Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Bringing together local businesses and neighbors of Bergen County
Good Neighbor Podcast: Bergen
Ep. # 110 Dr. DeFeo explains why eating seasonal produce transforms your gut health.
Spring brings renewal, and what better way to revitalize than by spring cleaning your diet? Dr. Dan DeFeo of the Osteopathic Family Medicine Practice of Northern New Jersey returns to share wisdom about seasonal eating that transforms not just your meals, but your health.
Many Americans struggle with vegetables, but Dr. DeFeo suggests this aversion might stem from eating out-of-season produce lacking peak flavor and nutrition. Spring vegetables like asparagus, artichokes, radishes, strawberries, and peas offer exceptional benefits - they're rich in prebiotic nutrients, high in fiber, and low in calories. These seasonal gems support gut health by reducing inflammation and improving digestion naturally.
The conversation delves into misunderstood digestive complaints, revealing how symptoms often attributed to conditions like celiac disease frequently stem from poor dietary choices instead. Dr. DeFeo expertly explains how consuming simple carbohydrates creates those familiar energy crashes and how these cycles can eventually lead to insulin resistance. His practice addresses these concerns through an integrative approach, combining medical expertise with nutritional counseling accessible through insurance when possible.
What makes Dr. DeFeo's perspective particularly compelling is his commitment to osteopathic medicine's founding philosophy - treating root causes rather than just medicating symptoms. This approach feels especially relevant today as many post-pandemic Americans seek alternatives to pharmaceutical-dependent healthcare.
Ready to transform your health through seasonal eating? Visit Dr. DeFeo's practice at 541 Cedar Hill Ave, Wyckoff, call 551-815-1000, or find them online at osteofamilymednjcom. Your body will thank you for choosing foods that nature intended for this season!
Osteopathic Family Medicine Practice of Northern New Jersey
Dr. Dan DeFeo
541 Cedar Hill Ave, Wyckoff, NJ 07481
(551) 815-1000
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Doug Drohan.
Speaker 2:Hey everybody, Welcome to another episode of the Good Neighbor Podcast brought to you by the Bergen Neighbors Media Group, and today we are welcoming back Dr Dan DeFeo of the Osteopathic Family Medicine Practice of Northern New Jersey, based in Wyckoff. Welcome back, Dr DeFeo.
Speaker 3:Thank you. Thank you for having me back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so today we're going to talk about it's. You know, despite it being like winter weather outside, it is spring and there's a great article in the April issue of Wyckoff Living called Spring Clean your Diet Nutritional Tips for a Fresh Start that Sammy Goodman of your practice wrote for this month's issue of Wyckoff Living. So I think it's a great topic. You know, spring clean your diet. So what are the tips and advice you guys have?
Speaker 3:Sure, and thank you, and thank you. So this was a collaboration between myself and Samantha, who is our certified nutrition coach. No-transcript. I'm a big believer in your diet and your lifestyle play a huge role in preventing disease, preventing injuries, preventing illness. So I brought her on to kind of expand on that a little bit and be able to give more one-on-one counseling to patients for extended periods of time, so that our patients can learn a healthier lifestyle and achieve their healthcare goals without the use of medications or, you know, even surgery sometimes. So this article here speaks a lot about some of the produce that's available in the springtime. I know a lot of Americans don't like to eat their vegetables.
Speaker 3:And I think part of that is sometimes with our you know, modern agriculture, people are eating things that are out of season. They may not be necessarily there, they're at their peak. So these are some foods that are probably at their better time period this time of year and probably will taste the best. So things like asparagus at this time of year and probably will taste their best. So things like asparagus, artichokes, radishes, strawberries, peas a lot of these foods have a lot of prebiotic and probiotic nutrients in them. They're all high in fiber and they're low calorie. So the article expands on them individually a little bit more, speaks about which vegetable individually can help with certain maladies and how they help the body produce the essential nutrients that they need.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny. Like I just made asparagus, uh, I just grilled it on the on the barbecue when we had actually nice weather on saturday and um, you know that, with just, you know, a little olive oil, salt and pepper is fine with me, you know, a little char to it. Artichokes never been a fan of artichokes. Spinach, eh, arugula, sure, radishes I actually like radishes. My son and my wife don't, so I don't get them too often. But peas, I love peas.
Speaker 2:But it's funny because a lot of these things growing up, when I grew up, you had canned and frozen versions, especially peas. What was it? Green giant peas, spinach was frozen in my house and, and to your point, it didn't really taste that good. So as a kid I didn't, I didn't like it. But when you have it the right way, and I guess to your point, and in season, you know there's certain yellow asparagus you only get, you know, and that's when you know you're going to a good restaurant, when they only you know, their menu changes per the season yeah and there's only certain things you can get at different times a year.
Speaker 2:Let's talk a little bit more about the um. You know the benefits, okay, so all right whether I like it or not, but you know, most of these things do taste good, um, you don't have to put butter all over everything to like it. Um, what are some of the benefits? Like you said, I've heard probiotic, but what's a prebiotic?
Speaker 3:So prebiotics are a different set of bacteria that help with digestion, moving essentially food product through your gut and helping decrease inflammation. They're more of a more related to the fiber content in the food. They work along with the gut bacteria to help keep a healthy digestive system and not lead to inflammatory conditions.
Speaker 2:Right. There's a lot of talk about gut health, you know these days. So I guess you know people understand, or have started to understand, inflammation and all the negative effects and how I guess food can create inflammation and it's not just about being bloated. You know, there's other things that go along with inflammation on the negative side that you want to try to avoid. I guess that's where these foods come in.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean. There's so many people that come to see me that complain about things like this Abdominal bloating, le leaky gut, concern over having celiac. Yeah, a lot of times these symptoms are more or less symptoms of you know, a poor diet than they are of any of these conditions. I've had plenty of people swear that they're celiac because they can't tolerate carbohydrates.
