Last year was one of those: my dad, Lewis Aase, finished his earthly race on Dec. 7, so with all we had going on, writing a Christmas post dropped down my list of to-dos.

That’s why I’m making it a priority during this long Christmas weekend to reflect on the many blessings Lisa and I have experienced.

Dad was amazing in all of his roles, as husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, teacher, principal, church and community volunteer and friend. My brother Mark and I couldn’t have had a better example of love and faithfulness.

Over the last several months we recognized that Mom needed more care than what she was getting in assisted living, so Mark and his wife April invited her to live with them. We’re grateful for this, and that we each have RN daughters who are helping navigate Mom’s care needs.

Mom got to celebrate her 90th birthday in her new environment:

Lisa and I welcomed two new grandchildren in 2025: Annie LaVonne Gatzemeyer (named after my paternal grandmother and my mom), and Lewis Noel Aase (named after Dad and his maternal grandfather.)

We had the whole family together for a couple of days in June, which is a rare occasion since our daughter Ruthie and her husband Trevin live in Sofia, Bulgaria where they are missionaries. This gave us a chance to update our family picture with all six kids and their spouses and 19 grandchildren (Lewis was still on the inside for this one!)

After that family gathering, the work commenced on Lisa’s long-awaited kitchen remodeling. She had postponed this for a few years while we were getting HELPcare Clinic started. I told her last December on our 40th anniversary getaway that 2025 was the year to do it.

I had pressed Lisa into service as our first receptionist at HELPcare Clinic, and she worked in that role for just over three years. Her “retirement” in February was a great blessing as it enabled her to focus on things she enjoys, like garage sales and overseeing the kitchen remodeling.

HELPcare 2025 highlights included:

• Successful onboarding of Mower County employees and their dependents as members through their employee health plan.
• Identifying clinic space and recruiting practitioners to start HELPcare Clinic Albert Lea, which will open Jan. 5, 2026.
• Several additional employers, including the City of Austin, making HELPcare Clinic membership part of their employee health plan for 2026, which will bring our membership to more than 2,500.

My daughter Rachel, who works with me remotely from Kansas, produced this song about HELPcare as a gift to me.

She wrote the words, and used AI to transform it into a finished piece, adding the pictures to show all of the people who have been part of our team bringing this vision to life, in “The Work of our Hands”

Our oldest granddaughter Evelyn, Rachel’s daughter, did something similar in honor of Lisa, recalling her fond memories of “My Grandma’s House” (which I turned into this music video):

Here’s wishing you all many blessings for 2026 and beyond!

Launching HELPcare and helping to make HELPcare Clinic a reality in Austin has been a great adventure. Mostly exciting and stimulating for me, but Lisa is considerably less adventurous than I am, so for her it’s been more stressful.

Even as HELPcare has pushed her out of her comfort zone, however, she is 100% committed because we have felt God’s call to do this, and we have seen so many providential circumstances that have confirmed that call and encouraged us.

These aren’t happy coincidences. They’re God’s provision.

HELPcare is the management company for which Lisa and I are the majority owners. It provides management services for HELPcare Clinic (which is owned by the health care professionals) so Dr. Dave Strobel, Nurse Practitioner Stephanie Kimmes and six part-time nurses can focus on meeting the medical needs of HELPcare Clinic members instead of on administration.

A year ago right now our combined team for the two companies had just four members: Dr. Dave, Coleen Olmsted (our office manager), Lisa and me.

We’ve never advertised job openings for either company. God has brought us this team, often providing the person before we realized we had the need.

Of course none of that would have been possible (or needed) without our HELPcare Clinic members. When Dr. Dave and I met for coffee in October 2019 and were inspired to create what has become HELPcare and HELPcare Clinic, we hoped there would be interest in the community of Austin for this kind of health care alternative. We’re grateful that member support has materialized, as we now have more than 500 active members.

Another great blessing is that I now have a content marketing and social media team for HELPcare, and most of the members are my children or their spouses: Rachel (Borg), Joe Aase, John and Bella Aase and Jacob’s wife Alexi, along with Dr. Dave’s daughter, Madeline Holden.

