By Ava Simone Collier

Dr. Edward A. Layne is the founder of My Preventive Health, LLC, (MPH), an Atlanta based company which promotes the use of preventive health as a primary method of maintaining your health and youthful energy. Dr. Layne is a Gastroenterologist and practices at the Westside Gastroenterology & Endoscopy Center in Austell, Georgia. This Barbados, West Indies native attended Harvard College and Tulane University School of Medicine and was the first black Gastroenterologist in Atlanta. Dr. Layne also serves as the Honorary Consul for Barbados in Atlanta since 1990.

When asked about My Preventive Health, Dr. Layne explained that his ego was partly responsible for its inception. “About ten years ago I was seeing lots of patients. The patients loved me and I felt very good about myself and what I was doing. But I looked around and thought, what am I really doing? How many people am I really impacting? I had the opportunity and fortune to acquire a lot of knowledge and experience. How could I use this to make more of an impact in health?” He says he then took a look around at the health situation in this country and it was clear to him that there was a problem. “There was a real disconnect in the area of health. We are treating patients like automobiles. You get into an accident and then we take care of you. You can’t do that with human beings. It dawned on me that we had to look at things from a preventive point of view instead of getting all excited about treating illnesses. When you think about treating, it’s already a failure.”

Dr. Layne says he and a classmate from Harvard decided to implement a system that could be used universally at any health care practice which could manage the care of a patients. “This is a system of healthcare that could be put into any doctor’s office. They can use that module and manage your health.” As an example, he jokingly used a hypothetical situation of a patient being accessed under My Preventive Health system. “Let’s say a patient came in and said to me, ‘Doc, I want to be young, healthy and sexy until I’m 110 years old,’ ” he laughs. “I would first need to find out where they are regarding their health. I would need to obtain a “fingerprint” of their health up to this point.”

He further explained that this could involve a series of tests, standardized and not so standardized. This could include devices that would measure your functional age, not how old you, but how old your body is behaving. “I know you may be 40, but your body is behaving like it’s 50. What we would do is develop a program that would first discover anything that we find that is out of kilter. We want to push your functional age back. We want you to be 50 and looking and feeling like you’re 30-35, not the other way around.” In addition, Dr. Layne says that avoiding or reversing the pitfalls of poor, long established eating habits is another major component of MPH. “We want you to avoid the challenges and traps that society has for you that can make you ill such as refined carbs, white rice, white flour, white sugar…those sorts of things.”

I asked Dr. Layne what he would offer as a single piece of advice to improve our overall health and prevent many illnesses. “We want you to learn how to burn off extra fat and teach you how to supplement yourself. It is important to bring your percentage of body fat down to where it should be for your height. We now know that every extra pound of body fat that you have will shorten your life. The secret is grazing. What that means is that you really want to eat small, frequent meals all day. This should consist of complex carbs, things that nature made…fruits, vegetables and nuts. You can also have your protein (hormone free meats). Grazing is critical because it speeds up your metabolism and helps you burn off your fat. You have to take your Tupperware to work and take the good stuff with you instead of eating from the vending machines and snack on it all morning.” Dr. Layne explains that by the time most of us are 40 or 50 years old, the glands that digest the food are the same age. They are programmed literally to produce enzymes to manage your body weight. He says that by the time most people are 50, they’ve put on an average of 30, 40 or 50 pounds. “Understand that we’re overworking those glands and when you put all of those extra calories in the body, the body doesn’t know what to do with it and stores it as fat. You want to control the percentage of body fat. Prevention is the way to go. We are hoping to catch another generation and teach them how to maintain their health instead of treating disease.”

To learn more about MPH, visit http://www.mypreventivehealth.com