Why Intergenerational Health is as important as Intergenerational Wealth
The wakeup call came when I was at a supermarket, buying our family groceries.
I checked a message from my doctor on the One Medical app – the results of my heart scan had arrived.
Two of my four arteries were showing signs of heart disease.
I am fifty-one years old.
And the second gut punch.
At my son’s latest checkup, his weight was in the 95th percentile, putting him as technically obese – and he too was showing high levels of cholesterol in his blood.
He is ten years old.
How can this have happened?
In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised my health was so bad. My family has a history of heart disease on one side, and diabetes on the other. My paternal grandfather dropped dead on a tennis court when he was 48. My father had a bypass when he was 55, but went on to live until he was 75. So, the genetic deck has been stacked against me from the beginning.
Then came my lifestyle. My attitude towards my body could be charitably described as ‘drive it like you stole it’. For years, I would eat anything and everything. I smoked cigarettes until I was thirty (thank God I quit that) and food was one of my major vices. Working in the alcohol industry didn’t help either. Ordering a beer for lunch or a cocktail for dinner became the norm when I went out. My doctor’s reaction when I went for my annual checkup was just to put me on medication and advise me to exercise more. For years, I have been on statins for high cholesterol and metformin for being pre-diabetic.
HOW PAST TRAUMA DRIVES BEHAVIOR
I realize now that my attitude to my body was driven by an ingrained belief that came from growing up surrounded by violence in the civil war of Sri Lanka in the Seventies and Eighties. A belief that death was around the corner and time was finite – so I might as well squeeze every last drop of enjoyment out of life, because who knew how long it could last?
Working with a coach (the wonderful Kirk Souder) made me change this false belief. Becoming a father made me determined to live a long and healthy life – to want to be a healthy and active grandfather to my son’s children.
And I had an epiphany: investing my time now in things like exercise could help me MAKE time in the future.
By increasing my healthspan, not just my lifespan, I could stay fitter, longer. So, I began exercising seriously: I found that I liked the efficiency of an exercise bike and started hitting my goal of 150 minutes of cardiovascular exercise a week, as well as daily resistance training and stretching (which helped my chronic bad back).
USING HYPNOTHERAPY TO QUIT ALCOHOL
I started to feel better and have more energy. But I was still hitting a plateau – and I realized that alcohol was the limitation. That daily glass (or three) of wine, that occasional binge on the weekends…. all of those things would cause me to skip a day here or there and start to eat unhealthy food – and then it would take me weeks to get back to my normal rhythm of daily exercise.
The solution came from an unexpected place: hypnotherapy. While researching how to deal with past trauma, I found Dr Jake Rubin – a licensed therapist and hypnotherapist. I told him how I wanted to break this vicious cycle I was in – one that I was frankly just bored of repeating every few months. In one session (he does them via Zoom!) he was able to completely remove the desire to have a drink ever again. I haven’t had a drink since May 9th, 2024, and have zero desire to have one ever again.
No longer drinking created multiple positive outcomes in my life. I was able to exercise more regularly and consistently yes. But my weight began to drop too – no more empty calories entering my body. Clear head in the mornings, no ‘hangxiety’, no fuzziness and a sense of calm which I hadn’t felt in years. I was doing really well.
GETTING.A DOCTOR WHO IS A TRUE PARTNER
It created the space for me to go on an even deeper medical journey – one that my existing GP wasn’t good enough for. So, I found a new one through One Medical – an Amazon company which provides a much more advanced and personalized system. I carefully went through the doctors available and selected one who I felt would be a good partner in my health journey.
My new doctor was young, up to date with current thinking, and understood the goals I had. We did extensive bloodwork, which revealed that I not only had high cholesterol but that for the first time my A1C was showing that I was technically diabetic. He was the one who suggested I get a CAC scan – a coronary calcium CT scan that could diagnose early signs of coronary disease.
That was when I got the gut punch of the blocked arteries.
And I realized that exercise and no alcohol wasn’t going to be enough to keep me going for another forty years. The best approach my doctor could suggest was upping my medication and monitoring the situation.
But that just wasn’t good enough for me.
I went down a rabbit hole to research how to reverse coronary heart disease – and found the work of Dr Caldwell Esselstyn. He was the doctor who had helped Bill Clinton lose 25 pounds after he had a heart bypass and his diet was one of the only ones where people were shown to have reversed heart disease.
Its radical: the Whole Foods Plant Based diet as it’s known is like veganism on steroids: not only do you not have any meat or dairy, but you also cannot cook things in oil.
(That’s right, not even olive oil. Just vegetables, fruits, legumes…baked, grilled, steamed.)
It’s the journey I am going on now and I’ve lost ten pounds already and I feel great. I didn’t realize how much the oil I was ingesting was making me feel sluggish. My digestive system has improved, and I have an even greater sense of mental clarity.
I also realized that I had to change my attitude from ‘I’m giving certain foods up’ to ‘look at all the delicious new things I can eat’. The good news is that there are so options available to me right now – from the bountiful plant-based foods available in Los Angeles where I live (thank God for the West Coast obsession with health) to ways to cook my beloved Sri Lankan food without oils.
I realized now what is meant by that old adage of ‘food being the greatest medicine’. No pill on the planet can compete with what we put in our bodies all day.
My goal is to do another scan in a year’s time and see if my diet has made a dent in reversing coronary disease in my arteries.
It’s a moonshot for sure. But one I am willing to devote my time and energy to. I want to be an annoying grandpa to my kids.
PASSING ON INTERGENERATIONAL HEALTH
Which brings me back to my son and his health. To give you some context, we adopted Nuri from Sri Lanka when he was a baby and he’s grown up eating a Western diet. He’s also a fast-growing boy – at age 10, he’s already 5 feet tall. So, his body needs fuel all the time.
But because his food is coming from the same industrialized Western diet that most parents have access too - things that come in boxes and packages – he is getting a dose of all the bad things which kids his age get. Too much fat, too much salt, too much sugar. His weight now puts him in the 95th percentile when it comes to his BMI (Body Mass Index). And his recent checkup showed high cholesterol for the first time.
It’s one thing to see high cholesterol on your medical checkup when you are in your forties.
It’s a whole other thing to see it on a medical checkup for a ten-year-old.
And since Nuri and I share no genetic connection, it’s down to his South Asian metabolism - and the diet he has been eating.
As parents, it’s hard not to feel a sense of guilt and shame when you see something like that. And that can be paralyzing. But to me, it’s an early warning signal that we can still do something about it. And the irony of father and son both realizing that they had to change their diet at the same time made me realize something.
That our history is not our destiny.
Just because we have always done something one way in the past, doesn’t mean we are condemned to continue doing it in the future.
I realize as parents that we spend so much time thinking about how we can pass down intergenerational wealth to our children – from investing in their education to passing down property.
We need to think the same way about passing down intergenerational health – passing down good habits from eating to exercise.
So that they can live lives better than the ones we had – and hopefully do the same for their own children.
It’s going to take a lot of experimentation, false starts, frustration and failure, but we’re going to figure out as a family how we can eat food that is both delicious and nutritious.
Wish us luck!