Janel Gordon, MD, DipABOM, DipABLM, is a triple board certified family, obesity and lifestyle medicine physician leader. Dr. Gordon is committed to changing the lives of her patients and offering advice so they can live longer, healthier lives.
Dr. Gordon spoke with rolling out about obesity, lifestyle medicine, and other factors that lead to high obesity rates in Black individuals.
What should obesity and lifestyle medicine mean to the Black community?
Obesity medicine deals with the treatment of obesity. I’m sure a lot of people have heard in the news about the GLP-1 agonist medication, the injections Ozempic, Mounjaro, Wegovy, and Saxenda. These are the medications that we can use to treat obesity and I would say that they’re the best we have if we’re talking about medication versus surgery.
Oftentimes, you’ll have physicians and nurse practitioners in the fields of primary care and other specialties who may treat obesity medicine, but they may not be board certified by the American Board of Obesity Medicine.
How can an individual know which medicine is safe for them?
It is based on a case-by-case basis. We try not to give blanket information. A lot of the parameters that we make are decisions that depend on the patient’s BMI (basic metabolic index) number. That is not something that we want to use only to determine if someone is considered to be overweight or obese but it is a measure that we do look at. We’ll also look at other medical conditions that a patient may have such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol.
Since I’m board certified in lifestyle medicine by the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, I’m always going to recommend lifestyle modification.
How is that patient sleeping? What is their stress management like? Are you stressed? How are you managing the stress that you are dealing with? Also, what is the stress? We know loneliness is an epidemic affecting a lot of people in society right now, so what can we do to help you improve that area of your life? What foods are you eating? What beverages are you drinking? People don’t realize how all of these factors can affect their weight.
What is the biggest factor of high obesity rates in Black individuals?
I think it’s multifactorial. Unfortunately, a lot of us are living in areas that may be under-resourced, so we may be grabbing foods that are more convenient for us and those usually aren’t the healthiest options for us. If you’re grabbing a more processed food, especially if you think about that corn on the cob right out of the ground versus popcorn, cornflake cereal, or corn pudding, these are all different forms of processing of the food, and a lot of times that’s with sugar being added in, saturated fats being added in, and lots of salt and sodium being added can affect the nutrients that are in the corn.
Some of these cooking methods that we use are being passed down from generations and some of them are way back from slavery where we got the foods after the master was able to use the foods that we prepared for them and we had to kind of be resourceful and very smart to figure out what can we cook and how can we stretch it for our family that we have in front of us.
Going back to the processing of the food, it’s not the same as it was for our grandparents’ generation. You may think, “My grandfather grew up on this and he lived until he was 90-years-old.” Well, he wasn’t eating the food that you and I are eating today full of unnatural additives.
