The father of preventative medicine is 100 years old and still working. Coincidence? I think not
Hi there, thanks for joining us. I’m Jeff, JR is the producer, and this is episode 225 of Plain English. You can find the full transcript of this episode and all of our study resources by visiting PlainEnglish.com/225.
On today’s episode, we all know the basics of preventative medicine. Lead a healthy life today and our risk factors for chronic diseases tomorrow will be a lot lower. Makes a ton of sense—but it hasn’t always been that obvious. One of the researchers who is credited with establishing the field of preventative medicine recently turned 100 years old—and is still working. That’s today’s topic. In the second half of the program, you’ll learn the English expression “to play a part” and JR has a song of the week.
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Preventative medicine in action
Is being healthier one of your New Year’s resolutions this year? Most people know that eating healthy, exercising and not smoking are all good ways to lead a healthy lifestyle and prevent disease. But like many things we take for granted, that guidance hasn’t always been so obvious. There is one scientist in particular that we can thank for this knowledge—Dr. Joseph Stamler, a researcher at Northwestern University. And would you believe that Dr. Stamler is still working at the age of 100? That’s only appropriate, right, for one of the founders of preventative medicine!
A lot of people attribute his long life and working career to his practicing what he preaches, but like a good scientist, he says that’s proof of a correlation, not necessarily causation. Even so, it’s worth taking a look at the field of preventative medicine that Dr. Stamler is credited with advancing so much.
The idea behind preventative medicine is that you can take proactive steps to prevent yourself from getting the big, chronic diseases that kill lots of people prematurely. You can’t prevent every disease—if you tried, you might never leave the house, and even then you wouldn’t succeed. But by making lifestyle adjustments and doing routine maintenance on your body, you can either stop yourself from getting a big killer in the first place, or find it early enough to allow your doctors to treat it.
Dr. Stamler’s work focused on what was once the developed world’s biggest killer, heart disease. When he first started working, many people believed that heart disease was largely attributed to old age. And old age does play a part. But it was Dr. Stamler’s and other researchers’ work that revealed there is much more to heart disease than just old age. And it was his research that gave us the insights that we now take for granted about protecting your heart—namely, that exercise, diet, smoking, stress, cholesterol, blood pressure, and family history all play a part in a person’s susceptibility to heart disease.
Have you heard the term “risk factors”? You’ve probably heard it in a number of contexts, but Dr. Stamler was the one who coined that phrase in the field of public health. Risk factors are the things about you that affect the probability that something bad will happen. He developed that term, and the research behind it, while working with the Chicago Board of Health. He wanted to make sure people knew the causes of heart disease—the number-one killer in the United States at the time. And sometimes that required looking several degrees of separation away. If one direct cause of a heart attack is high blood pressure, then what can a person do to not get high blood pressure in the first place? That led him to his recommendations on salt intake, for example. If your arteries get clogged from too much cholesterol, then what can you do to reduce that? Control how much red meat you eat, and get your cholesterol tested.
These are common sense today, but someone had to do the hard work that backs that up, and that largely took place in the second half of the twentieth century. Dr. Stamler’s guidelines are everywhere now. Heart disease has declined greatly since the 1960’s thanks in part to his work. The number of premature deaths due to heart disease has fallen by half in the developed world in the past sixty years. But knowing the risk factors is only a portion of solution—you also have to follow the guidelines. That’s where so many people fall short.
So in this season of fresh starts, you might be wondering what diet has kept the father of preventative medicine alive for over a century. Dr. Stamler follows the Mediterranean diet, which focuses on fish, healthy fats, whole grains, and plenty of fruits and vegetables. Hard to argue with that.
Stamler isn’t ready to retire yet. He and his team at Northwestern University are working on researching the factors that influence people’s blood pressure. But if his colleagues want him to review their work, they need to send him a hard copy—no e-mail.
I’d like to say hello to a few listeners today. Claudio has a great story about English. He wrote to say that English has “deeply affected and changed” his life. He said it gave him new friends, a new job, and a changed mindset. I absolutely love that and, except for the new job part, I have experienced those exact same benefits.
Also want to say hi to João Pedro from Goiânia, Brazil. He listened to our whole back catalog—over 200 episodes—in just a few months, and now he says, he doesn’t even need the slow version—but he still listens because he loves it so much. I told João Pedro that he sounds like he’s ready for Plain English Plus+ since that includes the fast version of the program!
One more today, Fernando is in Rio de Janeiro and he is in medical school and he’s studying to be a cardiologist. I remembered hearing from him as I was writing this episode, so I had to say hello since this is right up his alley.
I’m really happy to have Fernando, Claudio and João Pedro in the audience.
Great stories make learning English fun