Joe also is working in the clinic on Saturdays, our daughter Rebekah (pictured above…see if you can guess which one is her!) set up the lab and is Director of Nursing, and our daughter Ruthie, a missionary in Bulgaria, is even helping with some work that can be done at a distance.

What a great blessing to be called to this work, and to have all of our children joining with us in some way!

July was particularly eventful, as I had some numbness in my fingers and weakness in my legs that made spine surgery necessary. I wrote about that experience here as well as on the HELPcare site.

Just nine days after my operation, we welcomed Joe’s wife Amy into the family! It was great to have all six kids together with their spouses and 15 grandchildren (although one was still on the inside).

Some other key highlights of 2022:

• Rebekah having our 15th grandchild (and her fourth son) in August. In September she and Andrew bought an old farmhouse with 3.5 acres just outside of town, where the Gatzemeyer guys will have plenty of room to explore.
• My parents moving from the townhome they owned for 10 years into an independent living facility, just a few weeks before Dad was in the hospital with the flu, which led to discovery of gallbladder problems. He was in the hospital again later in the year to have his gallbladder removed, and has recovered well. The timing of their townhome sale and move was almost perfect. What a blessing to be 59 years old and to still have both of my parents!
• Having Ruthie, Trevin, Noa and Frank on home mission assignment from the end of July through early December. They stayed with us for about six weeks altogether, and it meant we had the whole family together both for Joe’s wedding and for a day-after-Thanksgiving early celebration of Christmas.

• Starting HELPcare Foundation, recruiting Linda LaVallie as its volunteer executive director and getting IRS tax-exempt status. HELPcare Foundation’s mission is health education and providing partial scholarships for those who can’t afford the full cost of HELPcare Clinic membership.
• Waking up at 3 a.m. October 17 with an insight into how we could open HELPcare Clinic in Rochester, several months earlier than I had previously imagined. We’re grateful for Dr. Bob Gustafson and his wife Laura, and their interest in the HELPcare Clinic model and their support for expanding this alternative into Rochester.

We’ve experienced so many other blessings and answers to prayer this year, too numerous to detail here, but the answer to one petition in the Lord’s Prayer has become more vivid to us: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Having worked for a salary for my whole career until now, I knew I should be thankful for the jobs God had provided. But with a good job and a consistent biweekly paycheck, it’s easy to take these blessings for granted.

Perhaps the greatest blessing for Lisa and me in 2022 has been a renewed sense of His care and daily provision, giving us what we need when we need it.

Sometimes the waters have been choppy, but He has always kept us afloat. We have a wonderful crew and He also seems to be enlarging the fleet. Most importantly, He has strengthened our sense of calling, that what we’re doing is His project, not ours.

We look forward to what He will bring in 2023.

I told part of the story in a blog post Thursday on the HELPcare site, but now I want to take a step back here on my personal blog to give some details, along with an update on my spine surgery experience.

I’ve been dealing with neck and back pain for almost four months, and in the last couple of weeks noticed weakness and numbness in both my arms and legs.

Among other impacts this affected my golf game, as my shots were consistently shorter than I expected. Eventually I recognized that I needed to “club up” a little, e.g. using a 6-iron when I ordinarily would use a 7.

In what turned out to be my last round of the year Monday, I seemed to have found the groove:

On Tuesday, July 19, Lisa and I left Austin at 6 a.m. and drove to the Twin Cities to take test specimens to Labcorp and to get an MRI of my spine as ordered by Dr. Dave Strobel.

After my scan, the remote technologist asked me to stay around a bit while she had the radiologist review it. She had seen something and wanted to make sure no additional images were needed.

That gave me an opportunity to capture an image of my own:

It was a little unnerving eavesdropping on one side of the conversation as the local staff person responded to the radiologist’s question with “No, he’s mobile.”

We had hoped the MRI would give us a reason for my symptoms.

To have the radiologist wondering whether I was even able to walk told me this was serious.

A few minutes later we were heading back to Austin with images on CD, and with the radiologist reading to follow by fax.

That evening we discussed the report with Dr. Dave and he said I needed to be evaluated for surgery, and we planned to have him refer me to Mayo Clinic.

