Welcome to iHeartRadio Communities, a public affairs special focusing on the biggest issues impacting you. This week, here's Ryan Gorman. Thanks so much for joining us here on iHeartRadio Communities. I'm Ryan Gorman, and we have a few very important conversations lined up for you. In just a bit, we'll talk to someone on the front lines of the human trafficking issue, as January is human trafficking prevention months, so make sure to stick around for that. But right
now to get things started with the new year upon us. I'm sure many of you have resolutions to improve your health in twenty twenty four, so for some tips on how to do just that, I'm joined by doctor Trisha pas Richa, the Ask a Doctor columnist for The Washington Post. You can find our columns at Washingtonpost dot com. Doctor Pasricha, thank you so much for coming on the show. And let's begin with your recent piece on doing a tune up for your body. You put together a checklist for every age.
Tell us about that. Yeah, thank you for having me. You know, I think it's really important for starting a new year to start thinking about one of the things that you can do to kind of help tune up your own health and specifically preventative health, right. I mean, we think a lot about treating medical conditions, rect are probably less good at stopping those conditions
from happening in the first place. And so this checklist I've put together is sort of a way to kind of get ahead of the game a little bit. And so, you know, there's a couple of things that I think people don't always think about. We talk a lot about cancer screenings. I think we probably do a less good job about talking about things just like breathing for diabetes and high blood pressure, especially when people are in their twenties and
thirties. They might not know that they're actually supposed to be checking for those things pretty regularly. But the sooner we catch all of these diseases in their early stages, the better we can treat them and prevent those complications. Are there certain items that you would say are on a checklist for those of basically every age, those in their twenties, those who are middle aged, and
those who are older adults. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean the big things that everybody at any age twenties through your nineties to one hundred should be thinking about. Our high blood pressure, cholesterol. These are things that can lead to cardiovascuids you to like heart attacks later in your life or stroke, So you should probably check those every three to five years if your average risk. But higher risk people and this is blood pressure, need to check their blood
pressure every single year. And that's even people who feel that they're otherwise healthy in their thirties and African Americans actually are considered higher risk. They have higher rate of hypertension, and so people who are higher risks need to check every year. And so ask your family members, do you guys have high blood pressure? Have people had heart attacks at a young age, and if these things are running in your family, you should talk to your doctor and think
about getting those sooner. But those are two of the big ones for cardiovascular disease. But everyone also needs to be thinking, I think a little bit harder than we do about stvs are sexually transmitted disease and that you know runs the gamuts of the age. It can be twenties up until people in their eighties, So don't forget to keep checking for those no matter what your age are. If you have any new exposures and people need to get their vaccinations,
I mean that's the other big thing people. I think we talk a lot about every season getting flu. We talked a lot about COVID and the vaccines, but a lot of people don't forget, or people forget to get things like their t DAPT vaccine for example, and if you get older, you want to get your single vaccine. So making sure you're up to date with all of just the basics applies to everybody, no matter what your age is. Going back to high blood pressure, high cholesterol, those kinds of
issues that can affect so many people of different ages. Are there any symptoms that we should be aware of outside of going for those screenings every so often to get a sense as to where your body's at? Great question, you know, this is the question I get from my pisients a lot of what are the signs your HyG cholesterol? And the really scary thing is that cholesterol
doesn't come with signs or symptoms. You can look and feel healthy at the blood level, and slowly but surely the cholesterol is building and causing problems in your arteries and flaxiform, but you don't might you know, have really any symptoms that that's happening. Now, there are some signs in your own history or your own family sistory that can give you some indication you might be higher
risk. Like I mentioned, if people in your family, you know, your dad had type cholesterol, or people have had troubles with heart attacks, then then that might be a clue. But tuly, you could be asymptomatic. And that is why this idea of screening screening for healthy people is so important. And so men should get their cholesterol and other measures of litids in their blood starting the age of thirty five, and women are recommended to start
at age forty five. But if you smoke, or if you have that family history, you might need to start a little bit sooner than that. I'm Ryan Gorman, joined by doctor Tricia pass Richa. She is the Ask a Doctor columnist for the Washington Post. You can find her columns at Washingtonpost dot com. And I thought you did a really interesting one last year towards the end of twenty twenty three. You wrote about five things that you want
