Why Half of America is Pre-Diabetic: A Nutritionist's Warning - Alison Riddiford NC
- Jack Heald
- Mar 31
- 17 min read
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In this candid conversation, former CPA turned nutritionist Alison Riddiford shares how her own health crisis led her to uncover fundamental truths about nutrition that your doctor won't tell you. After battling chronic digestive issues and thyroid cancer despite following mainstream health advice, Alison was shocked when medical professionals at a digestive wellness center never asked about her diet. Now with 15 years of nutritional expertise, she breaks down the three major dietary mistakes causing America's health epidemic and provides clear, actionable guidance to help you feel good again. With over 50% of adults now pre-diabetic or diabetic and 75% obese, Alison's practical approach addresses the root causes of metabolic dysfunction without asking for perfection. Learn why your waist measurement matters more than BMI, why fasting insulin tests are crucial, and how to balance protein intake for optimal health.
Contact Info - Alison Riddiford
Alison@SerenityNutritionandWellness.com https://www.instagram.com/serenitynutritionandwellness/ https://x.com/wellnessarizona
"There are just three things at the root of poor diet - added sugar, seed oils and processed carbohydrates- eliminate these and prioritize protein to transform your health."
Alison Riddiford NC
Jack Heald: Hey folks, welcome. This is the Predictive Health Clinic. I'm Jack Heald and I'm joined today by Allison Ritterford, who is a nutritious, nutritionist. I know how to say that word. Allison, welcome.
Alison Riddiford NC: Hey Jack, thanks for having me.
Jack Heald: Before we get into the details that I like to go through on this on the show, give us a real quick bio. Who are you? Why are you here?
Alison Riddiford NC: I am a recovering CPA. That was my former career before my own health issues prompted me to further my education and become a nutritionist and I've been doing this now for 15 years. I do individual one-on-one consulting, I've done group talks, I've done some corporate wellness. I've done some speaking. I just want to get the word out on, what does it mean to eat healthy and how do we go about it?
Jack Heald: That's, you've answered the first question. What's the one specific issue you want to address today? What does it mean to eat healthy and how do we go about it? So what got you interested in this?
Alison Riddiford NC: What got me interested was I, in college, I got really interested in health and wellness. And I would read all the headlines in the latest books and thought I was doing everything right. And it all resulted in chronic digestive issues, I had thyroid cancer, anxiety, those sorts of problems for the most part.
I felt miserable often. And I thought I kind of thought it was normal for a while that everybody felt bad by the end of the day, but that wasn't the case and about 15 years ago I decided I would get help. So I went straight to the professionals. I went to a center for digestive wellness and the result of that was a list of prescriptions that the doctor wanted to write for me. And I said, I'm not feeling any prescriptions. I came here to find out why I feel miserable. I left that appointment and realized, okay, I'm going to have to figure this out by myself. But there was one question that doctor never asked me.
And a center for digestive wellness. I bet you can ask. You can probably guess what that was.
Jack Heald: Given that you told me that what they told you was take these drugs, my guess about the question they didn't ask was, what do you eat and how do you eat?
Alison Riddiford NC: Absolutely. Not once. They never asked me what I ate.
You take your dog to the vet. The first thing the vet says is what are you feeding your dog? If they're unhealthy, they always ask that question. So I did go down a path of figuring out things for myself. I went back to school, got some education, and decided that I didn't want anybody else to go through that again.
I ask all my clients, my first question is what are you eating? What we put in our bodies really determines our health, it fuels everything.
Jack Heald: I was trying to explain to somebody why this is so important, and by this, dear listener, we're talking about what it means to actually eat healthy. And I'm not 100% happy with this analogy, but it'll do.
An internal combustion engine will burn all kinds of petroleum-based products. It will. But if you don't put the right kind of gasoline in that engine, you're going to burn it out pretty quick. It'll burn it, it'll run, but the wrong fuel, even though the engine is running, will destroy the engine.
