Lily | Ōtāhuhu
“I’m from Ngāi Tahu, so Dunedin is my true home.
I grew up, born in Dunedin, but moved up to Auckland as a child, and went through Kōhanga reo and Kura kaupapa education system. I’m the first graduate of Kura kaupapa to go to medical school, and I am just really passionate about people receiving good quality health care.
I work at Turuki Health Care in Māngere, I’m a GP and at the moment we are looking at a lot of lifestyle nutrition-based changes in our practice. I work in South Auckland, and a significant number of my patients are morbidly obese, or overweight and suffer from conditions such as Type 2 Diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and mental health problems. The link with nutrition, there’s lots of things that impact on that. But I’ve been looking a lot at the role of nutrition in these, and I think that lowering the amount of sugar and carbohydrates in our diet, and inputting more fat is actually what’s needed to help improve the wellbeing of South Auckland.
I think the role of the GP in the community is a place where people get their day to day knowledge about health in general and so we do have an important role in reassuring or providing information when people present to us. But also I would like to think that we have a bigger viewpoint of health and the other determinants of health, and it’s not just about prescribing medications or giving medical certificates.
What I would like would be support from the Government to make changes to the nutrition guidelines to enable more health practitioners to undertake these changes.
The changes that I’d like to see from the Ministry of Health are around the current nutrition guidelines. I think that we have vilified fat unnecessarily in our diet, and that removing fat from diets has actually had a big impact on our wellbeing. I would like to see changes that support that, based on the current evidence that exists, which actually also supports that.
My message about healthy eating is to encourage people to eat good sources of protein, whether that’s meat or eggs or fish or chicken, and to eat the fat that comes naturally with that, to eat lots of vegetables, coconut, olive oil, other types of fats, dairy products if you tolerate them, and just to be aware of the sugar and the carbohydrates in the food that you eat, and try and minimise those where you can.”
