December 22, 2024 • 36 mins
Dr. Galati starts with a Christmas story from his childhood. He also talks about his trip to target yesterday and the revelation he had. Dr. Galati goes on to share an analogy on the mechanical things we work with compared to our own body. He also talks about an article on bariatric surgery. MERRY CHRISTMAS!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Initialize sequencing coming to you live from Houston, Texas, home
to the world's largest medical center, and the approach brays
everything looking. This is Your Health First, the most beneficial
(00:22):
health program on radio with doctor Joe Bellotti. During the
next hour, you'll learn about health, wellness and the prevention
of disease. Now here's your host, doctor Joe Bellotti. Well,
(00:44):
a good Sunday evening to everybody, three days before Christmas.
I'm doctor Joe Galotti. You tuned into Your Health First.
We hear every Sunday between seven and eight pm Central Time,
broadcasting from our home rate seven forty k t H
in Houston, Texas, but we're heard around the globe on
(01:06):
the iHeartRadio network. Make sure you have a copy of
that downloaded so when you're traveling over New Years you
can listen to all of our programming that is available online. Well,
so nice to be here tonight with everybody. Hopefully you
have most of your shopping done, or you may be
driving home from the stores tonight some last minute shopping.
(01:31):
But I look at it that tomorrow's Monday, and I
still have some wiggle room that I can get some
extra little stocking stuffers and things that people need, or
at least the things that I think you need. That's
the way I look at gift giving. But anyway, I
do hope that you've gotten through the Christmas season unscathed
(01:53):
and kept your wits about yourself and didn't get too
crazy with getting stressed out, getting sick over it, eating
too much, drinking too much, and just really enjoy the
really the holiday spirit and the meaning of what Christmas
is all about, and those in the Christian faith keeping
(02:15):
Christ in Christmas as we like to say. So to
be part of the program, Doctor Joe Galotti dot com
is our website d R j O E g A
l A t I. That is the website, and once
you go there you can send me a message. You
can sign up for all of our social media including YouTube, Instagram,
(02:39):
and Facebook and see all the educational material that we
have posted over the years our podcast. So lots for
you to do there at doctor Joegalotti dot com. All right,
so to keep it really pretty mellow and easy on
this sun the evening right before Christmas, the one in
(03:05):
a way, if you want to look at this as
a Christmas story that I grew up with to share
all of you with some of you may have heard it,
and if you took a look at my ted talk,
which I gave in the fall of twenty three, so
a little over a year ago. I do talk about
(03:28):
this in more detail, but I will summarize it right here. So,
as many of you know, I grew up in New
York on Long Island, and my father spent his entire
career in pharmaceutical sales. And he had a number of
salespeople he worked with and managers and just had a
(03:50):
whole host of different connections and relationships with all kinds
of people. And it was really as a side note,
as a side note to see how we should all
lead ourselves or lead our lives in a very relationship
centric type of existence. My father was connected and had friends,
(04:16):
and these were really colleagues and friends. These were not
necessarily acquaintances. These are people that really my father had
deep relationships with which agains transmitted to his children, to
his family that we put a high priority on relationships.
But I digress for a moment. There was a gentleman
(04:38):
that worked with my father who was Orthodox Jewish clearly
didn't celebrate Christmas, but as a very religious individual in
the Jewish faith. What he would do is around Christmas
time he would make Christmas tree ornaments for all of
his Christian friends. And for a number of years, we
(05:02):
would get some sort of homemade Christmas ornament that we
would proudly hang on the tree that would come in
the mail in some sort of a box, or my
father would see him at work and he would take
it home, and my father would come home from work
and let us open it up. So anyway, so this
particular year, coming home from school and there is a
(05:27):
regular I would say, a regular sized brown Manila envelope
on the table, and it's addressed to the Galatti children.
So me and my two sisters, and so I rush
over to the kitchen table see it. I know exactly
what it is. It is this year's homemade Christmas ornament.
Rip it open, and I am completely taken back. Now
(05:50):
I believe I was ten years old this when this
took place. I open it up and it is a
piece of wood. It was basically a cedar shingle that
you would have on the side of your house and
with one of those heat pins or those you know,
(06:11):
a burn pen. What was written on it was three
words misery, is optional. And it had a host of
Christmas bling that was on it as well, you know,
Holly's were glued on it, little red balls and sprinkles
and all kinds of stuff like that. So I am
(06:31):
looking at this, and my sisters could sort of care less,
I think at this time. One sister was eight, one
was twelve. I was ten, right in the middle, and
I'm looking at this, and my mother is with me,
and I really said to my mom, this is a jip,
this is a ripoff. This is the most ridiculous thing
(06:52):
we could ever have gotten, a piece of wood with
burned on letters. Misery is optional. And my mother I,
you know, I'll tell you. We all have recollections of
our childhood, and I could tell you exactly where I
was standing in the kitchen. My mother came over to me,
put her arm around me, and she said, one day
(07:13):
you will understand how profound this statement is. Misery is optional.
And I thought for a second. My parents always treated
us like adults. They talked to us intelligently, and we
talked about these sort of deeper sayings. Misery is optional.
(07:33):
You know, to a ten year old kid, what the
hell does that mean? But my mother really spent a
few minutes to say that as we go through life,
the happiness or the misery or the sadness, the blues
or the sunny skies that we want to have, it
really is dependent on you. It is your call if
(07:56):
you want to be happy. And that was the central message. So,
as disappointed as I was with the physical ornament, misery
is optional. This hunk of wood with a wire hook
on it, we did put it on our tree. Now.
As kids would come over the house to look at
your tree, that's what we did years ago. If you
(08:17):
knew your friend put up their tree, you would go over.
