socially conscious nutrition and wellness
Menu
The link between the food you eat and complications with COVID-19 is based on whether your dietary pattern is helping you to prevent or promote chronic diseases.
“It’s so clear that the overwhelming weight of serious disease and mortality is on […] those with a serious comorbidity: heart disease, diabetes, obesity…”
Anthony Fauci, MD
As I covered in a previous article, increased prevalence of chronic health conditions contribute to disproportionately high mortality rates from COVID-19 in black communities.
COVID-19 has caused us to reflect on the roots of our cultural eating habits. Even rethink the relationship we want with food going forward. Because COVID-19 is chronic disease-risk based, not race based.
It’s common knowledge that a plant-based dietary pattern is protective against food-related chronic diseases. America has long been ranked among the wealthiest nations in the world. We have been blessed with an abundance of natural resources. Fruit and vegetable production occurs throughout the United States. When our season ends, production shifts to Mexico and Central and South American countries. This allows us to enjoy many fresh produce items year-round.
And yet
If health is wealth and we’re among the sickest countries — how can we also be wealthy? More on this later.
Of course, the fact that people are still going hungry, getting sicker, and dying at a younger age in one of the world’s richest countries is not news. In fact, the many studies, documentaries, and movements intended to wake people up about the need to fix our food distribution and health care system may sometimes impede action.
Yes, backlash against healthier eating habits is led by a legion of corporations and governmental offices with a lot invested in the status quo; they have the money, power, and know-how to spin the facts as necessary to protect their interests.
But ordinary Americans share the blame for inaction. Ironically, constantly hearing conflicting messages about what to eat, how to cook, what will make us sick, and how to manage those illnesses is so overwhelming that a lot of us turn to our extra-sweet, high-calorie, cheap and easy-to-obtain comfort food in order to cope.
When the problem seems so big and ingrained into society, most of us don’t really know where to begin to make a change. Even though when cooked from scratch — beans, whole grains and vegetables are widely available and affordable for most. It can come down to choice.
But the fallout from COVID-19 may help.
Even when you know the statistics about food in this country, it’s relatively easy to ignore them. While the idea of over 11 million American children going hungry is upsetting, we have an estimated 74 million children overall and we lose sight of the ones suffering. Unlike other countries, where you may be exposed to groups of people living in obvious squalor and children forced to panhandle for food, poverty in the US—and the health effects that come from cheap, overly processed, and unhealthy foods—can be comfortably overlooked: it’s hiding in plain sight.
Yes, we all must die. And when it seems as if every day, experts declare that one more thing is going to kill you, it begins to feel like everything in society will kill you eventually. But COVID-19 is killing people now. And as testing progresses and the ERs and morgues visibly fill up, you have to be willfully blind not to recognize that fact.
Even as media, politicians, and decision-makers cater to the human instinct to find a pattern—the virus is more likely to affect old people, black people, poor people—facts show that this virus is contagious and can impact any and everyone. Yet science has identified factors and behaviors, including:
This leads to awareness. The pandemic has created a worldwide crisis. It’s providing everyone a rare opportunity to witness how different countries protect their citizens and economies. As America fails to compare well with our peers, people are increasingly questioning the way we provide basic, fundamental services like policing, education, healthcare, and nutrition. And many are unhappily surprised by the status quo.
The reasons for this state of affairs in one of the richest countries on Earth are convoluted and complex. But the underlying causes are simple and straightforward.
In her influential book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander successfully tied suppression of voting rights to the development of the prison industrial complex. In the process, she clearly illustrated how this suppression of civil rights was effectively—and profitably—monetized.
It hasn’t been exposed yet, but there is an equally macabre origin story for the flawed food policy system that pours unhealthy, high-calorie foods into grocery stores throughout America, contributing to the rise in chronic illness throughout the country.
And just as with other scandals, even if the basic facts are discovered and exposed, the perpetrators, benefactors, and willing enablers will be equally hard to pin down, the legacy of the damage equally enduring, and an effective resolution equally elusive.
Even when we are not fully aware of our motivations, people do what they do for a reason. A short timeline of events that have impacted food production and distribution in America. This helps shed light on the origins of our present food distribution policies.
