For those who have personally researched real food-low-carb dieting and have applied the principles and seen the results on their health, you eventually reach a point where you realize that your Doctor, your family physician or your HMO nutritionist gives you dietary advice that YOU KNOW IS WRONG. Yet these are the same professionals who may have treated an illness you had or set a broken bone or even performed life saving or life-changing surgery on you. They are highly intelligent, educated and furthermore, you've known them for years and you simply feel good when you see them, because you know they genuinely want to help you with your health problems...
....but they give dietary advice that you know damn well is outright LIES.
It's not the Doctor's fault...really. It's endemic to our health "care" system.
I was brought to this train of thoughts today, because I just read a post by a Dr. who definitely understands the truth about diet and nutrition, Dr. Michael Eades. From The Pitiful State of Medical Ignorance:
It’s difficult to imagine the number of people who go into doctor’s offices every day with weight problems, elevated blood sugar, high blood pressure, and abnormal lipids and are told with great authority to eat less and exercise more. If the patient asks the doctor for a specific diet, the doc usually has the nurse give the patient the standard 1800 kcal low-fat diet sheet. Depending upon the motivation of the patient, this diet may or may not be followed. If the patient does suck up and follow the diet, many, of not most, will fail. When these poor folks come back for their recheck, their doctor then wants to put them on some sort of drug. Believe me, the stories above aren’t atypical. This is happening all across the country thousands of times every single day.
And I’m mad as hell because it doesn’t have to be this way.
There is another option. These poor people could be given a low-carbohydrate diet to try. Most of the doctors who prescribe the 1800 kcal diet (along with a recommendation to exercise more) could give people the choice. A low-carbohydrate diet or a low-calorie diet. But the vast majority of them don’t. They simply opt for the low-calorie diet, then resort to drugs when it doesn’t work.
Dr. Eades, a licensed physician, doesn't ever really get around to actually trying to point out WHY so many Doctors "opt for the low-calorie diet, then resort to drugs when it doesn't work."
I left the following comment on his blog, and I'm curious to see if he lets it show up (he moderates all comments).
If you want to know WHY so many Doctors dispense bad dietary advice, and refuse to believe their own eyes when their patients improve after going low-carb, you have to look at the big picture.
Low Carb is the exact opposite of what the USDA advises with their High-Carb Pyramid.
Follow the money.
Who regularly gets appointed to the highest echelons of the USDA? Big Agriculture execs for the likes of Monsanto and Cargill.
And who profits from having a populace deliberately mislead, literally slowly poisoned by their high-carb, processed food diets?
The Pharmaceutical industry (Who get there execs appointed to the FDA…are we starting to recognize a pattern?)
Big Money corporations buy influence by giving their money to politicians who than appoint their lackeys to the regulatory agencies who literally control the messages being promoted by our mass media and medical community regarding diet and nutrition.
Most Doctors are not deliberately prescribing these diets because they’re happily rubbing their hands together because they are receiving perks from Pharma reps for prescribing statins (although that does play a part), you also have to understand that most of the Doctors are reading peer-reviewed journals and/or given the latest “results” provided by the Pharma companies themselves with deliberately misleading results that all promote the same outcome – keep the sheeple eating the grains and prescribe the profitable drugs that mask the symptoms that result from the long term consequences of the conventional wisdom’s dietary advice.
My own personal family physician recently retired. He’s close to 90 lbs. overweight. He has chronic asthma. When I related my own discovery of low carb dietary knowledge, and how I lost 35 lbs. in 4 months and have kept it off for 4 years straight now by “eating bacon and eggs cooked in grease and butter” every morning, it simply did not compute with him. It was like his eyes glazed over and he simply tuned out what I was saying.
He simply could not come to grips with a living, breathing example of a person who was doing everything contrary to what his medical journals and professional nutritionist guidelines of our HMO direct him to apply to his own medical practice.
Quite simply, Doctors, like most people that have imbibed a lifetime of government/corporate propaganda via our mass media and public school curriculum, can’t deal with the cognitive dissonance of real live examples that are contrary to their own indoctrination that is repeatedly reinforced both inside (pharmaceutical sales reps sales sheets and peer review journals touting bad diet advice and pharmaceutical remedies) and outside (our mass media dietary zeitgeist) of their professional environment.
Most Doctors that prescribe bad diets and even worse medication to ameliorate the symptoms of those bad diets, are simply nothing more than highly educated and licensed useful idiots.