Journal photo by Tim Cook Dr. Mark Cucuzella has organized this Saturdays Harpers Ferry Half Marathon, a family-friendly spring foot race that includes a shorter 5K race and walk, as well as a kids fun run event.
CHARLES TOWN Its a national junk-food health crisis, a genuine medical emergency, according to Dr. Mark Cucuzzella, a Jefferson County family physician.
We must act now. We cant wait, he warned, voicing an urgency of someone daily witnessing and actively working to end the problem and promote healthier diets.
This medical crisis over junk food involves, of course, too much sugar far too much of it loaded every day into Americans meals of factory food and beverages, said Cucuzzella, a nationally recognized expert on unhealthy living and dietary habits. More than any other medical problem, he said, this daily overdose of sugar which the doctor calls a toxin is steadily sickening and killing far too many Americans, including disproportionately far too many West Virginians.
Sugary diets including those laden with simple and complex carbohydrates not fatty foods such as meats, eggs and butter, as federal health officials have long maintained are propelling an astronomical spike in acute obesity, Cucuzzella said. And that obesity is, in turn, causing a tidal wave of debilitating heart disease and diabetes and many related complications.
Most of the public health issues relate to nutrition, he added. In a hospital, 80 percent (of patients) have diabetes, heart disease or complications that is driven by their lifestyle. Occasionally, youll have a trauma a motor vehicle trauma but almost everything else we see is something that is directly attributed to their lifestyle.
The American Heart Association reports that the average person can safely consume about nine teaspoons of added sugar a day, but that the average American consumes more than double that amount. Cucuzzella said that the AHAs gauge of the sugar intake by typical Americans overlooks additional sugar people also absorb from eating carbohydrate-rich foods such as breads and pasta. And people with any degree of insulin resistance from too much sugar would need to consume even less sugar than the daily allowance the AHA recommends, he said.
Cucuzzella said this silent but plainly evident in the expanding waistlines of children and adults dietary disaster over ingesting excessive sugar has been unfolding in West Virginia and across the country for about 40 years. Now, in an astonishing new development, diseases involving metabolic malfunctions from sugar-laced diets are being passed directly down to children born from family habits and the unborn from the bloodstreams of mothers.
A child born of a diabetic mother, he pointed out, has a six times odds of having diabetes over the course of their lifetime.
For years, Cucuzzella has been leading local and national educational efforts to promote better nutrition through homemade meals with known, natural ingredients. Soda and boxed meals made for long shelf lives should be avoided or shunned altogether, he said. Dishes made from scratch with fresh and balanced ingredients, like those your grandmother made every day, should become part of regular nourishing routines again.
Practicing at the Jefferson Medical Center in Ranson, he devotes hundreds of personal volunteer hours educating his patients along with youth, everyday citizens and families, government officials and policymakers, and even other doctors about rampant medical problems for people consuming excessive amounts of sugar.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the upcoming generation of typically overweight Americans becoming the first generation to have shorter life spans than their parents, Cucuzzella said. And theyre also living sicker than their parents.
Right now the U.S. has one of the shortest health spans on the planet, he said. We might spend 80 years living, but were spending how many of those years as sick medical patients.
RACING FOR THE CURE
At national and international conferences, Cucuzzella highlights research showing how high-sugar diets are the primary cause of our nations recent spike in heart disease and diabetes and their many dangerous medical complications. In addition to giving local community talks, he lectures around the country as well as the Eastern Panhandle about the dangers of consuming too much sugar, something thats easy to do through the overwhelming abundance of highly processed foods and drinks widely stocked at fast-food restaurants, convenience stores and even many standard groceries.
Pretty much there is almost nothing you can get at a fast-food restaurant that I would recommend people put in their body, he said.
In Jefferson County, Cucuzzellas nonstop advocacy for healthier nutrition includes his volunteer work as the race director and driving force behind this Saturdays Harpers Ferry Half Marathon, a ninth-annual family-friendly spring footrace that includes a shorter 5K race and walk, as well as a kids fun run event. Attracting about 800 to 1,000 participants from 25 states every year, the day event, open to people of all fitness levels and athletic abilities, is a major fundraiser for the year-round health and educational programs in the Eastern Panhandle and throughout West Virginia.
Similarly in the fall, a bookend event to Saturdays spring footrace is the bigger Freedoms Run, which Cucuzzella also organizes under the same nonprofit mission to promote healthier, better-fed human beings. That September race features a full marathon as top billing, a race that takes runners through both the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park and the Antietam National Battlefield before ending in Shepherdstown. The event, which also includes a half marathon, a 5K race and kids fun run, brings 2,500 people from 40 states to Jefferson County.
