January 21st, 2010 by Steve Novella, M.D. in Better Health Network, Research
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The problem with the Western diet is not one of deficiency, but one of excess. We get too much of a good thing – too many calories, too much of the wrong kind of fat, and too much salt. As a result obesity, diabetes, and hypertension are growing health problems.
There also does not appear to be an easy solution – voluntary diets founded primarily on will power are notoriously ineffective in the long term. Add to that is the marketplace of misinformation that makes it challenging for the average person to even know where to apply their (largely ineffective) will power.
It can be argued that this is partly a failure, or an unintended consequence, of market forces. Food products that provide cheap calories and are tasty (sweet, fatty, or salty) sell well and provide market incentives to sell such products. Consumers then get spoiled by the cheap abundance of tempting foods, even to the point that our perspective on appropriate portion sizes have been super-sized. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
November 14th, 2009 by Gwenn Schurgin O'Keeffe, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Tips
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I opened a fortune cookie the other day, expecting it to say something relatively nonsensical or meaningless, only to have it read:
“Money is not everything. You can buy a doctor but not heath.”
This fortune tells the story of more people than most of us can count, including ourselves at times. All too often we fall into trap of thinking that the more we spend on health the healthier we will become. Not true. In fact, good health is a state of mind and need not cost more than time for exercise, time to give ourselves the R&R we need to nurture our souls, the price of food to eat for proper weight and overall good health, and the occasional co-pay for our primary care physician and needed prescriptions.
We can toss money at vitamins, pricey health clubs, personal trainers, diets, alternative health treatments, doctors, second opinions, medications, prescription and nonprescription, as many people do, but those things can’t get us healthy. More times than not, they only produce the facade of good health. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Dr Gwenn Is In*
October 1st, 2009 by Dr. Val Jones in Humor, True Stories
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I was hanging out with my friend and fellow blogger, Dr. Ted Eytan this evening. We were talking about the problem of overweight and obesity in America and he showed me this iPhone image of a small and large ice-cream cone that he and his friend bought at McDonald’s recently. He asked me to try to figure out which was which.
Sometimes a picture’s worth 1000 words…
July 29th, 2009 by Peter Lipson, M.D. in Better Health Network, Quackery Exposed
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Alternative medicine practitioners love to coin magic words, but really, how can you blame them? Real medicine has a Clarkeian quality to it*; it’s so successful, it seems like magic. But real doctors know that there is nothing magic about it. The “magic” is based on hard work, sound scientific principles, and years of study.
Magic words are great. Terms like mindfulness, functional medicine, or endocrine disruptors take a complicated problem and create a simple but false answer with no real data to back it up. More often than not, the magic word is the invention of a single person who had a really interesting idea, but lacked the intellectual capacity or honesty to flesh it out. Magic is, ultimately, a lie of sorts. As TAM 7 demonstrates, many magicians are skeptics, and vice versa. In interviews, magicians will often say that they came to skepticism when the learned just how easy it is to deceive people. Magic words in alternative medicine aren’t sleight-of-hand, but sleight-of-mind, playing on people’s hopes and fears.
A reader has turned me on to another magic word I hadn’t known about. It’s called the “Inflammation Factor”, and is the invention of a nutritionist named Monica Reinagel. Like most good lies, this one builds on a nidus of truth.
Inflammation is a medical term that refers to a host of complex physiologic processes mediated by the immune system. Inflammation gets its ancient name from the obvious physical signs of inflammation: rubor, calor, dolor, tumor, or redness, heat, pain, and swelling. As the vitalistic ancient medical beliefs bowed to modern science, inflammation was recognized to be far more complex than just these four external characteristics. In addition to being a response to injury and disease, the cellular and chemical responses of inflammation can cause disease. For example, in asthma and food allergies, a type of immune reaction called type I hypersensitivity elicits a harmful type of inflammation. Coronary heart disease, the biggest killer of Americans, is believed to have a significant inflammatory component.
But nothing in medicine is perfectly simple. For example, corticosteroids, which can be used effectively to treat the inflammation in asthma are not effective against the inflammation in cororary heart disease. It’s just not that simple.
But while inflammation may not be that simple, people can be. People want easy answers, and quacks are happy to step in to provide them.
So Ms Reinagel has invented a diet, available for sale in a book called The Inflammation Free Diet Plan. Her premise is that inflammation is at the root of all major diseases, and that your diet can affect inflammation, thereby improving your health.
While the hypothesis is intriguing, each step of the argument has problems, leading to an invalid conclusion.
Inflammation is the root of all disease
No, it’s not. “Inflammation”, which is actually refers to a lot of different processes, plays an important role in many diseases. But not all inflammation is the same.
The most important factor in fighting inflammation is the food you eat every day.
Um, no. If you have a staph infection on your arm, your eating habits will not change the amount of heat, pain, swelling, or redness. The kernel of truth here is that diet can affect various measures of inflammation, such as C-reactive protein (here is one of many examples). There’s a long leap between this fact and the conclusion that diet can “stop inflammation”.
The benefits of reducing inflammation are immediate as well as long term. You’ll notice that your skin looks younger, your joints feel better, and your allergy symptoms improve. At the same time, when you reduce inflammation, you also reduce your risk of heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, osteoporosis, diabetes, and other complications of aging.
It’s a very long walk from the claim that reducing inflammation is “a good thing” to proving that your particular diet reduces inflammation and thereby improves health . A hypothesis is not true simply because it sounds pretty.
Who wouldn’t love a magic book that would prevent and cure all illness? Perhaps you’ve noticed that these books come along every few months. None of them ever has the one true answer. Life is much more complicated and beautiful than any magic book. It may be a lot more difficult to commit science than to commit quackery, but in the end it’s a lot more satisfying and a lot more useful.
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*”Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” –Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law
*This blog post was originally published at Science-Based Medicine*