Yes you would go over to play with a boy,
or play with a girl, or brothers and sisters, but
you would check out their tree for what was maybe
new this year, how they had it set up. And
as kids would come out over to my house, I
would escort them over to our tree and I'm like, hey,
(08:39):
see this thing, misery is optional. And they would look
at it and they would just have no idea what
the meaning meant. And so I realized that, well, maybe
this was just sort of an inside family thing that
we were somehow a little more intellectual. We didn't grow
up that way. But that's what I was thinking, And
(09:00):
so I will say to this day, many many decades later,
amongst ourselves, amongst the siblings in laws that have come
into the family, and our local friends, the little slogan
of misery is optional. It's stuck. It stayed with us,
(09:21):
and we talk about it all the time. If anybody,
any one of us in a family is having a
tough time and we're talking on the phone or in person,
we will basically in a way to almost cheer them up,
we would say, hey, come on, misery is optional, basically saying,
count your blessings for what you have, whatever you're going through,
(09:42):
is not that bad, and get over it and move on. Now,
I do believe that that saying has gotten into my DNA.
When I take care of my patients. Now, as many
of you know, I'm involved in liver disease. I take
care of patients with livid disease orrhosis, alcohol related livid disease,
(10:05):
fatty liver, lots of complicated issues, transplant, et cetera. And
when you are sitting with a patient and they have
a number of chronic, progressive medical problems that they're facing,
and you know that they're not doing well. They have
(10:26):
high blood pressure, they have diabetes that's poorly controlled, they
are smoking and have lung disease, or because they are overweight,
they have hip problems, or they have sleep apnea. So
they will come to me and they will voice that
they're basically not doing well. They have a lot of complaints.
(10:48):
I could give them a piece of yellow legal paper
and they could fill it up every inch of that
with a complaint, a problem, something they can't do. There's
stomach hurts, their head hurts, they can't sleep, etcetera, etcetera,
et cetera. And I will have this conversation with them,
and I will bring up this story and say misery
(11:11):
is optional. Now you may be sitting there to say, oh,
these people can't control what they have. Now, I'm not
talking about somebody that develops some sort of genetic problem
that they have no control over, or the person that
developed some sort of cancer unrelated to anything that they did,
or had a heart problem. But what I'm saying is,
(11:33):
and the message here that I tell my patients and
I share it with all of you on the radio
every week, is that your own happiness, your own wellness,
how you look at the world. Is it half full
or is it half empty? Are the shades up or
other shades pulled down? So much of it rests on you,
(11:58):
and the saying of misery is optional when you really
think about it, and you have to look in the
mirror and admit to yourself that misery is optional for
the most part, that you have control over your happiness,
You have control over your health, you have control over
(12:19):
your wellness. You have control over what you eat, how
much exercise you get, how much sleep you get. So
that Christmas story of misery is optional. With the crazy
homemade piece of wood, three words on it and Christmas
bling when I was ten years old. To this day,
(12:43):
we are still talking about it and realizing how insightful
and profound it really is. So with that, let us
take out first break. I am doctor Joe Galotti, always
thrilled to be here spending part on my weekend with
(13:03):
all of you. Our website doctor Joeglotti dot com. And
when you go there, there is a pop up that
you'll see to sign up for our newsletter. First and foremost,
number two, you can get an audio chapter to listen
free sample of my book Eating Yourself six So if
(13:24):
you like what it sounds like, you could get a
hard hardbound copy or get the audible edition if you
liked audio books. All right, stay tuned, we will be
right back. All right, everybody, Doctor Joe Galotti, you're tuned
into your Health First every Sunday between seven and eight
pm Central Time, broadcasting from our home station seven forty
(13:47):
k TH and U standing across the entire iHeartRadio app network.
Make sure you tell your friends and family to tune
in wherever they are. But you have to get the
iHeartRadio app. And don't forget our website, Doctor Joegalotti dot com,
Doctor Joegalotti dot com. All right, So we were talking
(14:08):
last segment about some holiday traditions, and you know, sometimes
things just dawn on me, and I'm sure you're the
same way. You're just walking around and you're like, wait
a second, I've got an idea or I have an
observation to share. So yesterday I had to go to
(14:28):
Target looking for a present. And so it was Saturday morning.
The area where Target was was relatively crowded at a
park sort of far away, and I said to myself,
you know what, let me take a look at my
Apple Watch to see how many steps I'm going to
take walking around Target on a little bit of a
(14:53):
goose hunt. But nonetheless, I was out walking and between
walking from the car going into Target, and of course
I went in a door that was on the absolute
other side of the department. I was looking for something,
(15:13):
so I am knowing that I have to go from
one side to the other. I said, look, it's Saturday morning,
I'm alone, I have nobody waiting on me. My wife
was tied up doing her own things, the kids were
on their own. I'm not working this weekend, and I said,
(15:33):
let me just sort of see what's going on. So
I meander through the entire Target, and I ultimately get
to the department. I see what I needed and make
my appropriate observation and purchase. But then I said, you
know what, I'm here. I haven't been in Target for
a while, and I start going around. I go to
(15:55):
the electronic department, the sporting goods department, go to the
cooking and kitchen department. I don't know, I just look
through the entire thing. I am the total shopper slash
tourist going through Target, and I eventually walk out. Well,
I put on about twenty eight hundred steps in my
(16:20):
sort of hacking around Target, and it dawned on me
if I had elected, now, I could have gotten this
thing online through Target Target dot com, but I went
to the store. But then I went to another store,
and I am, this is where I'm thinking to myself.
With all of the online shopping, we are no longer
(16:43):
walking around the stores, which means we are not exercising,
and we are probably sitting at home on the computer, sedentary,
probably eating a snack while we're working on the computer.
But anyway, hard time out now where news, weather or
(17:04):
traffic is coming up. We're going to continue this in
a moment. Doctor Joglotti dot com is a website. This
is your health first. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.
Welcome back, everybody. I sure hope everybody's having a great
Sunday evening. Maybe some of you have off this week
like me, and so I hope you make the best
(17:25):
of it. Spend time with your family, your loved ones,
your dear friends, and enjoy the holiday spirit, but also
make sure that you take care of yourselves and you
keep an eye on your health and watch out for
the overeating, watch out for the overindulgence with alcohol, Be
vigilant when you're out on the roads. And as I've
(17:47):
said many many times before, don't mix a pseudomenafin or
tile and all with alcohol. That could lead to very
serious liver damage to the point that it kills you.