On Wednesday at 8 a.m. he submitted the referral. Lisa typically goes to Rochester on Wednesday afternoons to drop off HELPcare Clinic lab specimens for Labcorp pick-up, and we decided I should go with her this time with the image CDs in case I could be seen at Mayo.

We got a call from the Mayo referring physician office while we were on the way, and by the time we had dropped off the specimens it was clear we needed to go to the Emergency Department.

We arrived just after 3 p.m. and the speed of the process was otherworldly. By 5:15 we were told I would be admitted and scheduled for a Thursday operation.

On Thursday at 10 a.m. I participated with Dr. Dave in our regular weekly radio program on KAUS AM 1480, but this time from my hospital room:

Less than two hours later I was taken to pre-op, and I was wheeled into the operating room at 2. The operation started at 3:20, and at 5:53 Lisa got a text message that they were closing and that it had gone well. I was back in my room at 8:30.

On Friday morning I went down for x-rays, and before I was discharged the chief resident reviewed them with me and we discussed the need for follow-up. The team had taken a conservative approach, just removing the C4-C5 disc that was clearly causing the symptoms, and fusing those two vertebrae. The discs on either side might need attention eventually.

We left at about 1:30, and on the way home we stopped at the HELPcare Clinic office to see and thank Dr. Dave and the team.

I went to bed around 9, but then awakened at about 12:15 a.m. Saturday because the Tylenol had worn off, and my mind was flooded with ideas related to HELPcare Clinic development.

Practicing my Getting Things Done (GTD) training, I captured the ideas on my phone so I could clear my mind and get back to sleep.

But within a few minutes I’d get another idea, and then another.

The more I captured, the faster they came.

By 6 a.m. I had 51, and I realized I wasn’t going to get back to sleep, so I got up and started refining them.

They boiled down to about 30 distinct concepts or projects.

I think it’s one of the most creative nights I’ve ever had. Maybe all the stimulation my nerves got through this process amplified their creative activity.

At any rate, I didn’t have any problem getting to sleep early last night.

So just to recap:

• Monday morning I played golf for the last time in 2022
• Tuesday I got an MRI of my cervical spine
• Wednesday I was admitted at Mayo Clinic for surgery
• Thursday I had the operation
• Friday I was discharged home
• Saturday I had one of my more productive days of work

In less than a week we went from just having suspicions of the nature of my problem to having it surgically repaired.

We prayed for a positive outcome and resolution of my symptoms, and we appreciate so many who joined us in this plea.

Those prayers were answered in a way we couldn’t have imagined. We’re overcome with gratitude and joy.

I’m recovering well, and looking forward to having all six of our kids, five spouses and our 14 grandchildren together this weekend as my son Joe gets married on Saturday, and Amy Wagner will become our last daughter-in-law.

Today, Sunday July 24, Lisa and I were blessed to be able to worship with our church family at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Rochester.

Soli Deo gloria!

In theory these accounts should contribute to overall organization reputation, but if they aren’t well managed they could dilute the brand through inactivity or even become flash points for controversy.

Back when I led the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network (#MCSMN), which brought together social media leaders and users from health care, we heard these concerns regularly.

Now as I’ve moved into a third career while also continuing to work in digital health in my of counsel role with Jarrard, Inc., I’m excited to be working on a project to help health care social media colleagues compare notes and perhaps identify best practices for managing these sub-brand accounts.

One of our Jarrad clients, Ashley Anderson of Cedars Sinai, has commissioned a research project to gather input from colleagues on how their organizations are handling social media governance issues. Some of the questions include:

• Which department has primary responsibility for your organization’s main enterprise-level presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and any other social media platforms?
• What other departments have a role in using or contributing content to these enterprise-level accounts?
• How many employees contribute to your organization’s social media accounts (i.e. content development, strategy, planning, community management, etc.?)
• How do the sub-accounts contribute to and support the organization’s overall brand?
• Is there a strategy or methodical approach behind the sub-accounts?
• How do you measure and/or prove the success of the sub-accounts?

Ashley plans to share the results of the survey with the participants, so all will be better equipped with data from peer institutions to help guide their internal governance discussions.