your patients to know. And let's pretend for a moment that we're all your patients. What are some of these things that we should be aware of? Well, I try to think of my readers as all my patients, and I tried to think of things that I hear from you guys, and I hear from my readers, I hear from my patients. And you know, a lot of times you're going to go to the doctor and they're going to say, okay, cut back on your ultra processed foods. You know,
make sure you exercise regularly. And one thing I like to tell my patients is that you know the these are important, but just remember that healthy choices made even some of the time are better than unhealthy choices made all of the
time. So maybe you're going to eat your favorite you know, processed snack once or twice a month, or once or twice a week, whatever it is, if you're going to try to cut down, it's still better to do something than nothing, because all of these small micro decisions we make every day is what determines our health in the long run. It's now, it's never going to be necessarily an all or nothing decisions. Maybe the exception to that would be smoking. I think every doctor's until you, yeah, you
got to cut out smoking kind of hardcore. But everything else is there's a lot of gray, And so I would say, just, you know, give yourself a little bit of grace and forgive yourself a little bit and your doctor's here to work with you and kind of be your cheerleader about that. So that's sort of the big overarching theme about the years is that you know,
even making incremental progress is certainly a win. And this is a time of the year where many people they make those New Year's resolutions and they try to go cold turkey on some things, or they try to go all in one hundred and ten percent on lifestyle changes, and that can be difficult to sustain as opposed to easing your way in and like you said, giving yourself a little bit of wiggle room and not getting too discouraged. If you have a little slip up here, a little slip up there, I I'll go
back to the smoking. Except we're exactly right. I mean, I think, for example, smoking it's very hard to quit. We all know that, we know what nicotine does, we know what booking can do. But I always tell my patients that the person who's most successful at quitting smoking is the one who keeps on trying to quit smoking. And we don't expect that we would be excited and we'd applaud you if you're able to achieve your health goal the very first time that you give it a shot. But it doesn't
always happen. But the point is to keep trying and keep connecting with your doctor and being honest with them about where you're at, because maybe we can change our strategy. Well maybe if you want to exercise more, and maybe we can give you other hits for other ways that you can think about exercise. It doesn't always have to be you have to run a marathon by any means. You can just walk your dog, or maybe you need to do
something well inpact. So there's ways to explore different arenas. But it is hard to say my new year's resolution for help is going to be something that's going to be really hard to reach them, and within three weeks you fall flat. It doesn't have to be that way at all. We can find some middle ground that will still be better than doing you know, Coltu keep Nothing. I'm Ryan Gorman here on Ihear Radio Communities, joined by doctor Tricia
pas Richa. She is the Askadoctor columnist for the Washington Post and you can find her columns at Washingtonpost dot com I want to ask you about two things that I think might be important to bring up here at the start of a new year, when so many people are trying to maybe improve their lifestyles from health perspective, sleep and hydration. How far can making incremental improvements on those
two fronts go towards your overall health. Those are two big ones, and I think, and I think probably there's there's very few Americans out there who could say that they feel that they're getting in a sleep and certainly that they're staying hydrated. You know, it's important to do both of those things and to think about this idea of sleep hygiene. And there's lots of different techniques you can you can approach sleep, vizing from and getting better sleep and the
health impact getting a better night sleep is. They're just innumerable. But again it's both of these things. If you're not able to stay fully hydrated in any traditional method that you read about, think about one of the other creative ways. What are the things I can do that will help. So, for example, with hydration, a lot of people are like, Okay, I need to drink X number of cups of water a day. That's what I read online. Well, actually, there's probably other ways to stay hydrated
that don't necessarily involve hugging a bunch of water. That's wonderful if you can do that and stay on top of it, but you know, you can probably We've done these studies where you can probably just eat a lot of water containing foods like so fruits, a lot of germer types of melons, for example, contain a lot of water in them. And if that's something that
just works better for you, let's go that route instead. So I would just encourage you to whatever these goals are that you have and what you might read online about the prescribed way to reach them, keep an open mind and talk to your doctor about other ways that you can reach them that may not
