African-American Healthy: What You Need to Know to Protect Your Health - Tapa blanda

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Richard W. Walker, Jr., MD, MBA received his medical degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and completed his residency at the University of Michigan. He earned his MBA from the Jack Welch Management Institute. He has served on the faculty of the University of Texas Medical Center, and is the founder and CEO of Walker Health Care Holdings and TVP-Care, Houston-based national healthcare companies. In addition to being a published writer, Dr. Walker is a highly sought-after speaker.

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I grew up in Spanish Harlem, on 115th Street between Lexington and Park Avenue, in the Johnson Housing Projects of New York City. Back then, health conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and cancer were accepted by my community as part of the natural aging process. No one even bothered to wonder why so many black Americans were dying of these particular afflictions. Prior to his death, my own father suffered from type 2 diabetes and hypertension, which led to kidney disease, dementia, and multiple strokes. Both my maternal grandfather and grandmother also died of many of these same illnesses. But my family story was not unique. It was the same as so many other stories in the neighborhood. Black Americans were quietly being killed by their diseases and nobody was wondering why. These diseases affected not only the individual but also the family unit. A family member’s illness often resulted in a loss of work hours, reduced mental alertness (resulting in fewer promotions and pay increases), and less quality time spent with the family—not to mention the greatly increased healthcare costs that prevented families from saving or investing their hard-earned money. It appeared as though diseases like type 2 diabetes, hypertension, kidney failure, strokes, heart attacks, and cancer were an unavoidable part of the black experience. It was simply the way things were. Unfortunately, it’s the way things still are.

The idea for this book sprang from a conversation I had with my friend Rob Martin. Rob is a pioneer of health talk radio and continues to work on the air nationwide. While discussing our family histories, we found that the health differences between Rob’s Irish lineage and my own African-American one were stark. The diseases that ran through my family tree did not appear on the branches of Rob’s nearly as often. This discrepancy aroused our curiosity immediately, so we compared other families we knew, both black and white, only to confirm the distinction further. Time and again, blacks seemed to get the short end of the stick when it came to general health. Most striking were the differences in longevity and cause of death. While the majority of my white friends’ relatives tended to die as a result of the body’s natural deterioration (what we call dying of “old age”), my black friends’ family reports were littered with illnesses and rarely went beyond the basic knowledge that many of their relatives had acquired health conditions early in their lives and had died of complications from those conditions. Of course, these findings were all anecdotal, but as an African American and a doctor, my interest was piqued. Moreover, it seemed that African Americans had long ago accepted these health conditions without question, buying into the idea of a lifetime of disease management, instead of the possibility of disease prevention and reversal. Basically, the black community had come to believe that they couldn’t ever expect to be as healthy as other Americans, that they could only be “African-American healthy.”

Having read an enormous amount of literature over the years about the importance of vitamin D3 in disease prevention, Rob mentioned that he had also come across studies that suggested a severe lack of this vitamin in the African-American population. We immediately wondered if this deficiency was in any way connected to the apparent tendency of African Americans towards certain illnesses. With such a depressing health disparity between blacks and whites staring me in the face, I had to wonder: Were insufficient vitamin D3 levels making African Americans more susceptible to disease than the majority of the country? When I discovered that the answer was yes, I knew I had to do something about it.

The purpose of this book is to eradicate, if possible, the predominance of disease in the black population for good. Over the course of the following chapters, you will discover the ways in which small lifestyle changes—such as adjusting your eating habits, maintaining a healthy weight, and taking vitamin D3 and other proven supplements—can powerfully complement established medications and even prevent disease from occurring in the first place. The information found in this book aims to give you a reason to hope, to provide you with another option other than resigned acceptance of fate, which only perpetuates this silent epidemic. Ultimately, my goal is to equip African Americans—and everyone else, for that matter—with the best possible tools for illness prevention and wellness maintenance, so that we may look forward to a better future and redefine what it means to be “African-American healthy.”