Here’s the survey.

If you are responsible for managing social media in your hospital or hospital system, I hope you take a few minutes to participate.

It was 10 years ago this month that Minnesota Monthly, the magazine formerly published by Minnesota Public Radio, included me in its story called The Revolutionaries: 12 Minnesotans who are changing the way we think about the world—and its future.

I had started Mayo Clinic’s social media program as part of my role as manager for media relations, beginning with a makeshift podcast in 2005 and then branching into experiments with blogs and the various social networks.

By 2008 we were on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn, and also had a news blog that eventually became the Mayo Clinic News Network.

I understood that as Mayo Clinic’s reputation had been built for 150 years through word-of-mouth, these platforms would be ways that word would spread between people in the 21st century.

Along the way I met up with co-belligerents as we created what would become the Mayo Clinic Social Media Network, and we even wrote a book called Bringing the Social Media Revolution to Health Care. Meredith Gould, Ph.D. was our editor, and besides Farris Timimi, M.D., my great friend and medical director for social media at Mayo Clinic, our contributors included

• Patricia Anderson
• Phil Baumann
• Ed Bennett
• Andre Blackman
• Chris Boyer
• Christopher Burgess
• Dave deBronkart
• Susanna French
• Dan Goldman, J.D.
• Dan Hinmon
• Shel Holtz
• Aldon Hynes
• Matthew Katz, M.D.
• Dana M. Lewis
• Howard Luks, M.D.
• Cynthia Floyd Manley
• Bertalan Mesko, M.D.
• Jill Plevinsky
• Mark Ryan, M.D.
• Mike Sevilla, M.D.
• Christian Sinclair, M.D.
• Reed Smith
• Wendy Sue Swanson, M.D.
• Robert West, Jr., Ph.D.
• Mary Pat Whaley
• Colleen Young
• Kelly Young

That was a magical time, as we experimented together and encouraged innovative applications of social media to promote health, fight disease and improve health care.

I have many fond memories from that revolutionary movement, and now I’m excited to help start another one through HELPcare and HELPcare Clinic.

Instead of a health care communications revolution, it’s a revolution in health care practice. My experience in the former has equipped me for this next one.

So has my personal health journey.

HELPcare is my new venture that provides metabolic health coaching, education and peer support for people who want to turn back the clock on their health through lifestyle changes.

HELPcare also provide management services for HELPcare Clinic, a new direct primary care practice my dear friend and high school classmate, David Strobel, M.D., opened in our hometown of Austin, Minn. on Feb. 1.

In just its first month of part-time operation, HELPcare Clinic already has more than 200 members, and positive newspaper and TV feature stories in our local market.

Today we’re announcing HELPcare Clinic’s Corporate Membership program, which gives small businesses who can’t afford ACA-compliant insurance a way to support their employees’ health and well-being.

Direct primary care is a growing trend. Likewise, many people are finding a low-carb, ketogenic diet combined with intermittent fasting is enabling significant health restoration.

I think the synergy between an affordable, membership-based medical practice that provides unhurried, unlimited primary care services in concert with lifestyle coaching that equips members to address underlying causes of disease will be powerful.

Hopefully even Revolutionary.

We’ve lost a lot more games than we’ve won this season, but last night we achieved our first winning streak, following Tuesday night’s win with a big comeback against the Schaeffer Academy Lions. After being down 30-15 at halftime, the Athletics girls went on a 25-1 run to start the second half.

That was fun!

Afterward, Bekah and I took a picture with my parents, Lew and LaVonne, who were there to watch their son and granddaughter coach a great-granddaughter.

The basketball season will be wrapping up in the next couple of weeks, so then I will be focusing on another type of coaching Lisa and I are doing as part of our new venture, HELPcare.

Through HELPcare we’re providing online education, community support and metabolic health coaching for people interested in making lifestyle changes to maximize their health, energy and longevity.

These services are available globally, but for people who become members of HELPcare Clinic they’re included at no extra charge.

HELPcare Clinic is the new direct primary care clinic I’m helping my good friend, Dr. David Strobel, open in our hometown of Austin, Minnesota. My new venture, HELPcare LLC, is contracted with HELPcare Clinic, his medical practice, to provide management services so he can focus on doctoring. We just opened last week.

