 All of us at the Pritikin Longevity Center are pleased to announce the arrival of our latest addition to the Pritikin faculty: Tom Rifai, MD, Board Certified in both Internal Medicine and as a Physician Nutrition Specialist.
Dr. Tom’s passion for all things Pritikin is not only professional but personal. As a teenager, he struggled with weight problems. By age 19, he’d hit 200 pounds. “For a guy barely 5’7”, that was a significant amount,” recalls Dr. Tom.
Determined to shed the weight and get lean, he began following a Pritikin-style approach after walking into a little Lebanese restaurant near his home in the Detroit suburbs that featured a low-sodium, low-fat Pritikin menu “that I really caught onto.”
In the 1990s, throughout his undergrad years at Michigan State University and grad years at Wayne State University School of Medicine, and later as a physician practicing in Michigan, “the Pritikin Program continued to be part of my lexicon.” And so did his devotion to all people – children as well as adults – struggling to conquer weight problems.
As Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Wayne State University, Dr. Tom has helped developed curriculums for treatment of the overweight and obese. He has served as advisor to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Florida, for their multi-disciplinary weight-loss programs. Since 2003, he has also served on the Advisory Committee for the Michigan Cardiovascular Health and Prevention Task Force.
In 2007, Dr. Tom was invited to become an Advisor to Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm as part of the United States’ National Governors Association funded Healthy Kids, Healthy Michigan project. This project was formed to address the Governor’s request for proposals that will lead to formulation of Michigan legislation to promote changes in schools and public policy that will help Michigan’s kids achieve healthier weights.
Starting January 2008, Tom brings his enthusiasm and expertise to the Pritikin Longevity Center in Aventura, Florida. And he’s thrilled “because Pritikin is a natural for me. Frankly, I’ve tried to practice in today’s world of seven-minutes-per-visit medicine. I’ve tried to squeeze lifestyle-change education into that narrow time period, but it’s far from ideal.”
What is ideal is “taking patients and separating them from their calorie-toxic, high-stress environments and showing them in a highly developed, research-based multidisciplinary care experience like Pritikin that they can, in fact, make major health-improving lifestyle modifications. The multidisciplinary health education model is the well-recognized medical gold standard for prevention of chronic disease. And I don’t believe anyone does it better than Pritikin.”
“It’s great to be on board!” |
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