As our brief timeline of the history of US food production clearly illustrates, commercial food production is no easy task. And these are only the facts surrounding farming concerns. We haven’t even considered other ethical, environmental, and economic concerns like:
This does not mean that capitalism has disempowered us. In a system designed around profit, our spending money gives us some leverage in determining what products come to the market.
Simply put, they can’t sell what we won’t buy.
Our greater interest in and understanding of nutrition’s many affects on our overall health has already had an impact. There are an increasing number of plant-based options on the market today, some more healthy than others. The more consumers demand healthy options, the more corporations will respond to the opportunity to increase profits by supplying them.
With continued education, open conversation, time, and determination, our buying habits will eventually alter the focus of our now faltering food distribution policies, one meal at a time.
Alissa Nash is a published author and founder of ThatIsWhatIDo.com, a strategic marketing firm for small business owners. Ms. Nash started her career as a Diversity Specialist. She is former VP of Learning & Development. She spent nearly 30 years gaining knowledge and insight into effective methods to influence human behavior. Ms. Nash firmly believes in promoting the best of both conservative and progressive philosophies. She believes the community needs the change management, knowledge transfer, brand development and strategic thinking skills of a variety of professionals to help communicate and implement the ideas and solutions championed by our sociologist and political scholars.
The Daniel Fast: A Bridge to Healthy Living
Keeping People Sick: A Sustainable Business Model
If obesity were a war, we’d be shamefully losing that war. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, obesity reached the historic level of 42.4% in 2018, with black women comprising the highest group at 56.9%. We know that obesity is associated with several chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease, among others. We also know that obesity and other chronic illnesses have been implicated as a major risk factor in COVID-19, often resulting in hospitalizations and death.
But why are obesity levels so high? While exercise does play a role in weight status, the food system is arguably the biggest factor. The most unhealthy, disease-promoting foods are often the cheapest and most easily accessible. Below is a history on how things got this way and why it’s going to be difficult—but not impossible—to change.
In 1776, agriculture was the single most important industry in the US. 90% of the population subsisted on small, family-owned farms that produced just enough to feed their families.
The more prosperous farmers further increased their wealth by supplying the West Indies with corn and flour, selling surplus crops or animals in local markets, or exporting produce to slave colonies.
Around 1840, increased industrialization and urbanization enabled farmers to take advantage of a new and lucrative domestic market.
The federal government used the Homestead Act of 1862 to also take advantage of this opportunity. Tracts of 160 acres were issued to about 400,000 families. The land was available at very favorable rates for farmers willing to settle and cultivate the land.
As a result, the number of farms in the US grew from 2 million in 1860 to 6 million by 1906, with a corresponding increase in people living on farms, from 10 million in 1860 to 31 million in 1905.
Tycoons seeking a market for their newly constructed railroads also sponsored reduced-rate land and subsidized the relocation of hundreds of thousands of farmers from Germany, Scandinavia, and Britain.
This influx of farmers from different parts of Europe resulted in diverse farming techniques in the US, as each immigrant group adapted their Old-World traditions, experiences, and ideas to their new homeland.
As the pioneers successfully cultivated the Great Plains, most American farms were prosperous in the first years of the 20th century. That’s why organized farm groups wanted the government to use the years between 1910–1914 as a statistical benchmark, called “parity,” for the level of prices and profits they felt they deserved.
These glory days for American farmers were short-lived. The combination of the effects of over-farming during World War 1, the Stock Market Crash in 1929, and the dust bowl in 1930 nearly devastated Depression-era American farmers, many of whom went bankrupt and lost their farms.
To help stabilize the country’s food supply, the federal government approved the Agricultural Marketing Act of 1929 and the Agricultural Adjustment Act in 1933. Designed to stabilize prices by preventing a surplus of crops, both efforts provided subsidies to farmers who agreed not to produce corn, wheat, cotton, rice, peanuts, tobacco, or milk. Although these Acts failed to stabilize crop prices, the debate about the value of farm subsidies—which are now almost exclusively granted to large corporate farming conglomerates—affect our food supply chain to this day.
As the Depression wore on and US citizens were forced into soup lines, fortified and enriched foods were introduced to combat widespread malnutrition. Though now controversial, these processed foods provided an economical method to increase vitamin and mineral intake at a time when many people were malnourished. Fortified foods have been credited with virtually eliminating rickets, pellagra, and other common diseases caused by nutrient deficiencies, but they have also directly led to an over-abundance of processed and ultra-processed foods in the American diet.