This metabolic health coaching practice is built on what I’ve learned through my health journey over the last few years, and also the results Lisa has gotten. We started by coaching friends, and then the circle expanded over time.

I enjoy helping people discover their abilities to do more than they thought they could. It’s been really rewarding seeing people reclaim their health and even turn back the clock.

We feel better than we did 25 years ago, and are glad to help others looking to make similar changes.

And hopefully tonight we can make it three in a row for the Lyle-Pacelli girls!

By far the most difficult change was losing Lisa’s dad, Leonard Wacholz, in June. We all miss him and Lisa gets teary every day. But we’re thankful that he lived to be 90 and was able to stay at home on the farm until his last three months. Unlike so many who died alone during COVID, he had all of his children and their spouses as well as most of our children and grandchildren able to visit him in his last two weeks. And for those who couldn’t physically get there, we had FaceTime.

All of his descendants gathered in August for our nephew’s wedding, and we captured this photo that shows Leonard’s (and Lisa’s mom Arlene’s) legacy:

Here’s the Aase branch of the clan…

Behind us you see (L to R):

• Rachel, husband Kyle Borg and their five kids, who live in Winchester, KS. Evelyn is our first teenage grandchild. Judah is badly outnumbered. Aletta, Mabel and Sylvia are enjoying dance lessons. Rachel homeschools all of them, and Kyle pastors the Presbyterian church.
• Joe and his fiancée, Amy Wagner, who will be married July 30. We’re looking forward to that!
• Ruthie and husband Trevin Hoot with daughter Noa and son Frank, who was born March 22. They’re Presbyterian missionaries in Sofia, Bulgaria.
• Rebekah and husband Andrew Gatzemeyer with Griffin, Gus and Murphy. They live seven blocks from us in Austin.
• John and Bella, married last year and now living in Roseville, MN.
• Jacob and Alexi with Graham, Isaac, Clara and Julia. They live in Rochester and Jacob is a physical therapist at Mayo Clinic.

For Lisa and me, the changes in the last year have been breathtaking. So I’ll just take a breath now and reflect:

Leonard was diagnosed with heart failure in February and needed to leave the farm in late March. The following three months were pretty hard.

I completed my MBA in Healthcare Management on April 3. I decided to retire from Mayo Clinic May 3 and was originally intending to have it be effective December 31. A series of providential events made it possible for me to move it up to August 3.

That’s when I started an “Of Counsel” role with Jarrard Phillips Cate & Hancock, a communications firm based in Nashville. It’s very much part-time and lets me continue to use my skills and experience from 21 years at Mayo Clinic on behalf of Jarrard clients.

Given my newly flexible schedule, I also was able to arrange a significant increase in golf time, taking full advantage of my Meadow Greens membership.

Ruthie and family (including our newest grandson Frank) were back from Bulgaria in mid-August, which was another incentive for my August 3 retirement date. We enjoyed the company of Trevin’s parents and his sister Tiffany, too.

I’m also serving as the assistant coach (and JV coach) for the Lyle-Pacelli girls basketball team. Rebekah had accepted the head coach position and asked me to serve as her assistant. We’re enjoying spending time together, and the girls are great. It’s something I couldn’t have done without my newfound schedule freedom.

But my main focus since August has been development of our new health venture and what will be my third career. Here’s that story.

We’re blessed to be in position to start this new venture offering support to people interested in reclaiming their health, and also to provide management services to help my dear friend and high school classmate, Dr. David Strobel, open a new primary care clinic in our hometown. We’re on track for that to open in February.

Just after we signed the lease on the space for HELPcare Clinic, Lisa and I joined Dave and his wife, Lorene, along with our employee #1, Coleen Olmsted, to celebrate and commemorate the occasion.

As I look back, I’m astounded at how quickly this has all developed. We’re also gratified by the enthusiastic reception so far as Austin-area residents have signed up to become Founding Members.

We have been abundantly blessed!

Lisa and I wish you and yours a blessed Christmas, and hope your 2022 is characterized by personal growth and happiness.

