There's an awful lot about our society that is at odds with the basic message of "don't smoke, be active, eat a healthy diet, and by the way control stress and get enough sleep." We don't make those things easy. We ideally would make health lie along the path of least resistance. But if not the path of least resistance, there at least needs to be a path so you don't have to bushwhack your way there.

We have literature indicating that overwhelmingly, health is influenced by a very short list of modifiable behaviors topped by three: tobacco use, physical activity and dietary pattern. You could modify those three things; you can change people's fate. I wanted to change those. Smoking cessation, important but relatively simple - a lot of people are working on that. Physical activity: important to me, important to health but also relatively simple. I like nutrition. It's complicated; you really need to learn a lot of stuff to be an expert there.

I think basic disease care access and basic access to health care is a human right. If we need a constitutional amendment to put it in the Bill of Rights, then that's what we ought to do. Nobody with a conscience would leave the victim of a shark attack to bleed while we figure out whether or not they could pay for care. That tells us that at some level, health care access is a basic human right. Our system should be aligned so that our policies match our morality. Then within that system where everybody has access, we need to incentivize prevention, both for the patient and the provider.

When I went to medical school, I was taught about two basic kinds of diabetes: juvenile onset and adult onset. From the time I did my training in medical school to the end of my residency we were already seeing the transformation of adult onset diabetes into Type II, which is what we call it now, which from my perspective is a euphemism we have draped over this condition to conceal the fact that what was a chronic disease in midlife is now epidemic in children. Frankly, Type II diabetes in a seven year old is adult onset diabetes. We just don't want to confront that unpleasant fact.

We are creatures. We have a link with a native habitat just like every other species. Throughout most of human history, physical activity was unavoidable, calories were scarce and hard to get. In the modern era, calories are unavoidable, physical activity is scare and hard to get. The traits that allowed our ancestors to survive, and let's face it, the survival of our ancestors is the reason that we're here because the people who don't survive and make very crummy ancestors, are our traits. But they're very much at odds with the modern environment.

Color, rather than shape, is more closely related to emotion.

The metaphor I routinely use is polar bears in the Sahara desert. You take creatures adapted to the cold and put them in the heat, the very traits that allow them to survive in one environment will conspire against them in the other. We are polar bears in the Sahara with one important distinction: we are smarter than the average bear. Once we identify the nature of the problem, we can think our way out of it. But it begins by acknowledging you didn't fail because you couldn't succeed. Because you didn't even know what the scope of the problem was. It's not your fault.