Come to Buckhannon WV June 1 for Try This Health Professions Day and stay for full Try This conference June 2-3. West Virginia can’t wait and we can lead the USA. We will be hosting one of the world’s authorities on food science Gary Taubes. Gary is the author of NYT Bestselling The Case Against Sugar, Why We Get Fat, and Good Calories, Bad Calories. He is correspondent for the journal Science. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and Esquire, and has received three Science in Society Journalism Awards from the National Association of Science Writers. He is the recipient of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research. His work has changed my life and practice.
We have advocated for reducing sugar and reversing Type 2 diabetes here for over 5 years but still have miles to go. See this article from my column in February 2012 Shepherdstown Chronicle titled “Upgrade Activity and diet for a Healthier Spring” .
Why is this so difficult for most? I think the reason is that it is like imagining a color that you have never seen. The United Kingdom (UK) now is seeing the new color with 100’s of thousands now in collaboration with their physicians and community support reversing Type 2 diabetes with a low carb lifestyle. https://www.diabetes.co.uk/ . Conventional wisdom tells us Type 2 Diabetes is a chronic progressive disease needing medical management.
Einstein understood it too: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.”
The flawed “knowledge” we keep passing down in this area is what’s holding us back. Don’t give up I’m not.
The medical world is finally catching up to the science and history. Just last month a highly disruptive lecture was given by World Heart Foundation President Dr. Salim Yusuf who is among the most published and respected cardiologists on the planet. Dr. Yusuf had the courage to suggest after reviewing the data on the largest trail to date looking at nutritional factors and health (the PURE study) that the evidence fails to support many major diet recommendations.
From Dr. Yusuf:
“‘We actually found that increasing fats was protective. Low consumption of total fat was associated with increased risk….. Trends suggested that saturated fats were not harmful and perhaps even beneficial.”
“Even if you consume milk they want you to consume 2% or 1% of fat” but, he asked, “what is the evidence?” “A big, big, zero,” he said. In fact, he said, there “really are no data at all to reduce the fat content of milk.”
“… it’s carbohydrates that are the worst thing.” He offered a piece of advice: “so when you eat a hamburger throw away the bun and eat the meat.”
Yusuf volunteered a strong endorsement for Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise, who has been heavily criticized by the nutrition establishment for her defense of dietary fat. “She shook up the nutrition world but she got it right,” said Yusuf. Nina is a friend who is bold and knows the science also after spending 10 years doing the investigative work for her book.
For some interesting comments on Yusuf from the nutrition establishment read this and the reader comments in the “Diet Wars”. I comment in a few times in rebuttals.
How is the UK taking the lead and what specialty is taking the reins? General Practitioners (GPs) in the UK are becoming the “specialists” for a term called “Multimorbility”. The GPs are not referring every organ system and disease out to the sub-specialists which creates overcomplicated and complex care. They are leading from the front. Here is what is happening in UK with the Public Health Collaborative (PHC). Spend some time on the tabs. https://phcuk.org/. Under “reports” tab are powerful documents and the first one is white paper.
Here is a nice infographic from PHCUK….sums it up in one slide
A couple weeks ago I had dinner with Sam Feltham who is the lead of PHC and Dr. David Unwin also who is the physician innovating diabetes reversal in the UK and has offered us help. He received National Healthcare Innovator award for the large cost savings and health benefits his community is now enjoying. He loves going to work now since he can help people get healthy. In his words, he has never made a patient (or himself) happy by giving additional meds for chronic conditions. Now they get off meds and hug him.
Excerpts from Gary Taubes The Case Against Sugar:
“In 1890, Robert Saundby, a former president of Edinburgh Royal Medical Society, presented a series of lectures on diabetes to the Royal College of Physicians in London in which he estimated that less than one in every fifty thousand died from the disease. Diabetes, said Saundby, is ‘one of those rarer diseases’ that can only be studied by physicians who live in ‘great centers of population and have the extensive practice of a large hospital from which to draw their cases.’ Saundby did note, though, that the mortality rate from diabetes was rising throughout England, in Paris, and even in New York. ‘The truth,’ Saundby said, ‘is that diabetes is getting to be a common disease in certain classes, especially the wealthier commercial classes.'”
“Times have certainly changed. In 2012, the latest year for which the CDC have provided estimates, one in every seven to eight adults in this country had diabetes –12 to 14 percent, depending on the criteria used to diagnose it. Another 30% are predicted to get diabetes at some point during their lives. Almost two million Americans were diagnosed with diabetes in 2012–one case every 15-16 seconds. Among US military Vets, one in every four patients admitted to VA hospitals suffer from diabetes.”
“Six in every 10 lower-limb amputations in adults are due to diabetes–some seventy-three thousand of them in 2010 alone.”
So where to from here? You can shape the future. Diabetes was not the past, but it is the present and certainly will be future if we do not change things. Our medical students watched the 1930 video clip from Dr. Weston Price showing the roots of it all, the “foods of commerce” as he called them.
So what to do? A simple start is rid your life of sugar and junk food so it is not a “choice” each day. I am a “non-smoker” . I do not wake up every day having to choose to smoke or not. It’s simple, I don’t. This is not radical, evangelical, or painful. Patients die each day because as diabetics they think this is a daily choice and to “moderate” the foods toxic to them, which are primarily the sugars along with processed oils.
Come to Try This and be part of the solution. West Virginia Can’t Wait!
Try This Health Professionals Page For Program and to Register
http://bit.ly/trythisprofessional
for more on Try This go to www.trythiswv.com
or email me at afrundoc@gmail.com
Here is our exciting preliminary program with health leaders from around the State and the nation