When a new policy idea is introduced it may seem be radical or even unthinkable, but one effect may be that it shifts perceptions of the range of what is considered acceptable or sensible in its direction.

Things that formerly seemed out-of-bounds may seem less crazy in comparison.

While I’m not advocating mandated fasting as a governmental policy prescription, I hope what Lisa and I are doing right now might shift your personal Overton Window in the direction of at least trying a 24-hour fast before Thanksgiving.

Lisa and I are currently in the midst of our periodic #3DayCancerPreventionFast. We’re eating nothing (except Communion at church yesterday) for at least 72 hours. We are putting a small amount of cream in our morning coffee, supplementing magnesium, salt and potassium to make sure our electrolytes stay in balance, and are also drinking mineral water.

I’m just past the 38-hour mark right now. Lisa started a day earlier because on Saturday afternoon when I suggested we do this again she hadn’t eaten since Friday night, and she just decided to keep going.

Once we decide we’re going to do a three-day fast, Lisa wants to get into it and get it done. I wanted to have another bacon-and-eggs meal before I started.

Because I began my fast already having been in a high level of ketosis for a few days, I reached a glucose ketone index (GKI) of less than 1.0 by the end of the first day. Our goal is to be at that highest therapeutic level of GKI ketosis for at least 24 hours.

Lisa will end her fast tonight or wait until Tuesday morning, and I’ll finish tomorrow night or early Wednesday.

Either way, we’ll eat a few small meals to work our way back into eating mode, so we’ll be ready for a sumptuous feast on Thursday.

We’ll be able to eat anything we want without even a trace of guilt or regret.

A three-day fast may seem unthinkable or radical to you right now. It sure did to us originally, but now we’ve done it several times.

Maybe you could start with something shorter, like 24 hours. Or 18.

One person we’ve coached couldn’t imagine g0ing without eating for even eight hours. Yet by limiting carbohydrates and gradually extending her fasting window, she’s now done a 48-hour fast.

So here’s your challenge: after dinner tonight or tomorrow, don’t eat until dinner the following day.

You’ll have a prolonged period of low blood insulin levels, and you’ll be in fat-burning mode for several hours.

Then, if you’re able to have a feast on Thursday you too can enjoy it fully with no guilt or regrets. You will have paid the price in advance.

Your 24-hour fast will make ordinary intermittent fasting or time-restricted eating (fasting for 16 or 18 hours and limiting eating to 6 or 8) seem acceptable, sensible or even something you might adopt as your personal policy.

If you take the #24HourFastingChallenge, I hope you’ll leave a comment below with your thoughts on your experience and what you learned from it.

More than 100 of these patients have been able to reverse their diabetes and get off their diabetes medications.

Before his low-carb change, he had never seen that happen among his patients.

Not even once.

In the video below, Dr. Unwin shares several of those patient examples, as well as research that supports the assertion of his colleague, Professor Roy Taylor, which is the title of this post and of the video.

Some of Dr. Unwin’s key nuggets:

• Type 2 diabetes, raised triglyceride levels and abnormal liver function are linked to each other and to increased mortality.
• 24% of the patients in his practice had abnormal liver function (GGT) tests, and 32% had an abnormal triglyceride result.
• For several years he would watch these lab results with a feeling of helplessness because while he knew these patients were at higher risk of both cardiovascular disease and death, he didn’t really know what to do to help them. Statins, which are often prescribed for high cholesterol levels, don’t really help with triglycerides.
• High triglyceride levels and low HDL-cholesterol are strong predictors of a poor outcome with COVID-19.
• 25% of the developed world has Non-alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease.
• 3.3 million people have died of COVID-19 worldwide in the last 18 months. 4.2 million die of diabetes every year.
• He then shows the example of a patient with diabetes, high triglycerides and abnormal liver function, and that cutting carbohydrates fixed all three problems. He also details why this works.
• High carbohydrate diets not only lead to fat accumulation in the liver and pancreas, but even in the tongue, which could be responsible for sleep apnea.
• Many patients with fatty liver are dismayed to be treated with suspicion by their physicians, who believe the patients must be consuming excessive alcohol. In reality, the fatty liver in these patients is due to an excess of carbs.
• Dr. Unwin has developed infographics to help patients identify which foods have high carb loads, and what the equivalent teaspoons of table sugar would be in each.
• Finally, he shares compelling data from his practice, showing the improvements in triglycerides, HDL-c, liver function, weight and HbA1c after patients adopt a low-carbohydrate diet.

