Chatting with an MD Internist friend
of mine, my hopes for the medical care of his Type 2 diabetic patients sunk to an
abysmal low. Admittedly it was a social situation, and in fairness my friend
did not express much interest as I proselytized about my Very Low Carb, Type 2,
self-treatment regimen. However, I felt despair as he referred to how he
treats his Type 2 patients. When he used the terms “good
diet” and “under control,” I rudely interrupted him as I
was sure he and I had totally different concepts of their meaning. I must have
seemed insufferable to him.
This is an immense and important problem. Until the entire public health
and medical establishment comes to see these two terms differently, I fear that
the world-wide epidemic of obesity and diabetes (“diabesity”) will continue to
worsen. But small-town practitioners are not the problem. They just follow what
they have been taught and continue to learn on an on-going basis from their
medical societies. And the patient accepts the scripts his or her doctor
writes, as well as the assurances he or she gives the patient, because it
conforms to the messaging from the corrupt Government/Big
Pharma/Agribusiness/Media consortium. Just follow the money.
I challenged “good diet” when my Internist friend mentioned
it since I was sure he meant a “balanced” low-fat diet, specifically the one-size-fits-all
diet that government advocates: 60% carbohydrate, 30% fat, and 10% protein. It’s
on the HHS/USDAs Nutrition Facts label on processed and packaged “food.” The
fat category subdivides into saturated fat (bad), trans fats (worse),
and unsaturated fat, which they advocate. “These unsaturated “vegetable” oils (corn
and soybean) are unstable and inflammatory. See Retrospective #21. They are not healthy for anyone.
“Under control” is the other phrase over which I became
exercised. By this point my friend was backing away from the conversation (LOL)
so I didn’t get a chance to ask whether he was referring to an A1c of 7.0% (the
ADA standard), or 6.5% which is the standard of the AACE, the endocrinologist’s
society. If I had had the opportunity, I would have mentioned that Dr. Ralph
DeFronzo, MD, stated in his Banting Award lecture at the 2008 ADA convention in
San Francisco, that “good control” should
be defined as an A1c <6.0%.
Even better, an A1c of ≤5.6% (the “normal non-diabetic range), is achievable and can
be maintained by a “good diet” alone, as I would have it defined it: to wit, a
Very Low Carbohydrate or perhaps even just a Low Carb diet.
And Dr. Richard K. Bernstein, himself a Type 1, holds that diabetes
patients (Type 1s and Type2s) should be entitled to “normal” A1c’s, in the 4.0%
to 5.0% range. Remember, heart disease risk rises steadily with an A1c above
5.5%.
“Good Control,” of course, from a doctor’s perspective, means controlled
with medications, either oral or injected. And
good control as defined by the associations (ADA and AACE) assures that the
patient will take progressively more and more of these medication as the
disease “progresses.” Type 2 diabetes is defined as a “progressive
disease,” DUE ENTIRELY TO THE TREATMENT REGIMEN
THAT MEDICAL ASSOCIATIONS ADVOCATE. Why is that?
“That’s a very hard question to answer,” replied Jay Wortman, MD, a
Canadian activist and low-carb blogger, to Andreas Eenfeldt, MD, the Swedish
doctor who founded the very successful DietDoctor.com, in a 2013 interview:
Wortman: “I think there’s a multiple answer to that question. I
think there’re a lot of people in organizations and positions that are funded
by the drug industry, and the drug industry doesn’t want people doing this [“a
simple dietary change”]. They’d get off the drug.” Eenfeldt: “Bad
for Business?” Wortman: “Yeah. Bad for business – totally bad for
business. And these big organizations [ADA, AHA, etc.] depend on drug industry
funding.” Wortman, later in the interview: “The other problem is
there’s nothing to patent there. There’s nobody going to get wealthy from
patenting this [a simple dietary change]. Our system runs on something that can
be patented and marketed, and turn a profit, and that’s how the funding goes
through the system in terms of both the research agenda and also how
recommendations are generated, and there’s nothing to patent.” Eenfeldt:
“Right. It’s all free information, right?” Wortman: “It’s freely
available.” Folks, think about that for a moment, please…
No comments:
Post a Comment