Dr. Rocio Salas-Whalen
speaker
288 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard May 2025
Dr. Rocio Salas-Whalen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That obesity, that weight gain is complex. It's not as straight line as we used to think. And that most importantly, that weight loss is should not be a full-time job. Weight loss should not consume your life mentally or physically.
It exists. It is possible and reachable.
And I learned this through my patients and not in my medical training. I learned through my patients how they... I've seen how they struggle through decades for many. I have patients all ranges of age. I have from teenagers to 70, 80-year-old patients, how they've struggled through since childhood for many of them, and it consumes their life. And every plate in front of them
could be causing guilt, anxiety, shame. And this is 24-7, seven days a week, 365 days in a year.
I am originally from Mexico, and that's where I studied medicine. I graduated from medical school. And once I graduated from medical school, I decided to venture to the United States by myself. wanting to become a doctor in New York City. And then after nine years of training, residency, fellowship, I completed my specialty in endocrinology and then the following year in obesity medicine.
And originally, endocrinology takes over what's metabolism and obesity. But we've learned that obesity is complex and it requires its own specialty just to be solely dedicated for obesity. And endocrinology is the management of hormones. And yes, hormones impact weight, right?
I want to say that I'm sorry on behalf of the healthcare providers. We didn't know better and we failed you and I've been humbled by my patients. I've learned and hear their stories and we got it wrong. We got it all wrong, but there is help. We're learning more. Science advances like everything, right? Medicine is an evolving science and we are aware and we will do everything we can to fix it.
obesity increases your risk of mortality. There's more than 15 cancers that obesity is their biggest risk, including breast cancer. You have more risk of developing breast cancer than alcohol, hormone replacement therapy, or genetics. It's obesity. Obesity is the number one cause of pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer, thyroid cancer. The number one cause?
The highest risk for developing, yes.
So... By reducing obesity, by treating obesity, we are going to have less chronic diseases. We've built specialists. We created medical specialties from the complications of obesity. So we will have less diabetes, less hypertension, less cardiovascular disease. If we treat obesity now, we will have less incidence of the cancers that I mentioned.
And this is a very interesting thing because you as a non-medical professional have felt like that, judging and assuming we as a healthcare providers, as doctors, we did the same, right? When patients were coming to us for help and to play devil's advocate, we didn't have the training. We didn't have the knowledge that obesity is not a self-inflicted disease, right?
So what we've learned is that obesity is a multifactorial chronic disease. And I'll deconstruct that. Multifactorial, meaning that there's more than one cause leading to somebody to struggle with weight or have obesity. I like to break them into five pieces. One, lifestyle, exercise, sedentarism, diet. but that's one piece of the five. The other one is genetics, right?
You can have a genetic mutation, but also it can run in the family. So it's two different, right? Then the third one, hormonal changes. We have PCOS, perimenopause, menopause in women. Then we have aging. That's unchangeable. Nothing that we can do about it yet. But as we age, our metabolism slows down. We lose muscle mass. We tend to store more body fat. And then we have environmental factors.
And those are on its own. We can deconstruct that too, because in environmental factors, we can talk about the food industry. Right. We can talk about obesogenic environments. So meaning places where the walking is not available or accessible or easy, where people have to drive everywhere or even working from home now. Right. So there's less opportunities to being active.
That leads to more sedentarism. So we call that obesogenic factors, things that promote obesity in how we live. Also, we can talk about endocrine disrupting chemicals. Like BPA, what's found in plastics, pesticides, right? We live in an industrialized world that really promotes obesity.
So if you think of all those five factors and you think of what the patient has control, pretty much only on one, right? What we're talking about lifestyle, exercise and eating healthy. And before or when we do that, we tried or we put a lot of pressure on the patient to overcome all the other factors that are not in their control. Let's talk about genetics.
We know now there's research showing that the parent's preconception weight can impact the weight of their child.
Yes.
And when a patient hears this, I can almost physically see it how they feel relieved. I've had grown men in my office cry when they hear this for the first time because they've lived decades thinking that it was their failure.
So when we talk about genetics, we're talking about family history, right? If your parents struggle with weight, if your grandparents struggle with weight, then you are at higher risk of also struggling with weight. Again, we know the preconception weight of your parents impact. Even the food that they eat, consume highly palatable food that can be transmitted to you. What's palatable food mean?
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