American farms began another huge transition 20 years later. The number of people on farms dropped from over 20 million in 1950 to less than 10 million in 1970. More farms were consolidated or sold during this period than in any other period in our history, and the average size of farms went from around 205 acres in 1950 to almost 400 acres in 1969.
As the number of farms (and farmers) decreased, however, their overall productivity increased. Farmers increasingly embraced the economic reality that investing in machines specifically designed to produce a certain crop—then maximizing that investment by specializing in that crop—resulted in increased productivity with decreased production costs.
The embrace of one-crop, specialized farming techniques has increased reliance on synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides, since these new croplands lost the natural suppression of weeds and other pests once provided naturally by crop diversity.
First introduced in the early 1900s, synthetic and mineral fertilizer applications on US crops nearly doubled between 1964 and 1976, and pesticide use increased by 143%.
Chemical and pharmaceutical agents like antibiotics were also widely used in newly industrialized models of meat, milk, and egg production. As early as the 1940s, research proved farmers could use artificial steroids to breed animals that required less feed but gained weight faster.
In the late 1950s, US Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson called on farmers to “get big or get out.” Since the savings realized by consolidated farms eventually result in lower food prices for the rest of the country, large farms still enjoy support from the federal government.
So the number of small farms declined while on each farm involved in meat, dairy, and egg production the number of animals rose dramatically. In a domino effect, many other industries in the food system, including animal slaughtering and processing, rose as well.
Today, huge farming concerns account for most food production in the US: half of all US cropland is on farms with at least 1,000 acres. Most US poultry and pork products come from facilities with an annual production of more than 200,000 chickens or 5,000 pigs, and most egg-laying hens are born, bred, and die in facilities built to house over 100,000 birds at a time.
The federally funded farm subsidy program developed during the Great Depression to protect small, family-owned farms now controls more than $20 billion a year of taxpayer money.
The funds are currently allotted for farm subsidies in the form of direct payments, crop insurance, and loans meant to protect and preserve the nation’s food supply by covering farmers’ losses in case of natural, economic, or political disasters.
The process to apply for a subsidy has reportedly gotten more complex since the 1980s. Out of the estimated 2.1 million farms in the US, about 39% receive subsidies.
And most of the handouts are granted to the largest producers of US subsidized crops like grains and cotton.
Weather conditions, changes to market demand, and economic/political events beyond their control all make farming a risky industry for the people who supply our food chain. To ensure a reliable food supply during both good and bad markets, most industrialized nations subsidize farming to some degree.
In the US, almost $170 billion of our tax money was dedicated to subsidizing the production of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, dairy, and livestock between 1995 and 2010 alone. Yet numerous studies have found that consuming calories from the foods subsidized by the government increased the risk of obesity and chronic diseases.
According to an article published by The New York Times, the US “devotes less than 1 percent of farm subsidies to support the research, production, and marketing” of fruits and vegetables. This is despite the fact that federal guidelines recommend that adults eat at least 1½ to 2 cups of fruit and 2 to 3 cups of vegetables daily to maintain a healthy diet.
Corn is by far the nation’s largest crop, planted on more than 90 million acres of land. Most of the output is used to feed livestock and produce ethanol gas.
In 1977, high-fructose corn syrup was introduced to the US market. The objective was to provide a cost-effective substitute for high-priced imported cane and beet sugar.
Because it is cheap and readily available, high fructose corn syrup is difficult to avoid. It is commonly added to the US food supply, and not just in the obvious items like sodas, candy, and desserts. High fructose corn syrup is also added to salad dressing, bread, and the convenience foods—like boxed macaroni and cheese or frozen dinners—that many time-strapped or low-income Americans rely on to feed their families.
It’s debatable whether high-fructose corn syrup is worse than any other kind of sweetener. But the adverse effects of consuming too many calories from sweeteners (and the sheer number of foods and drinks processed with high fructose corn syrup) are not.
Neither is the fact that in 2015, 23.4 million people had diagnosed diabetes, compared to only 1.6 million in 1958.
According to the Mayo Clinic, “too much added sugar of all kinds […] can contribute unwanted calories that are linked to health problems, such as weight gain, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and high triglyceride levels. All of these boost your risk of heart disease.”