Very careful what you're doing out there, and to follow along.
Doctor Joegalotti dot com is our website. D R j
(18:08):
O E g A l A TI dot com is
where you can send me a message, get a copy
of my book Eating Yourself Sick. Take a look at
our practice website, which is Liver Specialists of Texas. We
take care of people with liver disease, urosis, alcohol related
liver disease, other digestive issues. But you have to go
(18:31):
to our website to find out. And of course all
of our social media is posted there on our website. Okay,
so to catch up with everybody. I had this revelation
yesterday at Target and walking around. So this was just
one simple errand I took myself and I put on
(18:56):
close to three thousand steps that I normally would not
have done if I did not go out and exercise,
go to the gym, go for a walk, ride my
bike or something like that. Then shortly thereafter I went
to another store and I picked up another two thousand
steps walking around, And I was not consciously looking at
(19:20):
my watch and say, okay, now I got to do
fifty more steps to get to two miles or whatever.
I was just walking around. And so the revelation, which
I don't think is that Earth's shattering. I don't think
anybody from the Wall Street Journal is going to call
me tomorrow morning. But when you look at all of
(19:44):
the time that we spent purchasing things online, and I
am as big an offender as all of you may be.
I love Amazon. I love the fact that I could
order something when I come home from work and at
seven in the morning it's at my office. Not that
anything on life is that vital, but we do it anyway.
(20:08):
We are programmed to behave like this. If this was
nineteen fifty, we have no idea what we were looking
at if you were handed a smartphone right now. But
my message to you all is, and as we are
getting into January and the new administration, and I've spoken
(20:29):
about this before, the idea of make America healthy again,
and you have to look and think to yourselves. Where
can we pick up ground, Where can we do something
that gives us an advantage that maybe doesn't take too
(20:51):
much time, because we're always worried about time and what's easy,
and we're a little lazy. But you go back ten
years ago, fifteen years ago, when you wanted to go
to the grocery store. You would get in your car
and you'd go shopping, and you would spend anywhere from
fifteen to forty five minutes to an hour shopping. And
(21:13):
again you all know the drill. You park in the
parking lot, you have to walk in, get a cart,
walk around the store, up and down all the aisles,
and then you walk back out to your car and
cart the things back into your house. Many people, I'm
(21:36):
not necessarily one of them. I did it a few
times during COVID. You can order your groceries online and
either they're delivered to you, or you go to a
little pickup spot at the grocery store, call in and
they bring you out your bags of food. Very easy,
(21:57):
very convenient. But I would say that activity you lost
the opportunity to walk a quarter mile or maybe a
half mile, depending on how much you're walking around. But
then if we multiply it by all of the other
Let's put it this way, if you did not buy
(22:19):
all of the stuff online, period, we're going to assume
none of this is bought online. You need shampoo, you
go to your supermarket, you go to Walgreens, you go
to your local health and beauty store. That you get shampoo,
you have to walk out, walk into the store, walk
(22:39):
around the store, walk back out to the car. There's
eight hundred steps. You want to go to home depot. Well,
you could order anything you want from home depot and
get it delivered. Here's another chance of you not walking around.
I believe the message here is that we are taking
(23:05):
such advantage of all of this online opportunity that we
are cheating ourselves out of the simple act of walking.
We are not moving, and so we have more sedentary
jobs nowadays because the work the technology has shifted that
(23:30):
there are machines doing it and you're just sitting running
a machine. Let's put it that way. So even at work,
we're not walking around because many are still not going
to the office. You're not going down for lunch, You're
not walking over to Bob in the office next door.
You're not going to a different building. You just zoom
in or FaceTime or use your team's application, or you
(23:54):
just call them or you text them, say Bob, what's
going on with xyz? Where ten years ago you'd have
to get up off your douff and walk flights up,
flights down across a campus or something. So we're not
even doing that anymore. And while we are spending more
time sedentary, substituting the time that we would be out walking,
(24:20):
we're sitting down. So we're sitting down at work, We're
sitting down when we're home, and now we're sitting down
when we shop. These are lost opportunities to get up
and move. And you wonder why there is an obesity crisis.
You wonder why there is a diabets crisis. You wonder
why cardiovascular disease is still a problem. You wonder why
(24:42):
I am busy with fatty liver due to obesity, diabetes
and inactivity and bad food. So that is my revelation
that this technology has stolen from us the opportunity to move.
And so for many are you really thinking about this?
(25:06):
Are you saying, well, gee, I'm not going to the
mall anymore. I'm not going and walking around home depot anymore.
I am not going to the local strip mall to
walk from store to store to store. But I am exercising.
I am getting on my peloton for forty five minutes,
(25:27):
five days a week. I am going to the gym
and I'm doing elliptical work. I'm going to the pool
and swimming, I'm doing pilates, i am walking around the neighborhood.
I am riding my bike. And that is the problem.
We are not substituting the deficiency of exercise and movement
that all of this technology has taken away from us,
(25:50):
and that really worries me. So we have to almost
reprogram all of us to think. And more than anything,
it is that aha moment to say, you know what,
he might be right. We just are not moving. We're
not getting out. You could do everything from the palm
(26:10):
of your hand while you're on the couch watching TV,
or maybe have a laptop in front of you with
something you don't have to move. Where you do not move,
you gain weight and your body falls apart. You get
out of shape. So again, I hate to harp on everybody,
because I have to harp on myself and my own
family members to say, we have to exercise as a family,
(26:33):
we have to move as a family, we have to
move as a practice, as a business, as a community.
So put that into your think cap and I do
want to hear and know what you think. And you
could send me a message by going to doctor Joe
Galotti dot com. There's a tab for contact us, or
(26:58):
if you want to bypass everything and just email me directly.
It's radio at doctor Joegalotti dot com. Radio at doctor
Joeglotti dot com. All right, final segment coming up. Let
us take a break and we'll be right back. Welcome back, everybody,
Final segment for this pre Christmas edition of Your Health First.