Now, I'm not a nutritionist. How is my analogy? Is that a pretty good analogy?
Alison Riddiford NC: I like the analogy. Yes.
Jack Heald: All right. So what's the biggest popular misconception about what it means to eat healthy?
Alison Riddiford NC: I would say the biggest misconception is that there is one way and it's going to work for everybody and depending on where you read your get your nutrition guidance from that one way could be vegetarian, carnivore, vegan, low carb, eat everything you want in moderation,
Jack Heald: restrict your calories,
Alison Riddiford NC: It's just everywhere. And it's just not the case. Everybody is unique. Everybody works best. Your car is going to run best on a certain mixture of fuel and oil to stay with your analogy. And that's different for every single person.
Jack Heald: This will be both good news and bad news for most people. It's possible that the way you've chosen to eat that hasn't been working for you is just a lousy way to eat. Or it might be that you just don't have the right way for yourself. This is probably not cutting time here. Let's deviate just a tad bit from the script. What are some of the symptoms? What are some of the signs that you're not eating right?
Alison Riddiford NC: Signs would be, gosh, it runs the gamut and most people feel a lot of them.
It could be minor signs like gas, bloating, uncomfortableness, or insomnia. It could be more serious. You have diabetes, pre-diabetes, you have heart disease. You, your mind is foggy. You're not thinking right. You can't get through a day without a lot of caffeine because the fatigue is so bad. You may have joint pain. The list goes on and on.
Jack Heald: And you would, as a nutritionist, listen to a litany of symptoms and still start with, let's look at what you're eating. Is that right?
Alison Riddiford NC: Absolutely. There are other things today we're going to focus on eating, but really there are three categories. You need to be eating right. You need to move. Your body and you need to rest and that's sleep, and I would put stress reduction in the rest category.
Jack Heald: And this isn't, this is not any different from what everybody that I talk to says. You got to eat right, you got to move, you got to sleep or rest.
That's why rest is a better word than just sleep. Sleep is in the category of rest. All right. So what's the most likely outcome of people just.
Alison Riddiford NC: We're there. It's one of the, it's the reason you do this podcast. We're there over 50 percent of adults in the U.S. are pre-diabetic or diabetic. 30 percent of teenagers fall into that category. Most people have no idea that they are there.
Jack Heald: This is just staggering.
Alison Riddiford NC: 75 percent of adults are obese. 40 percent of kids are obese. That is poor metabolic health and poor metabolic health are really at the root of every single disease that we fear the most, not just diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and dementia, mental health issues. It feeds all of them.
Jack Heald: I want to just take a moment and pause and contemplate what that means.
Half the population is pre-diabetic or diabetic. Half the population. I'm old enough to remember when two diabetics in a crowd was a lot. And if they were diabetic, it was probably type 1.
Alison Riddiford NC: Correct. Type 2 diabetes used to be called adult-onset diabetes because it was something that took half a lifetime to become diabetic. And now they don't call it that anymore, because now kids are becoming type 2 diabetics.
Jack Heald: Without getting into the medical, biological, chemical reasons why diabetes develops, because there's plenty of places y'all can find that, let's get to the real meat of the issue.
A list of symptoms that range from stuff that most people Probably just take for granted. I know before I started eating I just assumed having gas, painful gas, all the time, was just, that's, it was so common I didn't even consider it an issue. And then when I started eating right and I quit having gas, I thought, boy, I sure put up with a lot of pain. I didn't need to. But it runs from that all the way to these things that kill you.
Talk about specific actions in two different categories: the action being how do you, what do you do to maybe self-diagnose? Hey, I've got problems that are, if not caused by, are at least certainly, um, exacerbated by how I eat. And then the second category, what do I do? How do I eat? How do I figure out what to eat?
Alison Riddiford NC: First first I said earlier, there's not one way of eating that works for everybody. But there are certain concepts that, dietary concepts, that do apply to everyone, and I will talk about those to answer the second part of your question. The first part is awareness.
