Dr Rupy: Hello and welcome to the Doctor's Kitchen podcast with myself, Dr Rupy Aujla. For those who don't know, I am a general practitioner in the NHS. I do a bit of emergency medicine and I believe what you choose to put on your plate is the most important health intervention that anyone can make. I create recipes on social media and bring attention to the clinical research behind the ingredients I use in an effort to inspire everybody about the beauty of food and the medicinal effects of eating well. I also have a cookbook coming out in December 28th, 2017 and the first six episodes of this podcast are meant to be a teaser of the kind of stuff you can expect coming out of the Doctor's Kitchen cookbook. This series is meant to be a very relaxed, informal chat with each episode framed around a particular principle of healthy eating. Notice I said principle rather than rule or commandment because I'm a big believer in personalised medicine and nutrition. It's impossible to tailor specific advice to everybody and I'd rather equip you with the knowledge available so that you are empowered to make healthy choices for life, rather than rigidly sticking to a diet plan that somebody else has made for you. This is how we create a proactive, healthier population and how we make healthy lifestyles enjoyable rather than a chore. The principles that we're going to be introducing are: eat fibre, eat plants, or that should be eat more plants, eat colourful, eat whole, and eat in time. In each episode, I'll be chatting about the topic with a guest from a scientific background and bouncing ideas off each other about what the controversies are and what information there is out there. Each episode is rounded off with the Doctor's Kitchen tips to help you action that healthy principle in your daily life. These episodes are aimed at those without nutrition or medical knowledge, so we'll try and keep jargon to a minimum and each pod includes a brief intro to the guest and an opportunity to talk about their current project and aspirations in healthcare. We'll be answering the questions that matter to you most, like what should we be eating? What's the deal with food trends? What supplements are best? And hopefully giving you an idea of just what to eat. You'll gain an understanding as to why these are reasonable and actionable suggestions that everyone can benefit from. So, please tweet us at doctors_kitchen for questions or suggestions for more topics going further. To begin, why is a doctor talking about food? What is my story and why am I such a believer in plates over pills and the power of lifestyle medicine? So, I was trained at Imperial College, London in medicine. I also went to business school and I became a junior doctor in 2009. It was incredibly stressful. I remember I'd been working for about three months at the time. I was currently on a 12-day straight shift and it was the final few hours on a Sunday, only a few hours before I was meant to get home, and I was sat at the nurses' station, bleep going off, writing in some notes, and then I noticed my heart was beating really, really fast. I felt nauseated, I felt I was going to pass out, a bit light-headed. I was overcome at that point and I reached out to my boss and I said, look, my heart's going quite fast, would you mind feeling my pulse? And actually within 30 minutes, I had my bleep taken off me, I was stripped of my clothes and put into a hospital gown, I was hooked up to a cardiac monitor, and I was parked in a hospital bed next to a patient that I had just been treating earlier that day. It was a real turning point for me because I got used to being this young doctor on the ward and patients automatically respecting you without having really done much, but at that point, I was a patient. I was vulnerable and pretty frightened if I was honest. I was in something called atrial fibrillation, a heart condition where your heart beats very fast and irregularly. Luckily, I didn't have to have an emergency procedure to kickstart the heart using electronic paddles. It spontaneously resolved after 12 hours and I was monitored overnight and I was discharged, but these episodes were to keep on happening every week, two or three times. It wasn't just a one-off. And over the next six to 12 months, I had every single investigation that you can think of: blood tests, stress ECGs, blood pressure monitoring, cardiac MRIs. I even had an electrophysiology test where they examine the electricity of the heart to see if there's a short circuit. They pass a guide wire into your major vessels and look to see if there were any short-circuiting. The only explanation was that there are cells in part of the heart, commonly the left upper chamber, that were misbehaving and firing signals when they shouldn't be, but nothing revealed a true cause. I was otherwise in great health, no medications, I didn't have a family history, didn't have any weight issues, and after going to multiple doctors, cardiology and general medicine, I was offered either lifelong medication that actually had some nasty side effects, or a procedure where you essentially burn a part of the heart to ring-fence these misbehaving cells and prevent the heart condition from occurring. I was going to go for the latter option. I was a good candidate, I was young, didn't have any other medications, I was fine. But my mother actually convinced me to try some lifestyle options first, and with the blessing of my medical team, they gave me about six months and they said, look, you can use the medications in the meantime whenever you have these events, but they all warned me that I would have to have the procedure at some point. So, I did a lot