(27:23):
We're here every Sunday between seven and apm and trying
to give you on well I should say, well thought out,
well curated material for all of you to think about.
We want to make you better consumers. We want to
raise your health IQ. We want you to really and
truly understand how your body works, the pitfalls, the idiosyncrasies
(27:50):
of the body, so that you can truly understand and
pick up on early signs and symptoms to get you
into the doctor and get things taken out. I believe
that you need to start thinking about your body as
your car. You need to fill it up with good gasoline.
(28:10):
You have to rotate the tires, you have to change
the oil. Your front dashboard has a number of dials
and lights and gauges, and you're looking at them. And
if you see that something is heating up, your engine
is heating up, you pull over. You know you need
to see a mechanic. If you see that your front
(28:31):
left tire sensor is down, you go in and you
get air, You get it checked out. You have a
nail in it? Do you have a leak? Do you
need a tire replaced? Or you're about to have a
blowout of your front tire while you're traveling taking your
kid back to school in January? These would all be
(28:52):
considered negligence if you ever got into an accident. Okay,
let's talk back this this scenario, because I talk about
it all the time, and I do think that there
is credence, and we need examples, We need analogies of
these mechanical things that we work with compared to our
own body, which we seem to be totally neglectful of.
(29:16):
So if you're driving and you're let's just be a
little dramatic. Here, your college aged student gets in a
bad car wreck because the check engine light was on
for two or three weeks before they came home. It
(29:38):
was making noise and nothing was done about it. And
they broke down the middle of the night, bad part
of town, middle of a highway on a rainy night.
You want to make sure that they are okay. You
go get them or whatever you do to sort of
rescue them from there. And then they say, you know,
(29:59):
you know what we add for gee, it's been about
three four weeks. I think it was like before Thanksgiving.
The check engine light was going on. The car would smoke.
When I would start it up, it was making this clicking,
grinding sound, and when I would step on the brake
it would veer off to the left, the wheel would move,
and you're sitting there with your kid, And if it
was my kid, I'd say, what the hell is wrong
(30:21):
with you? Why do you put yourself in such a
precarious position? Why do you put yourself at risk? At
first sign you could have taken into Mike the mechanic
and find out that X y Z was wrong with it.
We get it fixed, and we get it back on
the road. But no, I mean for the human body.
(30:42):
We don't take care of it the way we are
supposed to. And part of it is we're too busy
and our focuses elsewhere. But think of things in that term.
The other thing, while we're talking about taking care of yourself,
the year is coming to an end and everybody starts
(31:03):
thinking about these New Year's resolutions. Keep in mind, and
you all know it, these resolutions don't work. You have
to make meaningful change instead of trying to conquer the
world in thirty days by doing something so heroic to yourself.
It's really the small steps. Just start walking. Just start
(31:26):
cutting out going to lunch with your coworkers, to the
greasy spoon, burga joint and take a salad instead, take
some leftovers, take some chicken that you made the night
before with some vegetables. So it's all these sort of
atomic steps that you need to take. All right. There
(31:49):
was an article that I thought was interesting that I
wanted to share with you. Is from the Journal of
the American Metaical Association JAMA, back a few weeks ago,
and the title was Metabolic bariatric surgery in the era
(32:11):
of GLP one receptor agonist for obesity management. So bariatric
surgery is a surgical procedure where they in a sense,
replumb the stomach and the small intestine so that you
lose weight. You really create a state of malabsorption where
(32:33):
you don't absorb the food. The other is, if you
construct a stomach that is smaller, you just cannot hold
as much food. You become full and that cuts down
on the amount you eat and obviously you will then
lose weight. These are proven surgeries that work. The technology
(32:54):
from a surgical standpoint has improved greatly over the past ten, fifteen,
twenty years. But that is a mainstay of management of obesity.
It is bariatric surgery. But now you may say, wait
a second, we have these GLP one receptor agonists, the
ozempics of the world, and how do they fit in
(33:16):
to obesity management. So this particular study asked that question.
And so what they did was they looked at seventeen
million unique patients between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three,
(33:39):
and they looked at patients that were on GLP one
drugs okay, and they tried to figure out what really
happened with them, and the bottom line conclusion is that
during this study period, eighty one thousand patients were prescribed
(34:01):
these GLP one drugs and a little over five thousand
patients underwent bariatric surgery. And what they found is that
patients with the bariatric surgery were more medically complex than
those that were prescribed the golp one drugs or no treatment.
(34:26):
So what they also found was that there it was
one hundred and thirty two percent increase in patients prescribed
the golp one agents between the last six months of
twenty twenty two versus the last six months of twenty
twenty three, So there was a big, big increase in
the number of prescriptions. And also, in contrast, there was
(34:48):
a twenty five percent decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric
surgery compared to the same period of time. And so
what we are finding that in this particular study, there
was about a twenty five decrease twenty five percent decrease
in the rate of bariatric surgery and patients were opting
(35:09):
more for a medical management through the GLP one drugs. Now,
you may say, well, that's that seems reasonable. Why should
these people go for surgery? There. There certainly are some
inherent risks of any kind of surgery, anesthesia, infections, et cetera.
But at the same time, there is not a hidden
(35:32):
cost or risk with the GLP one drugs, but we
do know that they are expensive. There is a very
high rate of side effects, typically the gastro intestinal tract,
where you are bloated, you are nauseous, you get constipated,
and all of this leads to you stopping these GLP
one drugs and guess what happens, You gain weight back.
(35:57):
And so the durability of the weight loss is going
to be in favor of the surgery where the golp
ones may be a little bit more of a quick fix.
I think that this is a topic and discussion we're
going to continue to face as the years go on,
and I am hopeful that in the early part of
(36:19):
twenty twenty three we get my friend and colleague, doctor
Garth Davis on the phone here or in the studio
and talk about it. He is a very well known
bariatric surgeon and really is quite articulate when it comes
to food and nutrition and approaching all of this. So
with that said, doctor Joe Glotti signing off. Hope you
(36:40):
all have a wonderful Christmas a little later in a week.
