Dr. Husain Abbas Discusses Nutrition

Hi there, I’m Dr. Hussain Abbas, a general and bariatric surgeon with MASJax. One of the common questions I get asked by my patients is “what is the best diet that I can have, doc? What’s the diet that I can utilize so that either it helps me to lose weight or maintain my weight loss?” Well the simple answer it depends, right? Kind of the answer that you don’t want to hear. And what we’ve found is the science supports that. Because when we look worldwide, we can see that there are various different diets.

Recently studies have been performed to see whether there is there a best diet or does it actually depend on the individual. The latest study is called Predict and they took about a thousand patients and also included twins in there – both identical and non-identical – to see does genetics play a factor? Because when we look at the diets worldwide. Let’s look at for example the Far East – places like China, Japan places like Okinawa, where we can have centenarians – basically people who are 100 years old still working the farms and very healthy.

Then when we move to places like the Mediterranean – Greece, Italy, Sicily, we find that these people have a very different diet, yet they still aged almost to the same number of years. So, what’s the secret? Well, what we actually found is people respond very differently to food they eat. So even when we have twins and we give them the identical healthy meals and we record how their insulin does after they eat; what about their triglycerides; what’s the sugar response.

The interesting answer is it actually depends – even identical twins do not necessarily have a very similar response. So, what that means is that where you and I could be eating the same diet, your body responds maybe completely different to mine. This is specifically pertinent to people who’ve had weight loss surgery because their body’s responds differently to the same diet that they may have had before surgery than what they do afterwards.

We can use that to individualize a diet to help patients either lose more weight or maintain their weight loss.

Until next time, stay safe.