Rittenhouse Village at Portage hosted Love Your Heart! on Thursday where they welcomed Dr. Maya Kommineni from Porter Physician Group to provide residents with an educational presentation on nutrition, the heart and cardiovascular health.
“When we think about medicine we think about writing prescriptions and taking pills,” said Dr. Kommineni, who has a specific interest in preventative cardiology and cardiovascular nutrition. “That’s usually what doctors do but in my training I really thought about how to reverse common diseases. This is a great way to learn about cardiac disease and how you can, at any age honestly, change your health just by what you eat.”
“I care about every place that you have an artery or a vein because that’s where your blood is going,” Dr. Kommineni said. “This is kind of a new frontier. Before we didn’t really talk about diet but now physicians need to talk about diet especially in cardiac patients where it is so, so important.”
Dr. Kommineni spoke with residents about her experiences with patients who are on multiple medications to treat blood pressure or cholesterol and how changing their diet can have a lasting impact on their health and need for medications.
“We’re just not doing a good job at treating blood pressure efficiently,” Kommineni said. “This is the number one thing we do to treat blood pressure, pills. I look at it a little bit differently. Through my journey I became a vegetarian about 20 years ago and it’s because of health. Now we have all these studies coming out over the last 15 years showing that reduction in meat and incorporating more plants into our diet improves a vast number of health problems.”
These informative health-based presentations are somewhat new to the residences of Rittenhouse Village at Portage but the interest among those attending was great and the information they acquire can be very valuable in treating a range of health problems with which they may be suffering.
“It’s actually something new that we started for 2016,” said Judy Kukelka, Director of Marketing with Rittenhouse. “Kim [Scott] is our activities director and she saw the need to have professionals come in from the community and do some type of education for the residents. It’s kind of hard for them to get out so it’s hard for them to participate and hear these things if they’re hosted at the hospital or the senior center so we’re just trying to bring them here.”
“Having a topic like this, and we’re going to have therapists come in and talk about how to prevent falls and things like that, is to try to keep them as young as possible and as healthy as possible,” Kukelka said. “[Dr. Kommineni’s] big thing is really to keep them off of medication. So often the residents go to the doctor and come back and check in at the nursing staff and say, 'It’s okay, I’m on this, this and this now!’ If we can incorporate and talk with our chef now we’re going to maybe get more greens and fruits and vegetables on the menu so it’s been great for the staff as well as the residents.”
To find out more about Rittenhouse Village at Portage, visit: rittenhousevillages.com.