Love one another, take care of each other, but most importantly,
you have to take care of yourself. So take care.
We'll see you next Sunday evening
Initialize sequencing coming to you live from Houston, Texas, home
to the world's largest medical center, and the approach brays
everything looking. This is Your Health First, the most beneficial
(00:22):
health program on radio with doctor Joe Bellotti. During the
next hour, you'll learn about health, wellness and the prevention
of disease. Now here's your host, doctor Joe Bellotti. Well,
(00:44):
a good Sunday evening to everybody, three days before Christmas.
I'm doctor Joe Galotti. You tuned into Your Health First.
We hear every Sunday between seven and eight pm Central Time,
broadcasting from our home rate seven forty k t H
in Houston, Texas, but we're heard around the globe on
(01:06):
the iHeartRadio network. Make sure you have a copy of
that downloaded so when you're traveling over New Years you
can listen to all of our programming that is available online. Well,
so nice to be here tonight with everybody. Hopefully you
have most of your shopping done, or you may be
driving home from the stores tonight some last minute shopping.
(01:31):
But I look at it that tomorrow's Monday, and I
still have some wiggle room that I can get some
extra little stocking stuffers and things that people need, or
at least the things that I think you need. That's
the way I look at gift giving. But anyway, I
do hope that you've gotten through the Christmas season unscathed
(01:53):
and kept your wits about yourself and didn't get too
crazy with getting stressed out, getting sick over it, eating
too much, drinking too much, and just really enjoy the
really the holiday spirit and the meaning of what Christmas
is all about, and those in the Christian faith keeping
(02:15):
Christ in Christmas as we like to say. So to
be part of the program, Doctor Joe Galotti dot com
is our website d R j O E g A
l A t I. That is the website, and once
you go there you can send me a message. You
can sign up for all of our social media including YouTube, Instagram,
(02:39):
and Facebook and see all the educational material that we
have posted over the years our podcast. So lots for
you to do there at doctor Joegalotti dot com. All right,
so to keep it really pretty mellow and easy on
this sun the evening right before Christmas, the one in
(03:05):
a way, if you want to look at this as
a Christmas story that I grew up with to share
all of you with some of you may have heard it,
and if you took a look at my ted talk,
which I gave in the fall of twenty three, so
a little over a year ago. I do talk about
(03:28):
this in more detail, but I will summarize it right here. So,
as many of you know, I grew up in New
York on Long Island, and my father spent his entire
career in pharmaceutical sales. And he had a number of
salespeople he worked with and managers and just had a
(03:50):
whole host of different connections and relationships with all kinds
of people. And it was really as a side note,
as a side note to see how we should all
lead ourselves or lead our lives in a very relationship
centric type of existence. My father was connected and had friends,
(04:16):
and these were really colleagues and friends. These were not
necessarily acquaintances. These are people that really my father had
deep relationships with which agains transmitted to his children, to
his family that we put a high priority on relationships.
But I digress for a moment. There was a gentleman
(04:38):
that worked with my father who was Orthodox Jewish clearly
didn't celebrate Christmas, but as a very religious individual in
the Jewish faith. What he would do is around Christmas
time he would make Christmas tree ornaments for all of
his Christian friends. And for a number of years, we
(05:02):
would get some sort of homemade Christmas ornament that we
would proudly hang on the tree that would come in
the mail in some sort of a box, or my
father would see him at work and he would take
it home, and my father would come home from work
and let us open it up. So anyway, so this
particular year, coming home from school and there is a
(05:27):
regular I would say, a regular sized brown Manila envelope
on the table, and it's addressed to the Galatti children.
So me and my two sisters, and so I rush
over to the kitchen table see it. I know exactly
what it is. It is this year's homemade Christmas ornament.
Rip it open, and I am completely taken back. Now
(05:50):
I believe I was ten years old this when this
took place. I open it up and it is a
piece of wood. It was basically a cedar shingle that
you would have on the side of your house and
with one of those heat pins or those you know,
(06:11):
a burn pen. What was written on it was three
words misery, is optional. And it had a host of
Christmas bling that was on it as well, you know,
Holly's were glued on it, little red balls and sprinkles
and all kinds of stuff like that. So I am
(06:31):
looking at this, and my sisters could sort of care less,
I think at this time. One sister was eight, one
was twelve. I was ten, right in the middle, and
I'm looking at this, and my mother is with me,
and I really said to my mom, this is a jip,
this is a ripoff. This is the most ridiculous thing
(06:52):
we could ever have gotten, a piece of wood with
burned on letters. Misery is optional. And my mother I,
you know, I'll tell you. We all have recollections of
our childhood, and I could tell you exactly where I
was standing in the kitchen. My mother came over to me,
put her arm around me, and she said, one day
(07:13):
you will understand how profound this statement is. Misery is optional.
And I thought for a second. My parents always treated
us like adults. They talked to us intelligently, and we
talked about these sort of deeper sayings. Misery is optional.
(07:33):
You know, to a ten year old kid, what the
hell does that mean? But my mother really spent a
few minutes to say that as we go through life,
the happiness or the misery or the sadness, the blues
or the sunny skies that we want to have, it
really is dependent on you. It is your call if
(07:56):
you want to be happy. And that was the central message. So,
as disappointed as I was with the physical ornament, misery
is optional. This hunk of wood with a wire hook
on it, we did put it on our tree. Now.
As kids would come over the house to look at
your tree, that's what we did years ago. If you
(08:17):
knew your friend put up their tree, you would go over.
Yes you would go over to play with a boy,
or play with a girl, or brothers and sisters, but
you would check out their tree for what was maybe
new this year, how they had it set up. And
as kids would come out over to my house, I
would escort them over to our tree and I'm like, hey,
(08:39):
see this thing, misery is optional. And they would look
at it and they would just have no idea what
the meaning meant. And so I realized that, well, maybe
this was just sort of an inside family thing that
we were somehow a little more intellectual. We didn't grow
up that way. But that's what I was thinking, And
(09:00):
so I will say to this day, many many decades later,
amongst ourselves, amongst the siblings in laws that have come
into the family, and our local friends, the little slogan
of misery is optional. It's stuck. It stayed with us,
(09:21):
and we talk about it all the time. If anybody,
any one of us in a family is having a
tough time and we're talking on the phone or in person,
we will basically in a way to almost cheer them up,
we would say, hey, come on, misery is optional, basically saying,
count your blessings for what you have, whatever you're going through,
(09:42):
is not that bad, and get over it and move on. Now,
I do believe that that saying has gotten into my DNA.