During the past nine years, both footraces have raised more than $400,000 that financially support classroom nutrition education, recreation programs, fitness trails and healthy food farmers markets.
Instead of selling cookies to people to raise money, which makes people sicker, Cucuzzella said of the two annual races, were actually providing opportunities for people to move and set goals and get themselves more physically healthy and, in the end, raise money to spread it wider.
MAKING LIFESTYLE CHANGES
Cucuzzella said a lack of exercise isnt the primary factor of todays obesity epidemic. Yes, people should exercise more, he acknowledged, but he doesnt blame overweight people for their condition. Instead, he recognizes the overall everyday living environment where high-sugar foods are hard for Americans to avoid. Even most hospital cafeterias have soda machines and snack machines.
Were trying to first address it with education, but education can only go so far, he said. If you have a toxin in the environment like sugar and sugar-sweetened beverages and Gatorade and sweet drinks and its the most accessible, affordable and acceptable thing to be using, you cant win.
The economically powerful food industry for years has tried rather successfully to place the blame of obesity and diabetes on a lack of physical activity, away from the products they sell, Cucuzzella said. Another factor is that the medical community hasnt communicated a consistent message well about the dangers of excessive sugar, he said. Doctors, nurses, dietitians and pharmacists all have to understand the dietary problem to guide patients successfully.
For this reason, Cucuzzella, who opened a specialized athletic footwear and healthier living store in Ranson called Two Rivers Treads that offers free advice and encouragement to those who want to get moving more, leads an innovative program that teaches young medical interns how to help patients with better nutrition. Along the way he also pioneered a hands-on program conducted in a kitchen setting that helps doctors better educate their patients about practical healthy eating and cooking.
If a family doesnt know how to cook, how are they ever going to learn how to eat well? he said.
Cucuzzella pinpointed the start of the crisis at 1980, when the federal government first published dietary guidelines for Americans, guidelines that essentially declared war on fat, telling people to significantly reduce oils and fats in their diets. And Americans listened, in droves. They quickly traded traditional meals of meat, eggs, dairy and vegetables for low-fat foods such as white bread, frozen yogurt, cereal and Pop Tarts that wear down human metabolisms.
If you look at the obesity graphs, thats where it started and the diabetes ultimately travels behind that, he said.
Cucuzzella likens the unquestioned everyday acceptance of todays destructive sugary diets to the dynamics of widespread acceptance of hazardous smoking and tobacco products years ago.
If you go back to my parents generation, you could smoke in doctors offices. It was acceptable everywhere, it was cheap and it was acceptable. Everyone smoked, he said. Now thats not the case. You practically have to go into a closet to smoke, and it costs eight bucks a pack, and theyre behind the counter and kids cant get them.
Today, refined sugar is viewed the same benign way as tobacco was a few generations ago, Cucuzzella said. However, our nations high-tech, high-cost and highly invasive medical system shares a portion of blame for the dietary obesity crisis to answer for as well, he said.
Were doing everything wrong, he said. Were arguing now in Washington over how to (medically) insure people, not how to keep them healthy and get them healthy. We spend more than twice as much as any industrial country on health care with the worst outcomes.
Cucuzzella said he has dozens of patients who, empowered with nutritional knowledge and support, have broken their dietary sugar habits for healthier lives. He also pointed to Frank Buckles, the local legend and last surviving American World War I veteran from the Charles Town area who lived for 110 years, as someone who adopted a healthy lifestyle that led to a long lifespan.
Once asked the secret of living long life, Buckles said family genes, regular exercise and a healthy diet are important. He also added that a hopeful attitude and taking life at a slower pace helps, too.
He didnt do anything fancy, he said, adding that Buckles avoided chronic, debilitating illnesses even in the later stages of his life. He was a farmer. He ate off his land. He got out and moved his body every day. He didnt have toxic stress. He tended to throw away every medicine his doctors gave him, and the rest is history.
For Cucuzzella, changing West Virginians ingrained dietary habits will mainly happen at the grassroots. Thats where individual consumers and families as well as their doctors support one another in common resistance to the dietary status quo. Thats also a significant part of what Saturdays footraces races in Harpers Ferry are all about, he said.
Certainly come for the exercise, fresh air and scenery. But also come to take part in the collective stand in sneakers and sweat suits to support a new and different path of resistance for your own better health and life and for the similar different path of new like-minded friends and comrades.
I encourage people to come out and run, Cucuzzella said. At the end of the day, we want people to go into that charity site and see what were doing. If people really see that this is a grassroots community effort to restore the health of West Virginians, thats what its all about.
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Sweet Sweat: Doctor leads race against sugary diets - Martinsburg Journal
