Dr Ezekiel Emanuel, a US oncologist, bioethicist and health policy expert, has published a book on wellness called Eat Your Ice Cream.
For many of us, the pursuit of health and wellness can quickly become an obsession - think of the supplements boom, the creatine craze, protein and fibre-maxxing.
Dr Ezekiel Emanuel, a US oncologist, bioethicist, professor and health policy expert, wants to change that.
“Nothing should become an obsession in the wellness space for you. That’s misplacing what’s important in life,” Emanuel says.
In his most recent book, Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life,he advises a back-to-basics approach to health: eating well, exercising, cultivating relationships, training your brain, getting enough sleep and staying risk-averse – by getting regular health screenings and not smoking.
He says wellness isn’t a one-and-done situation.
“You’re going to have to do wellness for decades and decades,” Emanuel says.
“You better enjoy what you’re doing, otherwise you’re not going to do it every day. You might have to start out willing yourself to do it, but it should become part of your routine and then actually you should miss it if you don’t do it.”
Many wellness trends involve making drastic or extreme changes to your diet or exercise routine.
But as Emanuel notes, when you find something that’s good, it doesn’t mean more is better.
“The body is a very carefully balanced machine and sometimes getting more is actually counterproductive. You [hear] a lot these days about the immune system, people want to ‘rev up’ the immune system – that’s wrong.
“We have a very carefully balanced immune system that is so complicated we still don’t fully understand it. Too much immunity gets you autoimmune diseases, gets you a lot of inflammatory diseases. Too little exposes you to infections, you can be very sickly. So you need to find that balance.”
Emanuel says we each have different health histories and needs, so just because an influencer says you should eat more protein, that doesn’t mean it’s true.
“Part of the wellness industrial complex is this mindset of, if this additive is good, more of it, tons of it must be better. That’s totally wrong ... you have no idea what is optimal for that individual,” he says.
In fact, he believes a lot of the health advice that circulates on social media can do more harm than good.
“This issue about vaccines that seems to be sweeping the world that somehow we don’t need vaccines, we shouldn’t be vaccinated - it’s a terrible idea,” Emanuel says.
“Vaccines are one of the great lifesavers of all time and this idea that they’re dangerous to us, including the Covid vaccine, is just total nonsense. That’s one thing which I think is pretty worrisome.
“Another thing that preoccupies a lot of people in the wellness industrial complex is all these supplements.”
While some supplements are effective, many of them are “terrible”, he says.
“In general, we way overdo the supplements and get them totally wrong - and that’s a bad mistake.”
In Emanuel’s home country, there’s been a big push under MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) for people to consume more protein and eat more meat.
But he says most of us are already getting plenty of protein.
“In the United States we eat an average of 10 ounces [about 280g] of meat a day, an outrageously high amount, 225 pounds a year, way more than we probably should, especially red meat.
“You’ve got to be moderate about it ... one or two servings of meat a week, about 6 ounces (170g), that’s the right level.”
Conversely, many public figures brag that they need only minimal sleep to function - but Emanuel says you shouldn’t follow suit.
“Sleep is very important... this idea of ‘I can cut that out’, or ‘I can minimise it’, is just foolish.”
Eat more dairy
“If there’s a single food that I think is a superfood that we don’t recognise, it’s yoghurt,” Emanuel says.
“It’s dairy, it’s got good protein content, it’s got good fats, it’s also fermented so it helps with the microbiome, it’s a probiotic and, of all the food groups, is associated with losing the most weight for those people who worry about that.”
Dairy is associated with being taller. “The Dutch have become the tallest people in the world, and there are multiple hypotheses about why - but one of them is they’re very high consumers of dairy.”
It’s also linked to reduced risks of type 2 diabetes and colorectal cancer.
“There are negatives and one should be very clear about it - it’s also associated with some increased risks of some cancers like prostate cancer - but from a pure numbers standpoint, colorectal cancer’s a way bigger problem.”
If you drink alcohol, don’t drink alone
Emanuel, himself teetotal, advocates for moderation when it comes to drinking alcohol.
“Do it in a moderate way and don’t swing wildly to extremes,” he says.
“You have to put it into context - what’s a safe level to drink, how to drink, what are the contexts in which you should drink.”
Where and how you drink matters as much to your health as whether you drink, he adds.
“[Having] three drinks a week is perfectly reasonable, but you should do it in a social setting, make it a way of interacting with other people. Don’t binge drink, don’t have five drinks in one sitting.
“Don’t drink alone, not facilitating your social connection with other people.”
Enjoy your ice cream
As can be seen from the title of his book, Emanuel is “big on ice cream”.
“First of all, it does have dairy in it. Second of all ... it’s highly associated with reduction of type 2 diabetes. It’s got sugar in it, but there are different ways of managing the sugar.
“The glycemic index, which is how fast your glucose goes up once you eat a sugar load, depends not just on eating the sugar, it depends upon the context in which it’s presented to the body.
“So if it’s eaten in conjunction with other things, the glycemic index can go down when you’re protected by fibre, you’re protected by other components.”
The fat and protein in dairy ice cream slow digestion, in turn slowing down the uptake of sugar in your blood.
But perhaps the biggest reason to enjoy an occasional treat like ice cream is simply that it makes us happy - and that’s good for us too.
“Who doesn’t like ice cream? It brings a smile to everyone’s face,” Emanuel says.
Of course, “you’ve got to eat good ice cream” - and that means reading the label before digging in.
“Don’t eat the ice creams with the emulsifiers, the polysorbate 80s and all those additions. Get the stuff that has three, four, five, six ingredients and not 15 ingredients.”
- Eat Your Ice Cream: Six Simple Rules for a Long and Healthy Life is out in New Zealand on April 28.
Bethany Reitsma is a lifestyle writer who has been with the NZ Herald since 2019. She specialises in all things health and wellbeing and is passionate about telling Kiwis’ real-life stories.