When I take care of my patients. Now, as many
of you know, I'm involved in liver disease. I take
care of patients with livid disease orrhosis, alcohol related livid disease,
(10:05):
fatty liver, lots of complicated issues, transplant, et cetera. And
when you are sitting with a patient and they have
a number of chronic, progressive medical problems that they're facing,
and you know that they're not doing well. They have
(10:26):
high blood pressure, they have diabetes that's poorly controlled, they
are smoking and have lung disease, or because they are overweight,
they have hip problems, or they have sleep apnea. So
they will come to me and they will voice that
they're basically not doing well. They have a lot of complaints.
(10:48):
I could give them a piece of yellow legal paper
and they could fill it up every inch of that
with a complaint, a problem, something they can't do. There's
stomach hurts, their head hurts, they can't sleep, etcetera, etcetera,
et cetera. And I will have this conversation with them,
and I will bring up this story and say misery
(11:11):
is optional. Now you may be sitting there to say, oh,
these people can't control what they have. Now, I'm not
talking about somebody that develops some sort of genetic problem
that they have no control over, or the person that
developed some sort of cancer unrelated to anything that they did,
or had a heart problem. But what I'm saying is,
(11:33):
and the message here that I tell my patients and
I share it with all of you on the radio
every week, is that your own happiness, your own wellness,
how you look at the world. Is it half full
or is it half empty? Are the shades up or
other shades pulled down? So much of it rests on you,
(11:58):
and the saying of misery is optional when you really
think about it, and you have to look in the
mirror and admit to yourself that misery is optional for
the most part, that you have control over your happiness,
You have control over your health, you have control over
(12:19):
your wellness. You have control over what you eat, how
much exercise you get, how much sleep you get. So
that Christmas story of misery is optional. With the crazy
homemade piece of wood, three words on it and Christmas
bling when I was ten years old. To this day,
(12:43):
we are still talking about it and realizing how insightful
and profound it really is. So with that, let us
take out first break. I am doctor Joe Galotti, always
thrilled to be here spending part on my weekend with
(13:03):
all of you. Our website doctor Joeglotti dot com. And
when you go there, there is a pop up that
you'll see to sign up for our newsletter. First and foremost,
number two, you can get an audio chapter to listen
free sample of my book Eating Yourself six So if
(13:24):
you like what it sounds like, you could get a
hard hardbound copy or get the audible edition if you
liked audio books. All right, stay tuned, we will be
right back. All right, everybody, Doctor Joe Galotti, you're tuned
into your Health First every Sunday between seven and eight
pm Central Time, broadcasting from our home station seven forty
(13:47):
k TH and U standing across the entire iHeartRadio app network.
Make sure you tell your friends and family to tune
in wherever they are. But you have to get the
iHeartRadio app. And don't forget our website, Doctor Joegalotti dot com,
Doctor Joegalotti dot com. All right, So we were talking
(14:08):
last segment about some holiday traditions, and you know, sometimes
things just dawn on me, and I'm sure you're the
same way. You're just walking around and you're like, wait
a second, I've got an idea or I have an
observation to share. So yesterday I had to go to
(14:28):
Target looking for a present. And so it was Saturday morning.
The area where Target was was relatively crowded at a
park sort of far away, and I said to myself,
you know what, let me take a look at my
Apple Watch to see how many steps I'm going to
take walking around Target on a little bit of a
(14:53):
goose hunt. But nonetheless, I was out walking and between
walking from the car going into Target, and of course
I went in a door that was on the absolute
other side of the department. I was looking for something,
(15:13):
so I am knowing that I have to go from
one side to the other. I said, look, it's Saturday morning,
I'm alone, I have nobody waiting on me. My wife
was tied up doing her own things, the kids were
on their own. I'm not working this weekend, and I said,
(15:33):
let me just sort of see what's going on. So
I meander through the entire Target, and I ultimately get
to the department. I see what I needed and make
my appropriate observation and purchase. But then I said, you
know what, I'm here. I haven't been in Target for
a while, and I start going around. I go to
(15:55):
the electronic department, the sporting goods department, go to the
cooking and kitchen department. I don't know, I just look
through the entire thing. I am the total shopper slash
tourist going through Target, and I eventually walk out. Well,
I put on about twenty eight hundred steps in my
(16:20):
sort of hacking around Target, and it dawned on me
if I had elected, now, I could have gotten this
thing online through Target Target dot com, but I went
to the store. But then I went to another store,
and I am, this is where I'm thinking to myself.
With all of the online shopping, we are no longer
(16:43):
walking around the stores, which means we are not exercising,
and we are probably sitting at home on the computer, sedentary,
probably eating a snack while we're working on the computer.
But anyway, hard time out now where news, weather or
(17:04):
traffic is coming up. We're going to continue this in
a moment. Doctor Joglotti dot com is a website. This
is your health first. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.
Welcome back, everybody. I sure hope everybody's having a great
Sunday evening. Maybe some of you have off this week
like me, and so I hope you make the best
(17:25):
of it. Spend time with your family, your loved ones,
your dear friends, and enjoy the holiday spirit, but also
make sure that you take care of yourselves and you
keep an eye on your health and watch out for
the overeating, watch out for the overindulgence with alcohol, Be
vigilant when you're out on the roads. And as I've
(17:47):
said many many times before, don't mix a pseudomenafin or
tile and all with alcohol. That could lead to very
serious liver damage to the point that it kills you.
Very careful what you're doing out there, and to follow along.