GMOs, or Genetically Modified Organisms, are living beings that have had their genetic code changed in some way. While conventional cross breeding has been around since the 19th century, GMOs are produced by inserting genetic material directly into individual cells in a lab.
Now so prevalent in the US food supply they are difficult to avoid, GMOs were developed and accepted rapidly:
1973: The first successfully genetically modified organism was developed.
1975: The Asilomar Conference paved the way for continued research and development of GMOs. The Conference attendees outlined guidelines to address GMO-related public health and safety concerns expressed by government officials, scientists, and the media.
1980: General Electric was awarded the first patent for bacteria that were genetically engineered to break down crude oil, providing incentive for other corporations to quickly develop other GMOs for commercial use.
1982: Humulin became the first human medication produced by a genetically modified organism. Developed from bacteria that had been genetically engineered to synthesize human insulin, it was approved to treat diabetes.
1987: Calgene’s Flavr Savr tomato became the first food crop to be approved for commercial production by the USDA after five years of extensive health and environmental testing. Their genetic modifications resulted in tomatoes with increased firmness and an extended shelf life.
1995: The first pesticide-producing crop was approved by the EPA to provide farmers with crops that are easier to cultivate. Bt corn was approved the following year, and this gene is now present in the majority of corn harvested in the US, as are crops genetically engineered to resist herbicides so that it is easier for farmers to control unwanted plants in their fields.
As with fortified foods in the 1930s, genetically engineered crops can increase nutrition value. For example, Golden Rice was developed in 2000 specifically to combat vitamin A deficiency, which kills an estimated 500,000 people a year worldwide. It remains to be seen whether these efforts will have unforeseen consequences the way over-processed foods do today.
At this point, it takes a conscious effort to avoid GMOs in produce. As much as 92% of US corn is genetically engineered, as is 94% of soybeans and 94% of the cottonseed oil often used in food products.
While there are currently no edible genetically engineered animals approved by the FDA, by 2009 livestock consumed 80% of the antibiotic drugs sold in the US, making it extremely difficult for people who eat meat to avoid ingesting GMO-derived substances.
The rise in obesity and the growing problem of illness-producing food and land has come about, as you’ve seen, from the combination of a laudable desire to nourish the greatest number of people with an unhealthy obsession with material gain. And those two motivators were shared by huge profit-driven farms, chemical companies eager to get their products into the market, and a government under the sway of lobbyists from both.
When looking at the food system problem from a policy level, one can find it daunting to envision making meaningful change. Too many people make money off of you being sick.
But each of us can contribute to making individual changes that will add up to systemic improvements over time.
The fact that our food is made for profit allows us to cast our ballot every time we buy something. Here are ways to vote for health, both for yourself and our environment:
Ultimately, these habits are not only more likely to improve your health, but they will cause a favorable shift in the supply of built environments promoting physical activity, and in healthy foods for all of us.
Alissa Nash is a published author and founder of ThatIsWhatIDo.com, a strategic marketing firm for small business owners. While she started her career as a Diversity Specialist, this former VP of Learning & Development has spent nearly 30 years gaining knowledge and insight into effective methods to influence human behavior. She firmly believes that, in addition to promoting the best of both conservative and progressive philosophies, the community needs the change management, knowledge transfer, brand development and strategic thinking skills of a variety of professionals to help communicate and implement the ideas and solutions championed by our sociologist and political scholars.
An analysis published in the Washington Post has sparked a wave of reporting about the disparate impact the Coronavirus has had on African Americans. Despite the fact that this is an equal-opportunity, global pandemic, that first impacted Asia and Europe before it was fully experienced by the US, the Post’s analysis of available data and census demographics indicates that counties that are majority-black have three times the rate of infections and almost six times the rate of deaths as counties where white residents are in the majority.
Coverage of this fact has largely focused on bringing awareness to the statistics, which undeniably proves there is a disparate impact, and ensuring adequate resources are available for traditionally marginalized and underserved communities. The logic behind this kind of reporting is both simple and effective – to achieve fundamental, systemic change, the ruling party must be made to recognize, acknowledge and address disparate impacts on communities who have systematically been denied fair access to opportunities and resources. A process that can sometimes seem exhausting on top of everything else we all have to do, but like James Baldwin said “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
My concern is that, in the effort to make sure the needs of black communities are not completely ignored once again, we run the risk of reinforcing the idea that being black in and of itself is the problem. After all, we all know the only two things we gotta do in this world is stay black and die. So when people who look like you always seem to fair worse than anyone else during every natural disaster or national crisis, it’s understandable that some of us may begin to feel a sense of inevitability, as if there is nothing we as a community can do to change our own circumstances.