Speaker 3:But you know, a lot of people eat a lot of simple carbohydrates, simple sugars, white white breads, things that don't have a lot of fiber content, not a lot of nutritional content, and then they feel awful within an hour or two of eating and they they're not generally realizing that it's more so just the way their body's absorbing those quick hits of energy. And you know, when you have anything that's a carbohydrate whether it's a potato, rice, bread or sugars your body's going to break those down to their most essential form, which is glucose, fruct, fructose and sucrose, which are all sugars. So you get that quick sugar high and then you crash and you feel terrible.
Speaker 2:And that's why complex carbohydrates like brown rice and you know I guess fiber and grains are, yeah, they take a longer time to break down. Therefore, you don't get that big sugar spike and then crash and that sugar spike then your body is, you know, responses to release insulin to lower your blood sugar. And obviously, if you keep having that kind of spike and your body keeps releasing more and more insulin, you might become insulin resistant, which then leads to type 2 diabetes, right?
Speaker 3:That's. I don't think I could have explained that better myself, so it sounds like you have a pretty good understanding.
Speaker 2:Well, I was. I was a personal trainer for a while, so I, you know I was into that stuff, but I want to, you know. So this article is great because it gets into prebiotics and probiotics and the probiotics that we hear on TV, you know, like yogurts and fermented things, they're alive bacteria. You know. Fiber rich foods there's an article.
Speaker 2:Part three is about hydration and then some of the things that you, you know your entire practice as spouses, which is, you know, balance, right, balanced diet, lifestyle changes, you know, be mindful of the way you eat, certainly, and other things that come into account, like our stress and adequate sleep. So I want to, you know, move away from the article for a second and go back to what you talked about with your, the goal and mission statement of your practice. So is it, if I'm a patient? Is it like a concierge, you know, medicine, where I can pay like a monthly, say, subscription or membership, and with that I get access to your nutritional counselor and other lifestyle like advice, or is it just come in when I'm not feeling well and then you'll also offer me these types of, you know, educational tools with a more proactive, healthier life?
Speaker 3:So we offer both. We don't offer monthly subscription per se. We can see patients if somebody has insurance, doesn't have insurance or insurance that we don't participate with. We do have cash pricing available and I feel it's reasonably priced. We try to have all of our services, or as much as possible, covered by insurance. So when patients schedule for consultation we do a benefit verification and we let patients know fairly quickly whether or not we participate with their insurance and if they would have any out-of-pocket costs. What that would be a monthly subscription is something that we've discussed. We haven't had a need for it right now, but that may change as our practice evolves down the line. Typically, if we go through insurance, all patients that want to speak to the nutritional coach would have to have a consultation with myself first, and then I essentially send an internal referral to our nutrition coach and just the way the insurance companies prefer it.
Speaker 2:Right, okay, and I think it's a's a.
Speaker 2:You know, definitely I've had other guests on the show doctors that are trying to do more of this proactive, uh, integrative medicine, that is, you know, talking about treating the, the cause, and not the symptom.
Speaker 2:It's not about just giving them a pill, it's about how do we live a healthier life to avoid having to come for, you know, inflammatory or or, you know, pain medication when it might be avoided by just having a, um, a lifestyle change. But that's hard, you know, taking pills easy and making the steps to to eat better and exercise, and, you know, be mindful of everything you do, from sleep to eating to stress is that's nothing that happens instantaneously, but I think the education and the testimonials of people that do make these changes I think can go a long way into, you know, into kind of permeating our, our approach to health. So let's just, I just want to review, like, where you're located and go through again the services that you offer, because you know you you've had articles about back pain, so you know you treat I guess we could say chiropractic symptoms, right, you also have the internist and general medicine. You have your nutritionist, so the osteopathic approach can you just remind everybody what that is, and then also where you're located and how people contact you.
Speaker 3:Sure. So I am an osteopathic physician and everything that you mentioned there is what we offer. I think some people who are unfamiliar with osteopathic medicine or vaguely familiar, they tend to think of more like the manipulation type services and things like that. But osteopathic medicine is. It's a philosophy as well. It goes back to almost 200 years ago when the field was started and the founding physician, andrew Taylor, still was disenfranchised with the current medical system. At the time he was unhappy with the amount of opiates that were being used and other medications like arsenic and quicksilver, which is also mercury.
Speaker 3:So it's funny how history repeats itself. Because I think that's one of the things that we emerged from the covid pandemic from is a little bit more sense of the pharmaceutical industry, and you know at times how the pharmaceutical industry and you know at times how the pharmaceutical industry can be profit over health in some ways. So I think the American people have become a little bit more in tune with their health and they're more mindful of the medications that they use and looking for alternatives like diets and supplements and things of that nature. So osteopathic medicine has always been aligned with that. I think more people become familiar with our practice style and our philosophy. They'll be very satisfied with that. So I'm located at 541 Cedar Hill Ave. We're at the corner of Sycamac and Cedar Hill. Essentially, our phone number is 551-815-1000. We have a website it's osteofamilymednjcom, and you can also find us on.
Speaker 2:Google.
Speaker 3:You can obviously find us in White Coat Living and all of our contact information is in our ad that appears every month.
Speaker 2:That's great. Well, Dr DeFay, we'll have you on for your next article. Looking forward to that, and thank you again for being a guest on the show.
Speaker 3:Thank you, I appreciate it.
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