Doctor Joegalotti dot com is our website. D R j
(18:08):
O E g A l A TI dot com is
where you can send me a message, get a copy
of my book Eating Yourself Sick. Take a look at
our practice website, which is Liver Specialists of Texas. We
take care of people with liver disease, urosis, alcohol related
liver disease, other digestive issues. But you have to go
(18:31):
to our website to find out. And of course all
of our social media is posted there on our website. Okay,
so to catch up with everybody. I had this revelation
yesterday at Target and walking around. So this was just
one simple errand I took myself and I put on
(18:56):
close to three thousand steps that I normally would not
have done if I did not go out and exercise,
go to the gym, go for a walk, ride my
bike or something like that. Then shortly thereafter I went
to another store and I picked up another two thousand
steps walking around, And I was not consciously looking at
(19:20):
my watch and say, okay, now I got to do
fifty more steps to get to two miles or whatever.
I was just walking around. And so the revelation, which
I don't think is that Earth's shattering. I don't think
anybody from the Wall Street Journal is going to call
me tomorrow morning. But when you look at all of
(19:44):
the time that we spent purchasing things online, and I
am as big an offender as all of you may be.
I love Amazon. I love the fact that I could
order something when I come home from work and at
seven in the morning it's at my office. Not that
anything on life is that vital, but we do it anyway.
(20:08):
We are programmed to behave like this. If this was
nineteen fifty, we have no idea what we were looking
at if you were handed a smartphone right now. But
my message to you all is, and as we are
getting into January and the new administration, and I've spoken
(20:29):
about this before, the idea of make America healthy again,
and you have to look and think to yourselves. Where
can we pick up ground, Where can we do something
that gives us an advantage that maybe doesn't take too
(20:51):
much time, because we're always worried about time and what's easy,
and we're a little lazy. But you go back ten
years ago, fifteen years ago, when you wanted to go
to the grocery store. You would get in your car
and you'd go shopping, and you would spend anywhere from
fifteen to forty five minutes to an hour shopping. And
(21:13):
again you all know the drill. You park in the
parking lot, you have to walk in, get a cart,
walk around the store, up and down all the aisles,
and then you walk back out to your car and
cart the things back into your house. Many people, I'm
(21:36):
not necessarily one of them. I did it a few
times during COVID. You can order your groceries online and
either they're delivered to you, or you go to a
little pickup spot at the grocery store, call in and
they bring you out your bags of food. Very easy,
(21:57):
very convenient. But I would say that activity you lost
the opportunity to walk a quarter mile or maybe a
half mile, depending on how much you're walking around. But
then if we multiply it by all of the other
Let's put it this way, if you did not buy
(22:19):
all of the stuff online, period, we're going to assume
none of this is bought online. You need shampoo, you
go to your supermarket, you go to Walgreens, you go
to your local health and beauty store. That you get shampoo,
you have to walk out, walk into the store, walk
(22:39):
around the store, walk back out to the car. There's
eight hundred steps. You want to go to home depot. Well,
you could order anything you want from home depot and
get it delivered. Here's another chance of you not walking around.
I believe the message here is that we are taking
(23:05):
such advantage of all of this online opportunity that we
are cheating ourselves out of the simple act of walking.
We are not moving, and so we have more sedentary
jobs nowadays because the work the technology has shifted that
(23:30):
there are machines doing it and you're just sitting running
a machine. Let's put it that way. So even at work,
we're not walking around because many are still not going
to the office. You're not going down for lunch, You're
not walking over to Bob in the office next door.
You're not going to a different building. You just zoom
in or FaceTime or use your team's application, or you
(23:54):
just call them or you text them, say Bob, what's
going on with xyz? Where ten years ago you'd have
to get up off your douff and walk flights up,
flights down across a campus or something. So we're not
even doing that anymore. And while we are spending more
time sedentary, substituting the time that we would be out walking,
(24:20):
we're sitting down. So we're sitting down at work, We're
sitting down when we're home, and now we're sitting down
when we shop. These are lost opportunities to get up
and move. And you wonder why there is an obesity crisis.
You wonder why there is a diabets crisis. You wonder
why cardiovascular disease is still a problem. You wonder why
(24:42):
I am busy with fatty liver due to obesity, diabetes
and inactivity and bad food. So that is my revelation
that this technology has stolen from us the opportunity to move.
And so for many are you really thinking about this?
(25:06):
Are you saying, well, gee, I'm not going to the
mall anymore. I'm not going and walking around home depot anymore.
I am not going to the local strip mall to
walk from store to store to store. But I am exercising.
I am getting on my peloton for forty five minutes,
(25:27):
five days a week. I am going to the gym
and I'm doing elliptical work. I'm going to the pool
and swimming, I'm doing pilates, i am walking around the neighborhood.
I am riding my bike. And that is the problem.
We are not substituting the deficiency of exercise and movement
that all of this technology has taken away from us,
(25:50):
and that really worries me. So we have to almost
reprogram all of us to think. And more than anything,
it is that aha moment to say, you know what,
he might be right. We just are not moving. We're
not getting out. You could do everything from the palm
(26:10):
of your hand while you're on the couch watching TV,
or maybe have a laptop in front of you with
something you don't have to move. Where you do not move,
you gain weight and your body falls apart. You get
out of shape. So again, I hate to harp on everybody,
because I have to harp on myself and my own
family members to say, we have to exercise as a family,
(26:33):
we have to move as a family, we have to
move as a practice, as a business, as a community.
So put that into your think cap and I do
want to hear and know what you think. And you
could send me a message by going to doctor Joe
Galotti dot com. There's a tab for contact us, or
(26:58):
if you want to bypass everything and just email me directly.
It's radio at doctor Joegalotti dot com. Radio at doctor
Joeglotti dot com. All right, final segment coming up. Let
us take a break and we'll be right back. Welcome back, everybody,
Final segment for this pre Christmas edition of Your Health First.
(27:23):
We're here every Sunday between seven and apm and trying
to give you on well I should say, well thought out,
well curated material for all of you to think about.