be obvious. Immediately, going back to last year twenty twenty three and bringing these tips back to the forefront, what were some of the pieces of advice, some of the tips that you shared with readers of your column last year that got a big response that people really they reached out to you and said, hey, this really helped, or you know, I found this really interesting. Were there a few notable ones? You know, that's a great
question. So I'm I'm an internal medicine doctor but also a guess storinrologist by by some specialty training. And I would say the number one, two, and three most popular thing I wrote about were people's style movements. And you know, the wed all to talk about that, you know, we need
now people that we as a society are not comfortable talking about it. And you know, one tips that I gave people at the end of twenty twenty three is that don't be embarrassed to talk about these quote embarrassing topics with your
doctor, right Like there's nothing. I tell this to my pieces every time someone says something that they think could be embarrassing, Like one, it takes a lot to make your doctor blush like I do coenoxraphies every single day, Like you telling me that you have some flatulence just won't make me blink an eye. But if you don't tell us what the problem is, then we
can't help you with it, you know. And a lot of times people stop taking medicines because of these embarrassing reasons, or they have you know, confusion or concern about things related to their ball habits, and they just don't want to bring it up with us. And I would say don't be embarrassed
to talk about it, because that is our job. But I think because reading about these kinds of topics in an online column is sometimes a little bit easier than trusting to someone in person, I think that's why they really blew
up. And I got a lot of people to write in and say, I'm so glad you brought this up, because I've always been so embarrassed and I've always wondered why this is that way, And I would just say, you know, I wish you had just talk to your doctor a person about it, because maybe you could have gotten helped for that so many years sooner than you did. And going back, you know, we talked a little bit about sleep and about hydration and the impact that both of those things have
on one's health. What about digestion. It feels like we've learned a lot more in recent years about how big of a role, you know, the digestive system, what you focus on plays more broadly with our health and our bodies. Yeah, oh absolutely. I mean I'm a little biased, but
I think the gut is the most important organ in this body. And there's just this growing body of literature over the last twenty years about how our gut really shapes our mind and our brains, and our brains in turn communicate very strongly with our guts. I mean, you know, you can think about when was the last time that you maybe had to go up. It was your turn at karaoke, but suddenly you had your vowels turning, or you
were telling a lie and you felt some butterflies in your stomach. It's because of this close connection between your mind and your gut, and it plays out in health and in disease. For Gippel Parkinson's disease, we actually think probably originates inside the gut due to changes maybe from the microbiome or other kind of pathogens that can enter through your bowels. And so as we learn more and more about these things, it's becoming more and more obvious and important that we
take good care of our guts in that microbiome. And so the short way to do that, and the kind of simple way to do that is to think about the foods that we're putting inside of us. And so almost every study about foods that we eat and longevity, like how to live longer, how to improve your microbiome, involves some simple steps and that's to have a high fiber diet, because fiber one, it softens the stool and that'll solve
half of your problems, but it also changes your microbiome composition significantly. And then to cut down on ultraprocessed food. You know, if you're going to the grocery store and you look at the nutrition label and it's got words that you can't find in your own kitchen pantry. Chemicals, sugars that end in like ros, like growth, like the these are things that if you can't reach them in your own pantry, they've been processed now again, And it's
not going to be an all or nothing. I know that you know it's very hard to cut all of it that we all live in the real world. But the more you can eat whole foods, the better that's going to be for your gut, and actually the better that it's for your entire body or all your entire health as a person. And so that's what I would
say. And one final question kind of following up on that point. With so many people including I'm sure many listening right now, looking to go on diets to start this new year, that's usually a big thing when a new year rolls around. Are there things that they should keep in mind in terms of potential changes in their gut when they start to eat differently, things that they should keep in the back of their mind as they begin that journey. Yeah, I mean, you're right, that's going on a diet is a
very very common thing that people do in the new year. And I think whatever you choose to do, make sure that what your diet is is something that's getting you all the nutrients you need, because I think some people go on either these crash diets or they do things like chronics or just kind of more extreme like like juices that they just drink, and you're actually loving yourself with some of the essential nutrients that you need maybe for some short term wins.
