The Questions and Answers

1. What do you do today to be healthy in your everyday life?

A: For me personally I try to make sure that I'm getting enough exercise in my life-So I really enjoy running, that's something I can do wherever I am that doesn't require attention or anything. So I try to go running, from my house I'm able to run around Lake Temescal, so I try to run around 2-3 times a week. But then I also try to fit in some strength training in addition to the cardio workout -So 2 days a week I try to do pilates or yoga or some sort of strength training class. I've actually taken some of your mom's classes at CruFit (Adam's dad's gym in Montclair). I also try to make sure that I eat a healthy diet. And by that I try to make sure I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables and get a combination of foods in my diet. I don't really like to deprive myself or go on strict diets. And so I try to just eat an overall balance of making sure that I'm getting enough fruits and vegetables and then having some lean meats and protein as well.

2. What do you research at Kaiser relating to health?

A: Well I actually do quite a bit of research on diabetes and obesity and trying to develop interventions which are programs to help people achieve a healthy weight. So, a lot of my work actually focuses on pregnant women. Pregnancy is a time when a lot of women if they gain to much weight in pregnancy after they have the baby they can struggle to lose the weight. So they can become overweight or obese after pregnancy-So I have some studies that are designed to help women who are pregnancy gain the right amount of weight during pregnancy by making sure that they stay active and eat healthy throughout there pregnancy. And actually, I like doing research in pregnancy as its a time when a lot of women are very motivated to make healthy changes because they are worried about there baby being healthy. And so it is a time when a lot of women willing to make changes to there lifestyle. Another reason why there is I think there is some evidence that what women eat during pregnancy and some other behaviors during pregnancy might actually have long term effects on there child as well. And we know that childhood obesity rates have increased a lot during recent decades and that means that in general, I think in this country we are facing obesity epidemic so both obesity and diabetes are two areas that I think my work focuses on-ways that we can kind of prevent those from happening.

3. What are the most important things that you need to keep in mind in order to stay healthy?

A: Okay, so kind of going back to the first question you asked me, what I do I think is general:

• Trying to make sure that you stay active, so getting enough exercise the recommendations are that you want to make sure that you get 30 minutes of exercise 5 days a week
• Making sure that you eat a healthy diet-making sure that you eat a diet that is high in fruits and vegetables. In some of the work I do, we talk about a plate method where you should try to make sure that the plate that you have is like a rainbow. You want to have lots of different colors, and usually if you have lots of different colors than that means that your getting fruits and vegetables. A little bit of everything.

4. How does exercise help people stay fit?

A: Well, exercise has a lot of benefits. One of them, just cardiovascularly, its good for your heart to get exercise. Its also good for your bones, it increases your bone density if you get enough exercise. But, I think more than that its also good for your mental health. There's a lot of evidence that it can reduce depression and help people feel happier. Some people actually find it helps them sleep better and were finding more and more that getting sleep is really important because a lot of times people who don't get enough sleep are at higher risk to develop obesity and diabetes as well, so exercise can help you sleep better. Building muscle strength when you get older, it can also help you reduce your risk of falling (when you older) and other things that can be bad for older people. So I mean I think the benefits of exercise are multiple, its hard to go wrong.

5. How do food choices effect your health?

A: Food choices too, you know I think that when we talk about trying to maintain a healthy weight because obesity is associated with developing diabetes and heart disease, which both can be very harmful-making sure that you eat a healthy diet and get enough exercise its a balance thing, so you want to make sure that your not eating more calories than your burning in order to maintain a healthy weight and so with your diet I think that making sure that your not eating to much but your eating foods that are going to be satisfying and keep you full. So I think a lot of the fruits and vegetables tend to be high in fiber and kind of keep you satisfied for longer then some of the "simple sugar" type foods.

6. Is staying social important?

A: Oh yeah, I think getting back to what I was talking about with mental health, I think that there's a lot of evidence now that your mental health is really important and that it can actually effect your physical health. And I think one of the most important things for mental health is making sure you have social support, and by that I mean friends and family who you enjoy being with and that make you happy. Also, if you have a friend who you really enjoy being with and you exercise together or you agree to eat healthy together, that can really be helpful. (For e.g.) If you have someone that you go on a walk with or you play basketball with, and its your friends, and you really enjoy it, your likely to keep doing it.

7. What did you study related to human health at the University of Washington?

A: So when I was an undergraduate I studied biology and I actually thought about becoming a medical doctor-so I had taken a lot of pre-medical classes: anatomy, physiology. I always enjoyed learning about that. And then, when I went to graduate school I got my Master's in public health. It was also about health and disease, but it was also more about kind of how can we study the causes of disease in population. And surprisingly that also involves a lot of statistics (which Adam loves), so a lot of the work that I studied in graduate school was statistics and figuring out how to analyze data, because you can get a lot of misinformation out there (in the world) especially related to health and a lot of people do study things that are not done well and that are not properly designed. So especially in the nutrition world, there's a lot of confusion, sometimes (for e.g.) research used to say that eggs were bad for you, and then they (scientists) decided eggs were good for you, and now they just kind of go back and forth. Science is always changing, so making sure that you do science well and that you take everything into account when your doing your studies, a lot of what I learned in graduate school was how to do a good research to make sure that the results that you get are right and accurate.

8. How do you keep your kids healthy?

A: Well, all the things that we talked about. Making sure that they stay active and that they eat healthy diets. Luckily, I have kids that really enjoy playing sports, so, my daughter plays soccer and does gymnastics. She also loves running and we try to make sure that we go for walks as a family and we like to take the dog on long walks or go hiking when my kids aren't doing sports. As for my son, he likes to play basketball, baseball, flag football, volleyball, ect. So again, its just making sure that they maintain that healthy active lifestyle, and then trying to feed them healthy foods... making sure that they always eat there vegetables and fruits and there protein.

Once again, thank you Monique for giving us her time, and allowing her to interview her about her knowledge of human health. We hope that you enjoyed the interview and thought that the information was worthwhile.