We want to make you better consumers. We want to
raise your health IQ. We want you to really and
truly understand how your body works, the pitfalls, the idiosyncrasies
(27:50):
of the body, so that you can truly understand and
pick up on early signs and symptoms to get you
into the doctor and get things taken out. I believe
that you need to start thinking about your body as
your car. You need to fill it up with good gasoline.
(28:10):
You have to rotate the tires, you have to change
the oil. Your front dashboard has a number of dials
and lights and gauges, and you're looking at them. And
if you see that something is heating up, your engine
is heating up, you pull over. You know you need
to see a mechanic. If you see that your front
(28:31):
left tire sensor is down, you go in and you
get air, You get it checked out. You have a
nail in it? Do you have a leak? Do you
need a tire replaced? Or you're about to have a
blowout of your front tire while you're traveling taking your
kid back to school in January? These would all be
(28:52):
considered negligence if you ever got into an accident. Okay,
let's talk back this this scenario, because I talk about
it all the time, and I do think that there
is credence, and we need examples, We need analogies of
these mechanical things that we work with compared to our
own body, which we seem to be totally neglectful of.
(29:16):
So if you're driving and you're let's just be a
little dramatic. Here, your college aged student gets in a
bad car wreck because the check engine light was on
for two or three weeks before they came home. It
(29:38):
was making noise and nothing was done about it. And
they broke down the middle of the night, bad part
of town, middle of a highway on a rainy night.
You want to make sure that they are okay. You
go get them or whatever you do to sort of
rescue them from there. And then they say, you know,
(29:59):
you know what we add for gee, it's been about
three four weeks. I think it was like before Thanksgiving.
The check engine light was going on. The car would smoke.
When I would start it up, it was making this clicking,
grinding sound, and when I would step on the brake
it would veer off to the left, the wheel would move,
and you're sitting there with your kid, And if it
was my kid, I'd say, what the hell is wrong
(30:21):
with you? Why do you put yourself in such a
precarious position? Why do you put yourself at risk? At
first sign you could have taken into Mike the mechanic
and find out that X y Z was wrong with it.
We get it fixed, and we get it back on
the road. But no, I mean for the human body.
(30:42):
We don't take care of it the way we are
supposed to. And part of it is we're too busy
and our focuses elsewhere. But think of things in that term.
The other thing, while we're talking about taking care of yourself,
the year is coming to an end and everybody starts
(31:03):
thinking about these New Year's resolutions. Keep in mind, and
you all know it, these resolutions don't work. You have
to make meaningful change instead of trying to conquer the
world in thirty days by doing something so heroic to yourself.
It's really the small steps. Just start walking. Just start
(31:26):
cutting out going to lunch with your coworkers, to the
greasy spoon, burga joint and take a salad instead, take
some leftovers, take some chicken that you made the night
before with some vegetables. So it's all these sort of
atomic steps that you need to take. All right. There
(31:49):
was an article that I thought was interesting that I
wanted to share with you. Is from the Journal of
the American Metaical Association JAMA, back a few weeks ago,
and the title was Metabolic bariatric surgery in the era
(32:11):
of GLP one receptor agonist for obesity management. So bariatric
surgery is a surgical procedure where they in a sense,
replumb the stomach and the small intestine so that you
lose weight. You really create a state of malabsorption where
(32:33):
you don't absorb the food. The other is, if you
construct a stomach that is smaller, you just cannot hold
as much food. You become full and that cuts down
on the amount you eat and obviously you will then
lose weight. These are proven surgeries that work. The technology
(32:54):
from a surgical standpoint has improved greatly over the past ten, fifteen,
twenty years. But that is a mainstay of management of obesity.
It is bariatric surgery. But now you may say, wait
a second, we have these GLP one receptor agonists, the
ozempics of the world, and how do they fit in
(33:16):
to obesity management. So this particular study asked that question.
And so what they did was they looked at seventeen
million unique patients between twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three,
(33:39):
and they looked at patients that were on GLP one
drugs okay, and they tried to figure out what really
happened with them, and the bottom line conclusion is that
during this study period, eighty one thousand patients were prescribed
(34:01):
these GLP one drugs and a little over five thousand
patients underwent bariatric surgery. And what they found is that
patients with the bariatric surgery were more medically complex than
those that were prescribed the golp one drugs or no treatment.
(34:26):
So what they also found was that there it was
one hundred and thirty two percent increase in patients prescribed
the golp one agents between the last six months of
twenty twenty two versus the last six months of twenty
twenty three, So there was a big, big increase in
the number of prescriptions. And also, in contrast, there was
(34:48):
a twenty five percent decrease in patients undergoing metabolic bariatric
surgery compared to the same period of time. And so
what we are finding that in this particular study, there
was about a twenty five decrease twenty five percent decrease
in the rate of bariatric surgery and patients were opting
(35:09):
more for a medical management through the GLP one drugs. Now,
you may say, well, that's that seems reasonable. Why should
these people go for surgery? There. There certainly are some
inherent risks of any kind of surgery, anesthesia, infections, et cetera.
But at the same time, there is not a hidden
(35:32):
cost or risk with the GLP one drugs, but we
do know that they are expensive. There is a very
high rate of side effects, typically the gastro intestinal tract,
where you are bloated, you are nauseous, you get constipated,
and all of this leads to you stopping these GLP
one drugs and guess what happens, You gain weight back.
(35:57):
And so the durability of the weight loss is going
to be in favor of the surgery where the golp
ones may be a little bit more of a quick fix.
I think that this is a topic and discussion we're
going to continue to face as the years go on,
and I am hopeful that in the early part of
(36:19):
twenty twenty three we get my friend and colleague, doctor
Garth Davis on the phone here or in the studio
and talk about it. He is a very well known
bariatric surgeon and really is quite articulate when it comes
to food and nutrition and approaching all of this. So
with that said, doctor Joe Glotti signing off. Hope you
(36:40):
all have a wonderful Christmas a little later in a week.
Love one another, take care of each other, but most importantly,
you have to take care of yourself. So take care.
We'll see you next Sunday evening
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Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.