Anytime you change dramatically change what goes into your body, what comes out of your body is going to look different. It's going to be maybe the frequency is going to change, the color is going to change, and these things can cause a lot of alarm and so just know that those things will
happen too, and if you're worried, check with your doctor. But I would say the main thing is that any type of diet you go on just check in with the nutritionness with your physician, make sure you're actually meeting all of your true dietary needs, because any of these crash diets, they may actually yes, they work from the short term, like for a couple of days, you might lose a lot of water, you might lose a little bit of access that, but you'll gain it all back because they're not sustainable,
and it's better to find a program that is sustainable. And if I had to recommend one diet to my patients, I often recommend the Mediterranean. Yeah, it's you know, it's because it's the less of a diet. It is one that helps lose weight, but it's more of a lifestyle that you know, it helps boost your microbiome, It helps boost your heart health, which is so important. So it hits so many different organs in your
body. And yes, by the way, it can help you lose weight, which is so key, and it's stone in several studies, but it really it helps your whole body. And so that's the one diet that studies really really back and it's sustainable. So if you're going to go that route, that's the one that I would recommend. Tricia pass Richa the Ask a doctor columnist for The Washington Post. You can read her columns at Washingtonpost dot com. Again, Washingtonpost dot com is the website doctor Passricha. Thank you
so much for taking a few minutes to come on the show. We really appreciate the valuable insight my pleasure. Thanks for having me. All right, I'm Ryan Gorman here on iHeartRadio Communities, and now let me bring in my next guest. I'm joined if I founder and executive director of Redefining Refuge. You can learn more about this organization at Redefining Refuge dot org. Natasha Nasimento joins me. January is human trafficking Prevention month, and that is the issue
that Natasha and her organization deal with. Natasha, thank you so much for taking a few minutes to come on the show to talk about this really important topic. And let's start with how you got involved in this. Thanks Ran for having us so I would ask being finance in a previous career, and
in twenty and ten visited a actually excuse me. In two thousand and eight, visited a local child welfare meeting and at the time, during this sort of child wealthfare stakeholders meeting, they were talking about child prostitutes, and I'd never heard that terminology before. I've it just sounded like a giant oxymoron to me. And so, you know, I asked what the age of consent was, and they said the age of consent was eighteen. And so this
language surrounding the group of children, it just confused me even more. And so I said, you know, I just want to be clear that I understand correctly that children that cannot consent when they are being sexually assaulted and law enforcement sees them, they're not there to help them, they're there to arrest
them. And everyone kind of looked at me like I was nuts and said, yeah, but you know, prostitution the legal and so my next question, my follow up question, was you know what if this was a foreign kid, and they said, well, that's difference. That's human trafficking. And that one meeting completely interrupted my entire psyche, so much so that I completely left my finance career and just put all of my energy and all of
my focus into what is now redefining refuge. Before we get into the work your organization does and so many organizations like it across the country, let's start with just kind of an overview as to how substantial this problem is in communities from coast to coast, because I think this will surprise a lot of people
listening. It's an extraordinarily prevalent issue. And I think one of the stereotypes surrounding this group of children was that, you know, to be a traffic victim or a traffic child, you are coming from, you know, a third world country or a country outside of the United States. So trafficking within the borders of the United States is extraordinarily prevalent. And you know, as our agency specifically has learned, more than fifty percent of the cases that are
referred to us are familial sex trafting cases. And so this is when a parent where primary tear giver, is exploiting and selling the child and it's generally in exchange for a substance use issue. And so we all know that substance use is extraordinarily prevalent throughout the country, and so you know, in areas that we see heightened substance use, we also see a heightened race of children
being exploited. So it's not always, it's very rarely, like this white van that's kidnapping kids then you know, less than one percent of cases specifically are abduction related cases, and I think people are really surprised to learn that. You know, we're not dealing with a Liam Nielsen taken issues. Yeah, it certainly does happen, but we see more exploitation of vulnerability throughout the
state. I'm Ryan Gorman joined by Natasha Nacimento, founder and executive director of Redefining Refuge, which you can learn more about at Redefining Refuge dot org. She's with me for Human Trafficking Prevention Month, and Natasha, I think there's no doubt at this point social media is exacerbating the problem right absolutely, so we continue to see a rise in cases where grooming is being facilitated on online social platforms. You know, gone are the days where we teach children about
stranger danger. If your child has an electronics device, you have tens of thousands of strangers in your home at any given moment. I'm interacting with your child and so we can seeing you. Like I said, to see, pathway to entre for exploitation is on social platforms. Parents need to be extraordinarily vigilant about kids having access to social media and having access to any electronic device, frankly, and many people may be thinking when they hear human trafficking,
like runaways kids like that, but that's not necessarily the case. A lot of times this happens with the child living at home, maybe even going to school, and like you said, many times it's tied directly to family members,
