Wendy Walrabenstein (50) worked in the financial world for fifteen years, most recently as director of the department Ultra High Net Worth Individuals at a subsidiary of Credit Suisse in Switzerland. Ultra High Net Worth Individuals? The richest on earth. She advised on investments and banking matters.
She never cared much for “bragging about Porsches”, but after the 2008 crisis it really started to bother her. “The money grab continued as usual.” She resigned in 2012. She returned to the Netherlands with her husband, an entrepreneur. They had been in a relationship since 1999 and it was because of him that she started wondering how to grow old healthily. Or how he could grow old healthily. He is twenty-three years older than her.
She says that a light bulb went on for her in 2004. “We moved to Como, in the north of Italy, for work and we walked a lot in the mountains. In all those villages we saw people over 80 working in their vegetable gardens. At that time, the Belgian demographer Michel Poulain described the blue zones: regions in Italy and Greece, among others, where people lived traditionally, ate a lot of vegetables and legumes, moved a lot and lived to be very old. So I saw it there.” In her own environment, she says, people over fifty were already old. Big bellies, stiff legs.
She and her husband started eating more vegetables. They stopped with the “mountains of creamy gorgonzola.” A “good plate of pasta” for lunch or dinner, yes. But nothing in between. They became slimmer, especially around their waist. Their blood values improved. Her husband, now 73, is still healthy. No high blood pressure, no diabetes, no high cholesterol. So he doesn’t take pills, like most people over 65.
In the Netherlands, in 2012, Wendy Walrabenstein started a vegetable garden. She also started baking her own bread, sourdough bread. She was so concerned with nutrition and health, she says, that she decided to make it her job. She was already an economist and now she started studying nutrition and dietetics in Amsterdam. When she finished, she opened a practice in Utrecht, where she taught people to eat mainly plant-based foods. And in April 2017 she started a PhD research with rheumatologist Dirkjan van Schaardenburg, professor at Amsterdam UMC.
Her research, Plants for Jointsplants for joints, was about a finding published in the medical journal The Lancet: people with rheumatism, an autoimmune disease in which the joints become inflamed, had fewer complaints if they ate a mainly plant-based diet. Could this be demonstrated again? She and other researchers developed a lifestyle program that combined plant-based nutrition with exercise, relaxation and better sleep. She also went to see if it helped with osteoarthritis.
Osteoarthritis, which is the painful knees and hips that affect so many people as they grow older, 1.6 million in the Netherlands. There are rapidly increasing numbers, and not just because there are more and more old people. “Due to obesity and lack of exercise, it starts at an increasingly younger age.” The cartilage in the joints becomes damaged and there are no medications for this, only painkillers. If it gets too bad: new hip or knee. It is expected that in fifteen years, 2.3 million people in the Netherlands will have osteoarthritis. There are medications for rheumatism, but they do not always help and have unpleasant side effects. And they are expensive. People with rheumatism – 270,000 in the Netherlands – or osteoarthritis often cannot work.
For her research, 77 people with rheumatism and 64 people with osteoarthritis were randomly divided into the group that followed the lifestyle program and a control group. They were on average 60 years old and had a BMI of 29, considerably overweight. In four months they met ten times for cooking workshops, information about healthy and plant-based eating, exercise, relaxation and sleep. Everyone had everything checked all the time. Inflammatory activity, pain complaints, blood values, weight, fat mass, eating and exercise behavior.
And yes, the program turned out to work well, beyond expectations. Significantly less swollen and painful joints in people with rheumatism. Significantly less pain and stiffness in people with osteoarthritis. They also lost weight, an average of 4.3 kilos per person. Fat mass decreased by an average of 3.3 kilos, waist circumference by 4.3 centimeters. And: better blood sugar and cholesterol levels (LDL). Wendy Walrabenstein received her PhD at the end of January and the lifestyle program, Plants for Health, will be launched this year for everyone with rheumatism or osteoarthritis. And after that, the plan is also for people with obesity, cardiovascular disease, neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, inflammatory bowel disease. “You can safely conclude that eating healthy and exercising a lot helps with all lifestyle-related diseases.”
Why plant?
“It doesn’t have to be perfect, and not all animal products are bad for you. But research does suggest that plants rich in fiber improve the microbiome in the gut and can reduce inflammation levels in the blood. Eating less meat is especially good because you automatically eat more plants. Less salt, less fat, more antioxidants, more fiber. In the Plants for Joints group, people consumed twice as much fiber as people in the control group.”
And will they maintain the new lifestyle?
“Yes, also above expectations. But you have to keep encouraging them. You can’t expect people to change their lifestyle in one or two years in a world so full of temptations. Even so, this program is cheaper for people with rheumatism than having them take medication for life. Or a new hip or knee for people with osteoarthritis. Or a stomach reduction for obesity.”
People find it easier to take pills or have surgery.
“And a lot of money is made from it.” She talks about the time she went to a rheumatism conference in Copenhagen with a colleague. “You can see who the researchers are. Moderately dressed, backpacks, everything for science. And then you enter the room where pharmaceuticals present themselves. Everything beautiful and expensive, delicious coffee, a paradise. You think: it’s like fighting the odds. But no. Pharma is not our enemy. We must ensure that we intervene with our intervention programs. Take a businesslike approach, show entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship.”
Pharma and the food industry are usually listed on the stock exchange.
“And they have only one goal: creating value for the shareholders. It’s perverse, but that won’t change anytime soon. I don’t experience that anymore.”