The life-changing moment when doctor learned to stop applying Band-Aids to lifestyle diseases such as obesity, diabetes, and insomnia and treat their underlying cause
- After nearly losing his son to a vitamin deficiency, British doctor Rangan Chatterjee knew he needed to change his approach to medicine
- He read up on nutrition, gut health and microbiology, and now believes small lifestyle changes can vastly improve our health
A preventable vitamin D deficiency nearly killed Rangan Chatterjee’s son, and as an experienced doctor with an immunology degree and specialist qualifications, he had been unable to prevent it. The episode brought him face to face with his own fallibility.
Now recognised as a bestselling health author by British newspaper The Sunday Times, and the host of a health podcast with more than 1.5 million listeners each month, 10 years ago Chatterjee realised there was a great deal more about medicine and health that he needed to learn.
“As doctors, we are trained to treat acute conditions such as infections and heart attacks, but chronic conditions require a different approach,” he says. “As my six-month-old boy was lying there helpless, and I, a trained professional, even more helpless, I realised that simple things like nutrition and lifestyle had been broadly neglected in my training.”
It was on that night in December 20010 that everything changed for Chatterjee, 42, now host of a recently launched radio programme on BBC2 and the author of the newly published book, Feel Great, Lose Weight, which sold 20,000 copies in its first two weeks.
Guilt drove Chatterjee to ask himself if vitamin D could help his son cope with eczema and help boost his immune system. He read about nutrition, gut health and microbiology – things he had learned about in an immunology course in 1998. He had never used the knowledge because medical school lecturers had never told him how to.