Dr. Unwin is unfailingly polite and understated in his delivery, which makes his conclusions all the more compelling.

I believe you’ll find this video well worth your time to watch and listen.

For more of his wisdom, see Dr. David Unwin on Cutting Carbs.

Building on our last few years’ experience and the results of our health journey, my wife Lisa and I are launching a new health-related venture next month, working with a friend who is a family physician. He shares Dr. Unwin’s concern about metabolic syndrome and his passion for equipping patients in making diet and lifestyle changes that can dramatically improve their health.

If you’re interested in learning about it, send me an email and I’ll be in touch to give you a preview.

Both of his maternal grandparents developed Type 2 diabetes and died from the complications.

All nine of their children developed Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, or both. At the time of his presentation in the video below, his mother was the only remaining survivor of that generation.

Dr. Wortman and two of his three siblings also have developed Type 2 diabetes.

He diagnosed himself in 2007. He recognized that this would dramatically reduce his life expectancy, so he immediately began investigating what would be the best drug treatment. But to buy time as he was starting that search, he says…

“I knew enough about diabetes to know that when blood sugar is high, that’s not good, and carbohydrates make your blood sugar go up. So I thought, ‘I’ll buy some time by right now, from this moment on, not eating any carbohydrates.’ Now I knew nothing about diet; I had the typical medical education – we get no training on nutrition…and I had no knowledge of the low-carb diet….

“So what happened over the next few days is I had basically a miraculous recovery. All the signs and symptoms went away quickly. My blood sugar normalized, and I started losing about a pound a day of weight, which went on for about a month….So something very dramatic happened, and something I had never encountered in my medical training or in my years of medical practice.”

Dr. Jay Wortman

In the rest of the video, Dr. Wortman describes how that discovery changed both his life and his career trajectory as he works with public health.

He has studied the diets of indigenous populations not only in Canada but also in other parts of the world, and has come to believe that changing from a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet to an industrialized diet high in carbohydrates (and particularly processed carbs) has massively increased the prevalence of obesity, metabolic syndrome and diabetes.

While I think you would find the whole video enlightening and interesting, I have cued it above to start at the 27:30 mark, where Dr. Wortman makes a compelling case that the various chronic disease epidemics “aren’t a bunch of distinct and different diseases. We’re talking about a problem that is linked together in one huge epidemic of chronic disease…. What we have is a continuum of disease, the underpinning of which appears to be insulin resistance.”

As he says, the point at which diabetes is formally diagnosed is fairly arbitrary. Insulin resistance, which can progress for a decade or more “under the radar,” puts patients on a path to develop a constellation of diseases and conditions.

And of course metabolic syndrome is strongly related to cardiovascular disease, including coronary artery disease, stroke and heart attacks.

Altogether, metabolic syndrome is a cause – if not the cause – of diseases that consume more than 70% of health care spending in the U.S. each year.

As it did for Dr. Wortman, a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet can help many people significantly improve health and prevent or even reverse many of these diseases and conditions.

Helping people turn back the clock on their health is the focus of what Lisa and I are planning as I start my third career following my retirement from Mayo Clinic. We’ve been doing this informally over the last 11 months, and soon we will be launching a venture that we hope will help many more.

We’re working with a long-time physician friend who has been interested in metabolic syndrome for decades.

Our venture is not a weight-loss program: as Dr. Wortman said, the reason for his personal change was to “buy time” and prevent diabetic damage.

But weight loss is typically a welcome side effect. Dr. Wortman reported losing about a pound a day for a month. Lisa and I have each lost 50 pounds. Your mileage will vary.

We’re developing educational resources, a community support platform and coaching services and expect to launch the new website next month.

If you would like to learn more and get a no-cost preview, send me an email and I’ll be in touch.