of homework. I had no idea where to start. There isn't a blueprint when it comes to lifestyle medicine. I didn't have any guidance or a pathway to follow. I essentially made it up as I went along. And during the next 12 months, I focused on my lifestyle by replacing elements in my diet, all whilst juggling the hectic job of being a junior doctor. I read everything that I could on associations between my condition and my environment. I started off by just getting rid of cereals and toast for breakfast and my soggy sandwiches at lunch, and increasing my dark leafy vegetable intake. I started having more nuts and seeds, quality fats, lots of different whole grains. I never left for work without my Tupperware brimming with cruciferous vegetables and spices. I was even nicknamed Tupperware boy by my consultant. I also began to realise the impact of stress on my heart, so I started meditating. I appreciated the importance of exercise, so I started doing home workouts before shifts. I knew I was lacking sleep because of my night shifts, so whenever I wasn't on nights, I was tucked up on time. But more importantly, I didn't sacrifice my enjoyment for life and I tried not to be owned or dictated to by a condition. The goal really was never actually to reverse my condition. I was set on having this procedure and I was just focused on optimising my physiology for that. But by concentrating efforts on optimising my food and my lifestyle, I had inadvertently put my body in the best environment that I could. And what happened? My atrial fibrillation episodes actually reduced from two to three per week to zero. Now, on discussing my experience with cardiologists, GPs, lifestyle medicine practitioners, it's really, really hard to retrospectively pinpoint exactly what I did to make my atrial fibrillation episodes stop. My increased vegetable intake may have replaced electrolytes and vitamins in my cells that were lacking and not picked up by conventional blood tests. Perhaps eating lots of cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and Brussels on a daily basis flooded my body with different sort of plant chemicals that we now understand have a profound effect on things like inflammation and our DNA. My increased dietary fibre may have improved the functioning of my gut bacteria that we'll learn a bit more about in episodes coming forward. I potentially attenuated the stress in my life triggered by poor sleep and a demanding job by increasing my fatty acid levels in my food or even practicing mindfulness or just getting to sleep on time. There are a number of things that I did that probably had synergistic effects, so it had an effect overall as a medicinal package. But what it revealed to me is something that I hadn't come across in medical school before, and that was the ability of the body to self-heal. And that sounds very hippy and kind of out there, but that's something I truly believe now. Now, I'm not just saying food is medicine to be trendy. It's a scientific fact. There is a plethora of research in food and medicine, the journals I use, the resources that I trust, the mountains of research that has already been established and continues to grow that underpins my belief. My personal story with food and lifestyle medicine, as well as the countless of other patients that have had similar experiences, is why I'm so passionate about this subject. From what I gather, it's really hard for those without a scientific background to navigate what's reliable on the internet. Sensationalist titles, sketchy credentials, a lack of references to academic literature, and panacea claims, these sort of cure-alls. There's also a lot of respectable doctors in the wellness space making a lot of noise. So to cut through it, I created The Doctor's Kitchen where I'm giving evidence-based and open-minded content about health and wellness that is inclusive rather than faddy and pretentious. My big vision is for modern medicine to appreciate nutrition and lifestyle medicine, taking a back-to-basics approach alongside medical therapeutics, which is essentially what The Doctor's Kitchen is all about. The future of medicine is actually lifestyle principles before pharmaceuticals, and that's actually what the NHS guidelines state, but we need to give both patients and doctors a foundation in how to implement those and why. My promise to you is an unbiased, educated perspective on health and wellness that is inclusive rather than faddy and pretentious. I also have big aspirations for culinary medicine, where we actually teach health professionals the foundations of nutrition and how to cook. And I'm doing this in conjunction with a medical school in America called Tulane and the Royal School of Culinary Arts and a few other culinary schools, initially in London, but aiming to go nationwide. So, back to the podcast. I'm going to be introducing the principles of healthy living and the evidence base behind them in the next five episodes with a guest so we can bounce ideas off each other. I believe the future of health involves food education as well as access to ingredients and community. It all starts on your plate. We'll be talking broadly about lifestyle practices as well as the things that complement nutrition. All of these principles of healthy living I talk about extensively in my cookbook and I complement them with 100 delicious recipes. You can tweet us at doctors_kitchen, check out the Instagram and YouTube, or my blog, thedoctorskitchen.com. Sign up for more information, events, and of course, don't forget to pre-order or order your copy and I will personally come to your house and sign it. I probably can't do that, but the thought was there.