People need to know where are you starting. Are you metabolically healthy? Are you unhealthy? Are you pre-diabetic? And one of the ways to do that there's a few things you can do one, get some comprehensive lab work done. And that's not the lab work that your doctor just routinely runs, or they check your blood count and your cholesterol.
And maybe there might be a fasting glucose number thrown in there. I have a whole handout on the tests, and they're pretty basic. This is nothing complicated or super expensive. However, I have a list of the tests I like my clients to get as a baseline, which I'm happy to share with your listeners if that’s something that you’d like.
Jack Heald: Awesome.
Alison Riddiford NC: But a few of the key things are, along with just getting your blood count, your cholesterol checked, make sure they're looking at your liver enzymes. Make sure you look at what's called A1C, which is your average blood sugar over a period of two to three months. And behind that, A1C absolutely insists that they check your fasting insulin.
It's such an easy test to do and doctors just start checking it. You can pick up prediabetes 10 to 15 years. Before it turns into full-blown diabetes by checking insulin levels because those are going to go up before your blood sugar does. And then another measurement that isn't standard and should be done is a measure of inflammation called C reactive protein, another great test to do.
There are other markers, but those are some of the key ones. So find out where you're starting. You can also do you should get your blood pressure checked, high blood pressure, that's a sign something's going wrong, and something you can do at home is, if you're, take your waist measurement, and it should be no more than half of your height. If it is, that's a sign that you're metabolically unhealthy and you need to make some changes.
Jack Heald: So a 72-inch tall man should have a waist no bigger than 36 inches. Correct. That's pretty simple.
Alison Riddiford NC: Yeah. It's a much better measurement than BMI because BMI depends on, you know, if you're a weightlifter. Your BMI may tell you that you're obese and you're not. So that's the first part of awareness is, where are you starting? Just your health status.
The second part of awareness is, what are you eating? You don't like people to get too bogged down in tracking things. But for a few days, maybe for a week to track how many grams of protein do you eat?
How much sugar do you eat? How many grams of carbohydrates? What type of food are you eating? Start looking at labels. What are you putting inside your body? People can be very unaware of exactly what they're eating. So that's the second part of awareness. And third, this really gets to the second part of your question.
Okay, now that you know where you stand, what the heck can you do about it?
And this part, the answer really is simple. It may not be easy to implement because people don't like making changes. But it really is simple. And that's because there are just three things. that are really at the root of a poor diet.
That's just three.
And if you can reduce or remove these three things from your diet, you're now eating healthy. So here's the three things. The first is adding sugar. And that's probably not a surprise to anybody. That's been well publicized now. Sugar's not good for you. Sugar now, added sugar has to be broken out on a food label, and that's very helpful because you want, as an adult, no more than 25 grams of added sugar per day. Much lower is healthier. Zero is best. And it's definitely doable. So look at labels and see how much added sugar is in this product. It gets very sneaky. If you're eating a flavoured yogurt, you might think I'm eating healthy because it's yogurt, and then you realize there's a lot of sugar in there.
Or you're going to Starbucks on the way to work, which is very common for people. And maybe you're getting a grande mocha. You've now started your day with 30 grams of added sugar. So you have to be careful. So that's the first thing, added sugar.
The second thing to stay away from is feed oils. And you had a great podcast episode with Kate Shanahan. I want to refer, to save time, to refer listeners to that episode to listen to it because she has done a deep dive into deceived oils and will tell you why they are so bad for you. Why they're toxic inside our bodies? And I'll tell you what the seed oils are, I will name the ones she calls the hateful eight. Do you remember them, Jack? You were trying to remember.
Jack Heald: There's soy, sunflower corn, canola, God. I got four out of eight right off the top of my head. Cotton seed. Corn, canola, cottonseed, palm oil. How am I doing? I'm getting there.
Alison Riddiford NC: Palm wasn't in there.
Jack Heald: Oh, okay.