The truth is, it isn’t a person’s race that makes the difference. While statistics about higher mortality rates among black people dominate the headlines, these articles tend to gloss over the fact that living with chronic conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease – conditions that are largely within our power to control with diet – is what actually makes you more likely to die from the Coronavirus.
To be clear, reporters’ efforts to promote this story have had an impact. The facts are part of the public narrative, and various local, state and federal politicians have pledged to look into the problem. But as Dr. Anthony Fauci admitted during the White House press briefing, “There is nothing we can do about it right now except to try and give [African Americans] the best possible care to avoid complications.”
So now that we are on record, doing what we should to speak our truth to the powers that be, can we have a FUBU moment? An essay for us, by us on what we, as a community, can do from here? Because while nobody saw this virus coming or knew what to expect, African Americans’ higher rates of diabetes, heart disease and lung disease are well-documented. The only difference now is, as LA Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) noted, there never has been a pandemic that brought the disparities so vividly into focus.
But now that there has been, ‘looking into it’ during a global pandemic and financial crisis may well be all ‘they’ can do. But it is most definitely not all ‘we’ can do.
We can use this as a wake-up call. Acknowledge and accept that the effects of institutionalized racism are so large and complex, we need both positive and negative liberty to turn things around so every disaster that hits this country doesn’t have to hit us hardest. To put it in more culturally relevant terms, we must embrace both W.E.B. Du Bois’ philosophy of securing our rights through agitation and protest while at the same time promoting Booker T. Washington’s philosophy around self-determination.
And we can start with what we decide to put in our mouths.
Of course, considering the world’s most famous early human ancestor lived in Ethiopia, chances are she was not born with the name Lucy either. Regardless of what they choose to call her, Lucy’s remains provide concrete proof that all of humanity began and evolved in Africa. And it’s a good bet that she never cleaned a chitlin in her life.
Traditional African diets consisted of whole, fresh plant foods like colorful fruits and vegetables, especially leafy greens; tubers like yams and sweet potatoes; beans of all kinds; nuts and peanuts; rice, flatbreads and other grain foods, especially whole grains; healthy oils; homemade sauces and marinades of herbs and spices. When our ancestors were abducted and enslaved in America, they were forced to subsist on whatever scraps of food they were given by their captors – typically small weekly rations of corn meal, lard, the least desirable cuts of meat, molasses, peas, greens, and flour. These became the basic staples of our African American ancestors’ diet for centuries, more than enough time for our collective psyche to have lost the awareness of our native dishes.
But not even 400 years of torture can trump thousands of years of evolution. While the time spent in captivity was enough to strip most of our minds of our cultural awareness, it was not enough time to fundamentally alter bodies that evolved to digest our native diets.
It doesn’t help that many of the cooking techniques adopted to stretch our meager food rations and make them not simply edible but, in the right hands, downright delicious were achieved by over reliance on other unhealthy elements like salt, sugar, butter, lard, and pork products of all kinds. But what choice did we have? Soul Food is a uniquely American cuisine with roots in both Africa and the plantation that was created out of sheer necessity.
When forced into hard, physical labor, what little food you get has to be rich and packed with calories. When your only option is to accept the food you are permitted, not the food you want, you have to figure out how to make it edible. Biscuits made with lard aren’t just fluffier, they are heavy enough to keep you feeling full for hours. Ham hocks may not provide much meat by themselves, but the whole family can at least get the taste if you add them to a pot of beans or greens. Fried and seasoned properly, no one will notice that the vegetables are a few days past their prime. And a ‘sugar-tit’ is better than nothing when the baby is screaming, and you can neither take time from the fields to nurse him or provide more nutritious alternatives.
We learn what to eat – and what to feed our children – from what was fed to us. Just like every other immigrant to our country, migrants who left the hard, physical labors of Southern fields in search of more lucrative opportunities throughout the rest of the country brought their food traditions with them. As a result, we maintained the high-calorie, high-fat diet that kept us from starvation when we were forced into back breaking physical labor, even after our access to food increased and our physical activity decreased. A perfect lifestyle for the development of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and obesity.
