Looking Back on 2017 — Dietary Guidelines Slammed, Food-as-Medicine Garnered Prominence
Looking back over the food and nutrition articles that I archived during 2017, two topics stood out. The most prominent was national dietary guideline slamming as a cause of today’s obesity and chronic disease epidemics. The second was a rise in articles related to “food-as-medicine”. I’ve picked a few of these articles and provided snippets from each below.
Therapeutic Nutrition-Paradigm for 21st Century Medicine
Jason Fung MD made the case that the heyday of medicine was circa 1940–1980. After which came a massive obesity epidemic followed by a massive diabetes epidemic; for which doctors are not qualified to treat and their arsenal of drugs and procedures are the wrong set of tools. Fung makes the case that obesity, diabetes and other conditions closely related to metabolic syndrome (including cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease and certain cancers) are dietary diseases and should be corrected by dietary change.
You can’t treat a dietary disease with drugs. So the weapon of choice for metabolic problems of the 21st century is not a new drug or a new type of surgery, although there are many who try to medicalize a dietary problem… The weapon of choice in 21st century medicine will be information. Information far beyond the simplistic notions of calories.
Noakes Calls Traditional Food Pyramid ‘Genocide’
A legend in the field of nutrition, Professor Tim Noakes was quoted by the South African newspaper as stating that the government dietary guidelines will be “remembered in history as a genocide”.
In the actual tweet thread to which the article refers, Noakes states that the sudden upward trend of obesity “begins in 1980, 3 years after proclamation of the 1977 US Dietary Guidelines that encouraged us to eat fattening carbs.”
“…the focus should be on human health‚ which he asserted had been very severely impacted over the past 40 years by the adoption of dietary guidelines that were never tested to see what the outcome would be… He alleged that the evidence was clear that populations following the dietary guidelines were getting sicker.”
Our Health Guidelines Are Letting Us Down
Continuing with the the theme that government dietary guidelines are the primary driver of today’s sickness and obesity, the Australian newspaper ponders the validity of the scientific evidence behind the guidelines when “a disproportionate number of the studies that are included are sponsored by food companies”.
The article questions whether the decennial publishing cycle is fast enough given that even if it were to contain corrected information “The next major edition is due to be published in 2023 but, by then, eight in 10 Australians over 20 will be overweight or obese”.
…many patients are paddling hard against the stream, doing as they are advised, but losing the fight and developing complications that take eyesight, mobility, circulation and eventually lives… they are responsible for what goes in their mouths, but those diagnosed with a disease generally turn to authoritative advice. But so many are finding they can’t reverse their condition no matter how rigorously they stick to the accepted guidelines. [Anthony] Power says logic would suggest the guidelines are flawed.
Nutrition Has a ‘Consensus’ to Use Bad Science: An Open Letter to the National Academies
Prof. Carl Lavie, MD. (medical director of cardiac rehabilitation and preventive cardiology) and Edward Archer, PhD, MS (Obesity Theorist and Computational Physiologist) published an open letter to the Presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) urging them to desist the use of “pseudo-scientific” data and “physiologically implausible” studies to establish the Dietary Guidelines for Americans or in regulation of the $5 trillion US food industry.
Briefly, the M-BMs employed in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) and other major nutrition studies produced data that were physiologically implausible, incompatible with life, and inadmissible as scientific evidence. For example, we used multiple methods to show that the energy intake data from 26,975 of 63,369 NHANES participants (42.5%) were below the level needed to support survival.
Implausible dietary data should not be used to establish the DGA; yet that is exactly what the National Academies’ report recommends.
Nutrition Coalition Reacts to National Academies of Medicine Report on Broken Process Behind the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans
The Nutrition Coalition expressed public delight that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) issued a report acknowledging that its process for reviewing the science used to set national dietary guidelines had flaws.
Flaws in the DGA [Dietary Guidelines for Americans] process are the major force shaping the U.S. food supply, and they drive dietary advice by all health-care practitioners as well as all federal nutrition policy — from school lunches to food stamps to even the meals served to our active duty military service members. For years, we’ve been told that the Dietary Guidelines are the gold standard and that if Americans are obese and diabetic, it must be their fault. This report confirms that this is not the case.
Sarah Hallberg, Executive Director of the Nutrition Coalition, succinctly made clear both the present-day absurdity and the national level harm being caused by the guidelines.
I sincerely hope that as a country this report will put us on a path towards science-based and effective guidelines that help, not hurt, our overall well-being. I find my patients get healthier — lose weight and even reverse their diabetes — by doing what the current science says, which is the complete opposite of what the Guidelines tell them. It’s obvious to me, as a practitioner, that these Guidelines do not reflect the best and most current science… It is imperative that we get this process right before as we head into the cycle for the next set of guidelines, which are due in 2020
When the Prescription is a Recipe
The aforementioned issues of government dietary guidelines being based upon pseudo-science in support of Big Food and the subsequent collective suffering in the millions (including premature deaths) was depressing.
However there was a growth in national stories that food could be used instead as a medicine. It’s reason for optimism; that culturally we could be at a turning point, turning away from the use of food as a decades long poisoning.
The New York Times ran a story that a growing number of medical practitioners are helping their patients to cook and/or offering healthy food pantries, and some medical schools are now offering culinary curriculums:
Dr. Fernando said she has learned that poor food choices can be the root of many seemingly unrelated issues. ‘Sometimes parents say their kids have symptoms of anxiety and are wetting the bed and they feel their child needs to see a counselor or needs medication,’… it may be that the child is not eating enough fiber.
However the article laments that today so few doctors are versed in nutrition and food as medicine, that at best it’s going to be a long time before kitchens become part of the health system:
… many doctors don’t focus on nutrition when they see patients. Only 27 percent of medical schools in the United States offer students the recommended 25 hours of nutritional training… in a recent study in the American Journal of Medicine involving 930 cardiologists, less than a third described their nutrition knowledge as ‘mostly up-to-date’
Is This Proof Food Can Be Better at Fighting Disease Than Medicine?
The British paper cites evidence that diet may be used to treat chronic conditions instead of drugs or surgery and that diet may work as well as, “if not better than, medication.”
However the article also laments the lack of training within the healthcare system:
Yet many doctors seem unaware of diet’s positive effect. ‘There is little or no training at medical school or postgraduate level on the impact of nutrition on health,’ says Dr Aseem Malhotra, a consultant cardiologist at the Lister Hospital in Stevenage.
The piece makes the very apt point that:
It’s not simply that switching to healthier eating and losing weight makes the difference — but it seems specific foods may also have a particular ‘healing’ effect in certain conditions.
And provides a positive view looking forwards:
We are on the edge of a breakthrough on knowing how the food we eat might change the treatment of disease… With that comes the possibility that one day we might use food, not drugs, as medicine.”
It finishes detailing the cases of five patients who “say swapping to disease-specific diets has transformed their health”.
