Dr. Carlos Jaramillo: “Own your health”

Dr. Carlos Jaramillo has become known for a comprehensive approach to the incessant health problems caused by the lousy diets we eat today, full of artificial substances and little knowledge about what which really makes us sick.

On the occasion of his recent visit to Los Angeles to promote his second book Como (Planeta, 629 pp., also available as an eBook) and after the success of The metabolic miracle, Jaramillo spoke about his mission and why we all have to take control of our own nutrition to heal ourselves and lead better lives.

Which the big difference between both books?
The metabolic miracle is especially focused on solving a problem….if cardiovascular or cardiocerebro-metabolic disease is the first cause of death in the world because I have an opportunity to correct it or turn it around. But what happens if I don’t have metabolic problems or if I had them and no longer have them, do I have to continue eating like this?

There are those who thought that my proposal was The metabolic miracle and that is not true. So I said, well, if nutrition is so important to me, well, I’m going to write a guide with useful tools so that anyone can start to take ownership of their diet and can learn at any time in their lives. It doesn’t matter if you are 80 years old or 17. It also doesn’t matter if you want to exercise, if you want to be vegan or vegetarian…there is the answer. It is a nutritional guide that combines many currents and solutions and above all explains how to make food a great ally for my life.

Latinos eat very badly, like our parents and with a diet without balance….

We believe that we eat the same as our grandparents and that is not true because they did not pass it on taking food out of packages. Nor do we eat the same potato and cassava because they were not transgenic. The other thing is that they did not eat anything ultra-processed.
Unfortunately in Latin countries ultra-processed food has become an aspiration and the person without resources does not send their child to school with water because it may be a sign that they do not have money but they send him instead with a ‘yogurt’ which is a diluted milk, treated with artificial coloring, sugar and artificial flavor and she thinks that ‘yogurt’ is a good thing. That is a problem of conscience, not even of food.

And how do you change that

We have to remind people that we have been on this planet for too many years and surely we will last for others. We have a reductionist version and we think that food is something of the last 100 years. We forget that we can take the ancestral model and bring it up to date but adapt technology to it, not to modify it, but to learn how it can be balanced and balanced and maintain it knowing what a protein is, what a fat is, which ones are yes and which ones are not, which ones are the amounts and what is better.

The main thing is that we should be consuming food without labels, food that does not come out of packages and jars and things that have minimal processing or processing in home, like coffee, which is processed because no one has red beans that are dried at home, but different from margarine that is modified and goes through processes of overheating, pressure, solvents, deodorizers, flavoring, more heating, solvents to remove oils and then hydrogenation to end up in margarine, that’s a ‘Frankenstein’ and they sell it to me as a cholesterol-free pasta, but for that reason it’s not healthy.

Every so often there is a new trend that is like a kind of fashion in the world of food and as you yourself mention in your books years ago fat was a terrible thing now fat is a friend , where is the problem?

I believe that what should not be done is to fall into extremes; an extreme diet whether it is vegetarianism, veganism, carnivory, paleo, keto… for whatever reason, this does not mean that it is correct. It does not mean that the foundation is applicable to everyone. If one starts from the basis of a well-balanced omnivore, one can begin to deviate a little and say, for example, I want to be a vegetarian, but I am going to do it well. Ancestrally we have always been omnivores… but we have to understand why I eat, what I eat, what not, at what times yes and learn to balance and know what is the benefit it has on my health, without extremes or anything… I can’t pass from a diet that I do not control to being a vegan and saying: I am going to remove the animals from my life out of compassion, which seems great to me if you want to do it that way, but you have to know that when making that decision you have to put a lot of understanding into what you’re doing.

But people say they don’t have time…. what do you answer to those who need a better diet but don’t know how to do it.

Today we compete against social networks, against Netflix, against the sofa in the house, against video games… the day will never have hours and then one will not have time. One makes the time; take out the time If you don’t have time to eat, prioritize your life or illness will make you find the time.

Not that it is the angle that doctors… it is always the pill for the problem. How did you reach those conclusions?

I worked many years of clinical nutrition and on the side of surgery and then I found the path of functional medicine that caught my attention and seems to me a way out, an approach to understanding the disease, not from the consequence but correcting from the problem, which seemed great to me, understanding habits as a great pillar and applying science to them….