When I first read, “Anyone can be a
doctor…,” my reaction was, this is over the top. To be clear, it was just a
comment on Authority Nutrition, a website founded by Kris Gunnars and sold to
Healthline in 2017. Still, I thought, it went too far. Then, as I read on “…so
long as you stay away from drugs and supplements and stick to using food as
your medicine,” I came to see the point. And the commenter had got my attention
with a trenchant and pithy lede. It was, after all, Hippocrates, father of
Western medicine, who said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy
food.” So, it was just echoing Hippocrates, who also said, “Primum non nocerum,” “First
do no harm.”
Okay, I’ll admit that medicine has come a long way since 370 BC,
but so has “food,” unfortunately, in ways that are mostly detrimental to our
health. The prescription to use food as our medicine was more prescient than
most will acknowledge today. Yet many clinicians and health care providers, and
bloggers like me, are absolutely convinced that the dietary advice that our
government has been giving us since the days of Ancel Keys’s 1953 “Six Country
Analysis” and George McGovern’s 1977 “Dietary Goals for the United States,” has
been directly responsible for the metabolic
maladies which underlie
the Diseases of Civilization. The “Dietary
Guidelines for Americans,” produced every 5 years since 1980, echo this
horribly-gone-wrong government intervention and still reign supreme today.
Crop production, food manufacturing and marketing have been driven
by the USDA’s prescription that our diet be composed of 60% carbohydrates, 30%
fat, and only 10% protein. Further, the guidelines still ordain that animal
products, which are higher in saturated fats and cholesterol, be reduced, and artificially
manufactured vegetable fats, such as soybean oil, corn oil, canola oil, safflower
oil, etc., be increased. These “prescriptions” are totally wrong and, in and of
themselves, the cause of our health
and obesity crisis.
So, under these circumstances, what’s a person to do? The answer,
of course, is to be your own doctor – to take charge of your own
health…with respect to your “dietetic prescription.” I discovered –
completely by accident – that changing what I ate “cured” my metabolic
disorders. My motivation was simply to lose weight, so
when my doctor suggested I try Atkins Induction (a very
low carb diet), I tried it. It changed everything. Thank goodness he had read
Gary Taubes’s “What If It’s All Been a Good Fat Lie,” a 2002 New York Times
Sunday Magazine cover story.
I wasn’t hungry, my blood pressure dropped from 130/90 to 110/70
on the same meds, my HDL more than doubled, and my triglycerides went down by
more than 2/3rds. My total cholesterol stayed about the same, as did my LDL,
but my LDL particle size/pattern changed from “small-dense” to “large-buoyant,”
meaning they were less likely to get stuck in ruts in my arteries caused by
systemic inflammation. My hs-CRP, a lab test which measures inflammation, went
from 6.4 in early 2003 to a low of 0.1 in late 2012. Oh, and I lost
170 pounds along the way.
Many people today subscribe to a proverb associated with the
prophet Luke, himself a physician: Cura te ipsum
("Take care of your own self!" or "Cure yourself, before dealing
with patients.” My doctor, an internist/cardiologist, after reading Taubes, had
tried Atkins Induction himself. So, I had my doc to guide me and I trusted him
implicitly.
But my doctor at first had followed the
2nd version of the
English translation of the Hippocratic Oath before he followed the 1st version: The operable provision of the 2nd (modern) version is: “I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients
according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone.” The same
provision in the 1st translation
is: “I will apply dietetic measures
for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep
them from harm and injustice.” (Emphasis mine in both quotes) My doctor, being trained to treat disease
with drugs, had “prescribed regimens” before
he “applied dietetic measures.”
So, my doctor, in his unending search
for a way for me to lose weight and keep it off, suggested, after reading
Taubes, that I apply dietetic
measures, AGAINST the medical establishment’s recommendations. He
did it “for the good of his patient,” and he “kept me from harm.” He must have
recognized a risk, but by monitoring my health closely, we learned that the clinical
outcomes clearly justified going against big government. Good on him, I say!
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