Alison Riddiford NC: Corn, canola, cottonseed, sunflower, safflower, soy.
Jack Heald: There we go.
Alison Riddiford NC: Grape seed and rice bran.
Jack Heald: Grape, grape seed and rice bran. And you know what? The grape seed was the one that really shocked me because I don't know, I don't know why it was grapeseed oil. It's far less common and therefore it's probably, you know, it's healthy.
Alison Riddiford NC: So those are the oils that you can, it's easy to avoid those at home. Just don't buy them. Don't have them in your cabinet. They are the oils, if you go out to eat 95 percent of the time, those are the oils that restaurants use to cook your food in because they're cheap. I'm not saying never go out to eat, but just be aware. And when you read. food labels, you'll be shocked at how often those are the oils that are used in all sorts of processed foods.
So don't eat those oils. Listen to Kate Shanahan and find out why. But you do want to embrace healthy fat. Those of us who grew up in the 80s, we were taught fat is bad, fat will make you fat. Fat is so important for our entire body, our brain health. It just keeps us running right. The good fats, olive oil, coconut oil, butter, unrefined avocado oil, and even lard, and ghee. These are really healthy fats. Don't fear them. They are absolutely an important part of a healthy diet.
Jack Heald: Stop, stop top, stop.
Alison Riddiford NC: Yeah.
Jack Heald: They are part of a healthy diet. It’s not just, yeah okay, you can have it. They are part of a healthy diet. Hear that people.
Alison Riddiford NC: I'm sure you've had guests on before, but I will reinforce. There are essential fats. That means there are types of fat that our body can't make itself. So we have to ingest them in order for our body to work properly. There are essential amino acids or proteins. We have to ingest them. Our body can't make them. There are no essential carbohydrates. Our body can make the glucose that it needs from other sources. So I'm not saying don't ever eat carbohydrates, but we have to eat healthy fat and we have to eat protein.
Jack Heald: When I talk to folks about what I've learned here, that's, that probably is the fastest, simplest thing. And one of the most shocking that I tell people. You have to have fats. You have to have protein and you absolutely positively don't have to have carbs. Your body doesn't need carbs. It's not that we don't love them. It's not that they're not fun. It's not, they're not delicious. It's that if you never put another carb in your body for the rest of your life, you'd be just fine. Fats and proteins, not so much. Okay. I don't want to hijack your, what you have to tell us here. Okay. Got it.
Alison Riddiford NC: We have two out of our three.
Things that we want to avoid or reduce refined that add sugar, seed oils and the 3rd are processed highly refined carbohydrates or processed food.
Most of them come in the form of carbohydrates and basically that's almost anything you find in the store that's in a package and it has more than 5 or 6 ingredients.
A lot of times it's flour-based, you have crackers, cookies, pasta- even rice, white rice, packaged goods, cereal. I think people are kind of aware now, pretty aware of what these processed foods are and those refined carbohydrates. Bread, even bread that says whole, made with whole grains. So that, that is definitely the third category of the food that you want to reduce or avoid.
So now you have all this awareness. You know where you're starting. You know the basics of, I need to get these foods out of my life. But then the question I get is what, now what do I eat? What's left? And the biggest thing I see is people not eating enough protein, especially at I'm not even going to say, especially as we get older. That's where I notice it the most.
Protein. That needs to be the focus of every meal. We can't build our body. We can't heal our body. We can't maintain our body without protein. That's our building block.
There's a lot of different guidance on how much protein is enough protein. A general rule of thumb that seems to be, that I agree with, is you shoot for about one gram of high-quality protein per optimal pound of body weight. Most people I work with, women in particular, they might be eating 30 grams, 40 grams of protein a day, in an entire day.
I generally tell them, because people are so far down there, I say, okay, shoot for 100 grams of protein a day. It's not that hard. You just have to shift what you're eating and normalize things like instead of one egg, which is six to seven grams of protein or two eggs in the morning, you should be having three or four eggs in the morning.
