What are ways to help people make healthy choices?

The key to helping people live more healthfully is to make it easy to make healthy choices and hard to make unhealthy choices. Michael Roizen, MD, shares some ways to do this.

Transcript

00:00

So the only way we can fight it is to change our environment. So we're not teens. We've done that with alcohol.

00:07

We don't allow it to be sold in certain things. And it's not the cultural norm to have it.

00:13

[MUSIC PLAYING] Ingrained brain addictions, so we

00:24

know that we have addictions similarly to narcotics. But sugar, saturated fat, and salt

00:32

seem to trigger the same responses. And when you combine them together, those addictions are too tough for us.

00:40

So the only way we can fight it is to change our environment so we're not teased. We've done that with alcohol.

00:48

We don't allow it to be sold in certain things. And it's not the cultural norm to have it. We've done that with heroin.

00:55

We don't offer it on the street very easily. We try and do it with tobacco by taxing it.

01:01

When you're trying to do this, what we've done at the Cleveland Clinic is we've changed our vending machines so they don't have any of those products in it.

01:08

Literally, you can't buy a product with saturated fat out of our vending machine. You can't buy it with added sugar or added syrups.

01:15

You can't buy it with salt above a certain level. Similarly, we've taken all the sugar drinks out of the campus.

01:24

We don't even have fat in milk. So we've taken all the, if you will, whole milk away

01:31

and things like that to change the environment so that it's easy to be healthy, hard to be unhealthy.

01:38

We've made a walking track, encourage that. We have games on the internet so it's social. We've made our fitness clubs free.

01:45

What are we doing? All we're doing is trying to make it easy to make healthy choices, hard to make unhealthy choices.

01:54

So if you're a patient, you can't get biscuits and gravy unless you send out for it and have a special delivery

02:01

service bring it to you. So we don't want you to be able to get sick easily. [AUDIO LOGO]