even parents exactly. And so again, yeah, there's so many stereotypes involved with this group of children, but I'll tell you that we've seen children that are trafficked who come from families where both parents have been physicians, and then we see children that are traffics that are in the foster kid system. And so I think what people need to understand is that trafficking is really the exploitation of vulnerability. If you can identify the vulnerability of a child, and
every child in every demographic, in every neighborhood has a vulnerability. If you can exploit that vulnerability, it's very easy for children to full prey to a predator and to be trafficked. And correct me if I'm wrong, but it's not necessarily always the threat of physical force on the part of the trafficker that has such an impact on the child who's being trafficked a lot of times, it's more psychological. Yeah, in more cases than not, it's a psychological
issue. The majority of trafficking programs you know, throughout the country are very mental wellness based programs because of the amount of trauma bonding and that it's full psychological warfare really, and it's the exploitation of vulnerability, vulnerability thoughts internally. So yeah, absolutely, it's not necessarily kidnapping or you know violence. It's a lot of mental coersion that's happening. So organizations like yours across the country,
what kind of work are you doing in this area? So we provide direct services to children that have been trafficked, so, you know, intervening in this horrible moment in these children's lives where now they have been trafficked and
what kind of recovery options do we have for them? And that can be physical, it can be you know, physiological, it can be I mean, it's just kids need so many different things, and so our job is to really do a needs assessments, a comprehensive and needs assessment on a child, figure out what it is that they require to kind of move forward, and then the advot side of that is the prevention is, you know, how do we prevent this from happening to children, especially children that are at
higher risks of being preyed upon. So really, you know, most organizations I think are somewere in that area. Is either intervention, prevention or both, and so we're focused on both. Tell us about the National Human Trafficking Hotline and the website is Human Traffickinghotline dot org. And also some things that we should be on the lookout for when we're going about our daily lives in case someone in our orbit is a trafficking victim. Yeah, the National Human
Taste Hotline. You can text, you can pull them, you can make a report. It is anonymous. And I always tell everybody that, you know, people are so afraid of making pulls or doing reports because if they're afraid, they might be wrong. And if you're wrong, so what, you know, who cares? If you're right, you potentially save the life of a child. So I would say that we all have this, you
know, our sidy senses, our intuition. If we see something that we don't think is quite right, between an adult and a child, especially,
we should absolutely be reporting those circumstances. You know, Unfortunately, this group of children is not walking around, you know, bruised and basst necessarily because there are products to be bought and sold, sadly, and so just looking for nuance things, children with really expensive items if they shouldn't have, you know, more than one cell phone, not able to speak for themselves in the company of an adult, that seems domineering. You know those sorts of
things. If you're a school teacher, obviously kids that are you know, skipping class, falling asleep during the day, you know those sorts of things. And again most of us know when you're an adult that something seems a little off but doesn't seem quite right, and so just report it doesn't feel right. Just yes, just make their report. Do you have a story that comes to mind during your experience dealing with this issue that is a good
example of someone seeing something, noticing something, and taking action. Yeah. I actually had a personal experience, believe it or not, at a Starbucks where you know, I walked in in the morning and it was during a school day, first of all, and there was a very very young boy sitting in Starbucks with a with a much older gentleman. And so my first inclination is why is this kid not in school? You know, just and this is a past Starbucks, by the way, why is this kid not
in school? That just seems really odd to me. And he was very young, you know, probably nine or ten years old. He had a face full of makeup, and it just something about it just struck me as really really odd. And so I kind of, you know, made ordered my coffee, stood to the side and was overhearing the conversation between this much older adult male and this little boy and they were negotiating a price. Wow.
And so thankfully because of the work that I do, I was able to just pick the contact that I had in law enforcement and say hey, can you come yeah immediately. And so I mean that was at a Starbucks in the middle of a in the middle of the day, you know, mid morning, and not a single person and they was asking any questions. And I think people were so afraid to offend anyone that they don't want to
ask any questions. That again that little tiny detail of he's not in school, he's age appropriate for school, he doesn't appear to be six, if you you know what I mean. Just see these little things and then what do you know, here we are in the middle of the day and this was happening like literally in plain sight while there's people all around. Unbelievable.
Again. The website, Yeah, Human Traffickinghotline dot org. The number if you see anything suspicious eight eight eight three seven three seven eighty eight, or you could text two three three seven three three that's be free. Natasha Nasamento, founder and executive director of Redefining Refuge. You can find out more about her organization and get some great resources at redefiningrefuge dot org. She's with us for January Human Trafficking Prevention Month. Natasha, thank you so much for coming
on the show and for the tremendous work you're doing. We really appreciate it. We appreciate you. Ryan, thanks so much. All Right, that's going to do it for this edition of iHeartRadio Communities. As we wrap things up, I want to offer a big thanks to all of our guests and of course to all of you for listening. I'm your host, Ryan Gorman. We'll talk to you again real soon.