevention, which I will now define. But primordial prevention, although it's not new as a concept, is becoming more important. And the American Heart association is really focusing on primordial prevention. And I'm going to get into what this means. If you've been listening to me for a while, you know that I always love to say that it's never too early to start and it's never too late to start. However, the truth is, the earlier we start, the better. So if you're a mom or a younger person listening to this, we used to kind of say, oh, kids can bounce back.

The truth is that the earlier you start with healthy lifestyle behaviors, the more effective these habits are going to be for a lifelong health span. So health span, as opposed to lifespan, health span is about how we live disease free and thriving and engaging with our lives. And right now, our lifespan may be longer than it has been in the past. However, we spend the latter part of it sick from chronic diseases. And cardiovascular disease worldwide is the leading cause of death and debilitation. And most people have not heard of thinking about cardiovascular disease when their kids are little. But it turns out that the risk factors start very young in kids in their preteen years. Even though we know some of this may be reversible, we want to set those healthy habits as young as possible, because we now know how the brain develops. And we also can see that kids who start healthy habits early have an easier time, even if they, through the teen years or in college, fall on and off healthy habits.

So, first of all, the percentage of healthy choices that we make throughout our lives to some degree add up. So every healthy choice you make adds up. And we all know when we learn something very young, it sticks with us, right? Because these habits actually stick around forever. The neuroscience is very complex around behavior, so we can't say for sure. But what the research shows so far is that habits, especially ingrained habits, don't actually go away, but they become replaced by other habits. So if we're teaching our kids to brush their teeth or wash their face, we need to also be teaching them about healthy habits that will help them for the rest of their lives.

So let's define prevention. Let's go from tertiary down to primordial prevention. Tertiary prevention is when we try to minimize death or worsening of disease in someone who already has a diagnosed disease. So we try to help them to live longer, maybe even reverse some of the disease and improve their day to day life. So in our current health system, we often talk about prevention or treatment, right. The treatment would be what is known as tertiary prevention, meaning you already have the disease, and we're giving you pharmaceuticals and you're getting surgery to prevent this. Disease from becoming worse or even causing death. So that's tertiary, you already have the disease. Secondary prevention is mostly screening exams. So you might have had screening like colonoscopies or mammograms.

These types of exams try to catch that disease as early as possible. So that's secondary prevention. Now, primary prevention is when you are screened for risk factors. So you go into your doctor's office and they're screening you for depression or anxiety, or they're screening you for cancer risk, asking you family history questions and your lifestyle questions. Are they eating a lot of meat, especially processed meats? Are they exposed to other toxins? Do they have a low fiber diet? Do they drink alcohol? And how much do they drink? Smoking. So at that primary prevention level, you may be diagnosed with a risk factor like high blood pressure or high cholesterol levels. Those are the risk factors that your doctor will measure in order to prevent them from getting to the level where it actually causes an event like stroke or heart disancer. So you'll get medication for the elevated blood pressure, cholesterol, and or hopefully, definitely, you are offered lifestyle changes to decrease those risk factors.

Now, primordial prevention is something that I've always believed in, especially after I had kids. Primordial prevention means that you are keeping them from developing those risk factors in the first place. So from a very young age, you instill the healthy habits that you know will prevent those risk factors from happening in the first place. Primordial prevention is focusing on preventing the risk factor itself. So, according to this paper called primordial prevention of high blood pressure in childhood, an opportunity not to be missed, they recommend, quote, targets for primordial prevention in childhood include preventing and reducing childhood obesity, achieving an optimal diet. That includes avoiding excessive salt consumption, and removing barriers to physical activity and healthy sleep throughout childhood. End quote.

And the thing that I love about primordial prevention is that all of these lifestyle recommendations and habits that you would be instilling into your child or if you're childless, into yourself. And again, it's never too late to start any of this, but there's significant advantages if you can start it as soon as possible at birth or even before. But the absolute best thing about all of this is that these lifestyle changes not only affects our wellness, but our performance, our energy levels, and our happiness.

So it's a win win situation. So remember, primordial prevention, that's what we're going for. If you're in your primary prevention stage, where your risk factors are already there, you can reverse those with lifestyle as well. Your secondary prevention. Make sure you have your checkup scheduled and screening procedures scheduled for you and your family. And then finally, tertiary prevention. It's never too late, even if you've been diagnosed with a disease and there's so many lifestyle choices that you can make to empower yourself. So it's great to have excellent intentions about our lifestyle and being so excited for the new year. And I love this time of year too, because it feels like a brand new start. But remember that every single moment is a new start. Every single day, every single moment, every choice. You can start again.

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