It's amazing when people shift what's on their plate and you prioritize that protein. If you're really eating 100 grams a day or more, you just don't have a lot of room for those three things that I want you to cut down on. You stay full. That's huge. I want people to eat, and focus on protein and healthy fats. If you love, and then fill in with your vegetables, whatever vegetables that you love it's pretty simple.
Jack Heald: Get enough protein, avoid the three things we don't want and the rest of it kind of takes care of itself. That's what I'm hearing.
Alison Riddiford NC: Absolutely.
Jack Heald: Let's talk about the feedback that you get in your practice. And the ones that are always fun are the biggest complaints or the most common complaints, the biggest compliments, the most common compliment, you know, give us some of the extremes that you hear as you're working with people.
Alison Riddiford NC: I'll start on the positive side. If somebody tells me I feel good for the first time in a long time, that is one of the best compliments somebody can give me about my practice.
It's rarely, oh, I lost 10 pounds and I'm so grateful for you. It's just not that.
While weight loss is a priority for many people, feeling good is all the motivation you need. To continue on a certain dietary plan or eating a certain way. So the best thing I can hear from someone is, Wow, you made my life better because now I feel good.
Complaints oftentimes have to do with ice cream. Like people just want to eat ice cream every day. They’re not happy with me when I tell them that they can't. Yeah, it's ice cream is such a common one, bread also people and I don't tell people you have to avoid bread 100%.
But I know for me, growing up and well into really until I educated myself bread was a huge part of my diet. I had bread with every meal. So that's another complaint. People don't want to They just don't want to give up certain foods.
I would say that if you really don't want to give something up, whether it's sugar, or bread, or your ice cream, or alcohol, If something is really hard for you to give up, that's something you need to put more thought into as to why it may be a problem if it's that difficult.
The other thing people have a hard time with is they're going along on this wonderful course of feeling good, eating healthy, and then there's a crisis in their life or a stressful time or even a happy time they go travel, it's the holidays, they're celebrating something when they go off the rails and so many people have this really hard on themselves, first of all.
Harder than anyone else is on them. They're hard on themselves. So they go off the rails a bit, they're back to eating the way they used to, and they feel crappy, but because they've already failed, they just stay there for a while, and that's super common and what I like to remind my clients is it's okay. It happens. And you have all the knowledge and you have all the tools so that when you're ready, you can get back on track and don't try to be perfect. Don't try to be perfect because that just sets you up for failure.
Jack Heald: The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Alison Riddiford NC: Well said.
Jack Heald: All right. This is my favorite part of the show the billboard message. If you had to deliver the essence, the core, the distilled truth of your message and you had at most eight words, what would those eight words be? Eight or fewer.
Alison Riddiford NC: First of all I really would like to see this on a billboard and I would like to see it all over town. Here are my words. Prioritize protein, embrace healthy fat, cut processed carbs.
Jack Heald: Hey we did it. Prioritize protein, embrace healthy fats, that's five, cut processed carbs, that's eight. People, we can put it on a billboard. I love it.
Alison Riddiford NC: Yep. I want to see it.
Jack Heald: Very good. Our guest has been Alison Ridderford. Alison, tell folks how they can get more details. And by the way, listeners, this stuff will be in the show notes.
Alison Riddiford NC: Probably the best way to reach me is through my website. It is https://serenitynutritonandwellness.com.
Jack Heald: https://serenitynutritonandwellness.com and you are, you have a presence on social media, Instagram and LinkedIn and X, I believe. So I'll make sure all of that is available. Is the the list that you talked about is that available on your website or is that a separate thing that we should just add a link to?
Alison Riddiford NC: I will provide you a link because it's not on my website.
Jack Heald: Very good. The link to the list of. of things that Allison said she'd share with us. We'll also be in the show notes. Thanks for joining us. This has been Predictive Health Clinic, and we'll talk to you guys next time.
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