A forty-two-year-old obese attorney dies in the middle of a deposition. A fifty-six-year-old attorney has a cardiac arrest in a courtroom. You are horrified when you hear these stories and understand the importance of staying healthy.
Are you a legal nurse consultant (LNC) working in the often-demanding fields of law? You might be handling stressful cases including personal injury, medical malpractice, worker’s compensation, risk management, forensics, or criminal, to name a few. Legal professionals frequently dedicate extensive hours to complex and emotionally challenging tasks that could put their health at risk.
The high stakes and sometimes nonstop pace can make it easy to overlook your well-being and how to stay healthy. The stress of demanding tasks and emotional involvement in the law field can put you at risk of cardiovascular disease, mental health issues, and metabolic diseases, which include the risk of developing diabetes. Taking the necessary steps to ensure that you are your best self is essential.
While attorneys and LNCs work in many different fields of law and face the demands of the fast-paced world of law, maintaining good health is not merely a personal responsibility—it is a professional necessity. We must “put our oxygen mask on first to be able to help others”!
“The greatest wealth is health” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
This post provides an overview of nutrition and ways to improve the health of LNCs, attorneys, and other law professionals. These concepts affect all of us, no matter what our role in the legal world.
Let us explore how law professionals can prioritize self-care and adopt routine practices to enhance their performance, make healthier food choices (improve nutrition), reduce stress, improve their metabolic health, reduce inflammation, and better position themselves to handle their demanding legal roles.
My Awakening about Staying Healthy
To understand where we are now, it is essential to understand some of the history of food and how it can relate to potential health issues. I have been a nurse for almost 27 years and thought I understood nutrition and well-being. In nursing school, I learned concepts of nutrition, which included eating from the “food pyramid” and limiting fats.
Over the last decade, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, I discovered a new way of looking at food and nutrition and how they affect my overall well-being. By adopting new approaches to health and the foods we eat, I helped myself, my husband, and other close family and friends to improve their well-being.
I started exploring some of the following:
- delved into functional medicine (looking at root causes of disease),
- read books about metabolic health and insulin resistance,
- explored and began practicing intermittent fasting,
- listened to podcasts,
- attended online conferences,
- continued practicing yoga and tried meditation, and
- lost weight and improved my metabolic health.
Furthermore, I have started a deep dive into a new approach to nutrition and overall well-being and have tried and sometimes failed (mostly succeeded) on some of these points.
I started to remove sugar from my coffee and did not drink juice or sodas. Then, I started to look at food labels and became more aware of the extra additives I ate. I did research and attended online conferences to learn more. The more I learned, the more changes I saw in my body. Although the weight scale numbers did not change initially, my waist-to-hip ratio dramatically improved! My clothes started to fit much better; who does not like that? People asked me, “Wow, what have you been doing?”
I shared some tips and tricks I learned; some others have implemented those changes in their lives and had similar results. Furthermore, I realize I made sustainable lifestyle changes for myself, my family, and those around me.
It turns out that while I looked deeper into nutrition and metabolic health, it has been there all along; however, it has been taught to us in a way that has damaged some of our overall health and well-being. Our parents and grandparents ate mostly “whole foods” and did not eat processed or ultra-processed foods, which did not exist.
However, with modern inventions, our foods have changed over the years, making them less nutritious and sometimes harmful to our overall health. The food industry has also changed, making it difficult for people to make good choices.
Brief History of Food Processing
What has changed? Let us look at an overview of a brief history of food processing.
Throughout history, humans have tried to make food processing faster and more sustainable for consumption. As far back as the Stone Age, food was processed by being
- cleaned,
- stored,
- heated,
- salted,
- smoked,
- pickled,
- dried, and
- fermented.
In the 19th Century, pasteurization and canning were introduced. According to Currier (2023), “Among Pasteur’s major contributions and their benefit to society, the most important is the heat treatment of foods and beverages to reduce spoilage and eliminate pathogens for consumers. This process became known as pasteurization while Pasteur was still alive.”
While Pasteur’s contribution helped eliminate pathogens and deadly diseases for consumers, time marched on, and ready-to-cook foods became available as early as the 1920s. Canning and frozen foods soon followed, and then, as the decades went on, more conveniences and additives were introduced.
Today, our grocery stores offer food choices containing preservatives, oils, added sugar, and other unhealthy choices that add to increasing a food’s shelf life and decrease its nutritional value. These types of foods often come in “packages.” Real food does not usually have or need a label or package and is mainly found on the outer perimeter of the grocery store. Pesticides and other toxins are abundant today, so an organic product is hopefully a good choice.
“Processed food is not just toxic; it is addictive.” Sugar triggers our brain’s reward system, and neurons release a brain chemical called dopamine. Our dopamine levels surge when we consume dietary sugar; eating “real” and less processed foods can help minimize that cascade process.
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Kristina Mew, BSN, RN, PHN, CCRN-K, owns Mew Consulting Business. She has nearly 27 years of clinical experience across diverse in-patient and outpatient settings, encompassing managerial and clinical staff positions. Her clinical experience spans trauma, adult critical care, ambulatory surgery, gastroenterology, and plastic surgery nursing. She has earned and held the CCRN-K certification for over 20 years and holds a Public Health Nurse License (PHN).
Kris has experience as a Legal Nurse Consultant for defense and plaintiff attorneys in the San Francisco Bay Area. Currently, she observes Defense Medical Examinations (DMEs) for plaintiff attorneys. She is recognized as an accomplished Federal Rule 1006 expert, having authored on the subject, and can help with voluminous medical records cases. She has a passion for health and wellness.
Meet Kris Mew in this video interview.
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