Rochester Doctors Arm Residents with a Dietary Blueprint to Combat Chronic Disease

WASHINGTON—Physicians in Rochester, N.Y., are encouraging city residents to fight back against our nation’s top killer—chronic disease—by adopting a plant-based vegan diet for 21 days on May 1, 2016.

The Kickstart Your Health Rochester program, created by the nonprofit Physicians Committee and supported by Mayor Lovely Warren and the City of Rochester, provides Rochester residents with a nutrition blueprint to reach optimal health and reduce the risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, certain forms of cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease later in life.  

The prescription, a diet rich in vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and legumes, is scientifically proven to provide a cost-effective solution to today’s most pressing health problems.

“As an interventional radiologist, I’m a high-tech doctor with low-tech solutions,” says Ted Barnett, M.D., founder of Rochester Lifestyle Medicine and a guiding force behind the Kickstart Your Health Rochester campaign. “By moving nutrition as an after-thought to first-line medical treatment, we’re helping people lose 100 pounds, toss their medications, restore insulin function, and prevent open-heart surgery.”

Dr. Barnett, alongside Kickstart Your Health Rochester leaders Erin Campbell, M.D., M.P.H., Tom Campbell, M.D., Kerry Graff, M.D., and Joy Valvano, M.S., R.D., C.D.E., will provide a series of free plant-based nutrition lectures, grocery store tours, and cooking demos for the entire city to take part in.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that 91 percent of New York adults fall short of consuming at least two servings of vegetables each day. One in three adults now has prediabetes and one in six children struggle with obesity.

To flip these statistics, the Kickstart Your Health Rochester physicians star in four poster-size billboards that feature “The Future of Medicine,” “Plants Over Pills,” “A New Prescription,” and “Beets or a Bypass?” taglines to capture travelers’ attention and showcase a plant-based prescription.

Researchers with the University of Oxford find a plant-based vegan diet can reduce 70 percent of food-based emissions, slash up to $1 trillion dollars in annual health care spending, and save 8.1 million lives over 30 years.