Nurses Try Out Plant-Based Diet, Report Health Benefits

            If you don’t take care of your body, where will you live?

Photo from Shutterstock.

This adage, sometimes attributed to Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, reminds us that the personal choices we make are important. Drugs and procedures are unlikely to ensure continuing good health, especially if we don’t first attend to the basics. And when it comes to personal choices, nothing is quite as personal as food.

Maybe this is why some nurses and physicians are so quick to dismiss decades of promising research on the effects of meatless diets. “People will never change the way they eat; it’s not worth talking about.” But as Michael Greger, a general practitioner specializing in nutrition and an advocate for plant-based diets, once said in a lecture I attended, “That attitude may be one of the true leading causes of death and disability.”

In “A Plant-Based Nutrition Program” in this month’s AJN, Joanne Evans and colleagues describe the results of a “personal experiment” in which nurses at three faculty-led community health clinics associated with George Mason University followed a plant-based diet for three weeks. Their goals were to

2017-12-19T10:03:39-05:00March 22nd, 2017|Nursing, nursing research|11 Comments

‘Do You Consider Yourself Healthy?’ Study Sheds Light on RNs’ Lifestyle Practices

By Sylvia Foley, AJN senior editor

Over the past decade, the lifestyle practices of nurses and their connection to quality of care and patient outcomes have been gaining attention. Indeed, according to the patient-centered, relationship-based care model, one of the main conditions for optimal care is that providers engage in healthy self-care behaviors. Yet there is some evidence suggesting that RNs don’t consistently do so, especially when it comes to exercise and stress reduction—even when they believe they should.

Nurse researchers Karen Thacker and colleagues recently conducted a study to learn more. They report their findings in this month’s CE–Original Research feature, “An Investigation into the Health-Promoting Lifestyle Practices of RNs.” Here’s a brief summary:

Purpose: To gather baseline data on the health-promoting lifestyle practices of RNs working in six major health care and educational institutions in southeastern Pennsylvania.
Methods: The 52-item Health-Promoting Lifestyle Profile II instrument was used to explore participants’ self-reported health-promoting behaviors and measure six dimensions: health responsibility, physical activity, nutrition, interpersonal relations, spiritual growth, and stress management.
Results: Findings revealed that physical activity and stress management scores were low for the entire group of RNs. There were statistically significant differences between nurses 50 years of age and older and those 30 to 39 years of age for the subscales of health responsibility, nutrition, and stress management, suggesting that older nurses are more concerned about […]

Are the Benefits of Nutrition for Cardiovascular Health Being Undersold ?

By Betsy Todd, MPH, RN, CIC, AJN clinical editor

By Eric Hunt/via Wikimedia Commons By Eric Hunt/via Wikimedia Commons

A nutrition conference at which physicians and medical students outnumber either nurses or dietitians is a rare event. This was the case at last month’s International Conference on Nutrition in Medicine: Cardiovascular Disease in Washington, DC, cosponsored by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) and George Washington University.

The speakers, shared a wealth of data on the influence of different types of diets on weight, blood pressure, lipids, serum inflammatory markers, hemoglobin A1c levels, and diseased coronary arteries. More than one pointed out that we too often overestimate the benefits of drugs and medical procedures and discount the effectiveness of diet and lifestyle changes. Some highlights:

Does heart disease begin in utero? Children who are large for gestational age (> 95th percentile) and those born to overweight mothers are at increased risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD). Vascular physiologist Michael Skilton, PhD, associate professor at the University of Sydney in Australia, has also identified microscopic lesions in aortic endothelium of babies born small for gestational age (< 10th percentile). He suggests that their diets include the American Heart Association’s recommendations for omega-3 fatty acid intake beginning in childhood (breast milk, flax seeds, walnuts, or child-friendly omega 3 supplements can be used in lieu of fish-derived omega 3s when mercury is a concern).

Children […]

2017-03-15T16:58:14-04:00September 14th, 2015|Nursing, personal health practices|1 Comment
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