Food that’s beneficial for your overall health

Dr. Elizabeth Parks, a professor at the University of Missouri Medical School, is educating people on healthy diets that can support your overall health.

Dr. Parks dives into how our bodies process, store, and utilize food for energy, emphasizing the critical role of metabolism in overall health. Metabolic medicine, as Dr. Parks mentioned, focuses on understanding the role between diet, metabolism, obesity, and various health conditions.

At its core, metabolic medicine shows us how our bodies deal with food and utilize nutrients, with the ultimate aim of developing targeted therapies for clinical applications.

Dr. Parks’s research dives into several key areas, including the timing of food intake and the impact of added sugars on fat metabolism. She explained that our bodies are better at storing calories later in the day, with later meals potentially being more readily stored as fat. Shifting food intake to earlier in the day may help metabolic health.

In addressing the issue of weight, Dr. Parks emphasized a shift in focus from achieving a specific body weight to mitigating disease risks associated with obesity. Rather than focusing on weight loss, interventions are focused to reduce the burden of obesity-related diseases such as hypertension and diabetes.