Even when we are not completely aware of our motivations, human beings do what we do for a reason. In an egalitarian society, endorsing policies and practices designed to ensure a sizeable part of your population will be malnourished would be so nonsensical it would never be tolerated. So, we’d be able to elect public officials who really cared about the disparities of the Coronavirus’ effects on the African American community. They would quickly identify how a flawed food policy system that makes unhealthy foods cheap and readily available intersects with policies and procedures purposely designed to keep African Americans poor and thus reliant on that flawed system is the root cause of the disparity. And take effective, immediate actions to remedy the problem.
But in a society built around a clear hierarchy – where the designated level reserved for those of African descent was considered so low at one point we only counted as three-fifths of a human being – there is a twisted logic to the status quo. If you’ve designated a group of people to the lowest rungs of society, it is simply easier to contain and exploit them if they are malnourished, uneducated, incarcerated and unhealthy. Thus, the US developed systems – slavery, sharecropping, segregated schools, mass incarceration – where the very people forced to tend the crops had no access to the literal fruits of their labor. We were made to feed our children pig feet and hog intestines so the rest could provide theirs with steak and potatoes.
We have come a long way in a relatively short period of time. True, slightly more than 150 years since the official end of slavery – and just slightly more than 50 years since the Civil Rights Movement abolished Jim Crow – hasn’t quite been enough time to counteract the effects of 400 years of sanctioned oppression. But black lives do matter. Our collective voices are a force to be reckoned with.
But to paraphrase James Baldwin, not everything that is faced will be changed. At least not by those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. They can and will continue to sprinkle sugar on shit and call it a treat for as long as it’s profitable.
But they can no longer make us eat it.
By now, most people have some basic awareness of the importance of good nutrition. This is probably especially true of those of us already living with the ill effects of chronic illness. After all, they are given that same information when diagnosed, and it is reinforced to some degree every time they face another pill or injection. No one can be nagged or shamed or judged into making different lifestyle choices.
Obviously, when it comes to food, when you know better you don’t necessarily do better. Unique historical challenges aside, Black Americans are Americans, united under the same unhealthy dietary habits shared by the rest of the country.
But the concept of racial identity can present an additional challenge for some. When used correctly, the desire to seek out, identify, maintain and celebrate a shared cultural identity is a positive thing. But when used as a weapon to force conformity, it can artificially and unnecessarily limit people’s ability to live their best life without self-imposed White’s Only signs getting in the way.
What we choose to eat is viewed as a personal choice strongly influenced by the communities we live in. However, those communities are impacted by the health and wellbeing of every individual in the collective. Without blaming or shaming, we can help each other begin to reclaim the dietary legacy stripped from us during captivity. We can introduce healthier, plant-based dishes to family dinners, backyard barbecues, and church potlucks. We can find natural herbs and spices to add flavor to the healthy greens already in most people’s diets instead of meat. We can start to wean ourselves and our children off modern-day ‘sugar tits’ by drinking water and natural fruit and vegetable juices instead of Kool Aid or sodas. And we can discover a delicious new palette while strengthening the communities’ income by supporting any of the many soul food and Caribbean inspired vegan restaurants opening in cities throughout the country.
And most of all, we can help open up our collective minds by correcting anyone who says moving to a healthier, plant-based diet is ‘acting White’ by reminding them that this diet, like life itself, originated in Africa. We are not trying to eat like them – they are eating like us.
Alissa Nash is a published author and founder of ThatIsWhatIDo.com, a strategic marketing firm for small business owners. While she started her career as a Diversity Specialist, this former VP of Learning & Development has spent nearly 30 years gaining knowledge and insight into effective methods to influence human behavior. She firmly believes that, in addition to promoting the best of both conservative and progressive philosophies, the community needs the change management, knowledge transfer, brand development and strategic thinking skills of a variety of professionals to help communicate and implement the ideas and solutions championed by our sociologist and political scholars.
An estimated 3 out of 4 Black adults will get hypertension or chronically high blood pressure by age 55. Check out this interview with cardiologist Dr. Kim Williams and learn more about what you can do to prevent and reverse hypertension and other chronic diseases like obesity, type 2 diabetes, and high cholesterol.
© 2020, MY TRUE SELF, PLLC | ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.