Ever get the feeling when you visit your doctor that you actually know more about nutrition than them? Let me put this another way, when you look at your doctor do you think that this is a person following the healthy lifestyle? A person that is truly living and breathing optimum health? Someone that is practising what they’re preaching?
I think it’s fair to say that most of the doctors I’ve visited are the exact opposite to this. Sadly, most look overweight, stressed out from all the long hours they do and their knowledge on nutrition appears extremely limited. OK, not ALL doctors are like this but the harsh reality is that the majority are.
Don’t get me wrong I’m not Doc bashing here, I think they do a great job primarily. Their knowledge on medication is second to none at the end of the day they’re trying to help us which is a good thing right?
But (and there’s always a but right!)
Are we truly any better off with medication?
Is medication making us healthier or sicker?
Have we forgotten how to heal our bodies naturally?
In this article I’m going to address some of these burning questions and hopefully give you more clarity on what’s going on underneath the surface of the medical profession:
The cold facts
There’s a valid reason why doctors knowledge on nutrition appears limited.
By law, no med schools HAVE to have nutrition on their syllabus. It’s not a requirement. So, knowing this, only 25% of all med schools have a nutrition program on their syllabus.
In 9 years of studying medicine a doctor on average receives 2 HOURS of nutrition education. Yep you heard me right, 2 hours. So, in all of those 9 years of study, only 2 hours are dedicated to nutrition and even then, the exam at the end of it is optional, so they don’t have to take it if they don’t want to.
Is medicine helping or hindering?
Let’s look at the facts:
In the last 100 years:
- Cancer has risen from 3% to 30%
(¼ of ALL deaths are cancer related)
- Diabetes has risen from 0.1% to 20%
- Heart disease has risen from
Between 1974 and 1997 there has been a 300% rise in brain disease (Alzheimer’s etc.)
When doctors went on strike
Research shows that when doctors strike, there’s a reduction in death rate:
In the year 2000, doctors in Israel decided to go on strike; demanding increases in pay. Before long, morticians began to notice a bizarre trend.
“The number of funerals we have performed has fallen drastically”. — Hananya Shahor, the veteran director of Jerusalem's Kehilat Yerushalayim burial society.
The longer the doctors' strike continued, the more the death rate fell. In some locations, the death rate dropped by an astounding 50%. Unfortunately, the doctors eventually stopped their strike, and the mortality rates returned to normal again.
In 1976 in Bogota, Columbia, there was a 52 day period in which doctors disappeared altogether except for emergency care. The "National Catholic Reporter" described "a string of unusual side effects" from the strike. The death rate went down 35%. A spokesman for the National Morticians Associations said, "It might be a coincidence but it is a fact.”
He also tells about an 18% drop in the death rate in 1976 when doctors went on a strike in Los Angeles County. After the strike, the death rate returned to pre-strike levels.
When we stop interfering with medicine, there seems to be a reduction in death rate.
In the UK, medical errors account for an estimated 40,000 deaths each year and have officially become Britain's third biggest killer behind cancer and heart disease.
Something’s going wrong down the line. The human body is an amazing piece of machinery and it’s not really designed to get sick. Way back in the cave man days they seemed to do just fine without medicine so why have we become so heavily reliant on it over the years? Have we forgotten that with the right nutrition and lifestyle that our bodies can heal naturally?
It’s clear from these statistics that we’re not getting healthier, we are becoming sicker and medication doesn’t appear to be working.
Now the most common reply I get when I talk about how we’re getting sicker is “well, we’re living much longer now than at any point in history. Our life expectancy is much higher now than before so we must be healthier as a result.”
Well here’s the thing…
Yes, there’s no denying the fact that we are definitely living longer (not by much) but I can assure you it’s not because we are healthier.
These “extra years” are hardly quality years though are they? Yes diseases are being caught earlier these days but most people will spend those “extra years” albeit drugged up.
Also, life expectancy increases when infant mortality rates decrease. With better sanitation procedures, infants die less than when they did over 100 years ago so life expectancy increases.
So, to come back to the title of this article “Is your doctor making you sicker?”
Well, you have some of the facts now. I’ll let you decide…
What’s happened to us? Why are we getting sicker?
I believe that we’ve fully entered a new age.
The Toxic Age.
Toxins and chemicals have been polluting our environment at an alarming rate. Think of the most remote place in the world, the polar ice caps right through to the amazon rain forests. We have successfully polluted EVERY part of our planet. There isn’t anywhere in the world that is free from pollution.
Our food and water is currently more toxic than it’s ever been in our history and we are now the most contaminated species on the planet.
We spray our crops with an alarming amount of pesticides. From seed to supermarket the average seed is sprayed over 20 times from 20 different pesticides and we stuff our livestock full of antibiotics and steroids for no reason other than to bulk them up quicker for market day.
We are experiencing the birth of the toxic age.
We’re in it right now.
So how does this affect us I hear you say? Surely the body can cope with all these toxins?
Well, a lot of so-called health experts and “professors” will have you believe that the body is perfectly designed to deal with these toxins and that we don’t need to go on “detox” diets to sort this out.
Well, I agree with this up to a point. One of the liver’s roles is to detoxify any nasty’s coming in but what happens when they’re coming in at an alarming rate? (i.e. too many for the liver to deal with?)
You see, the more polluted your body is, your body is more likely to hold onto water. When the liver and digestive system are compromised your body will store the chemicals in fat cells. If you're VERY polluted then you will be fatter and unhealthier.
If there was a small amount of toxins coming in then yes you’re liver could probably just about cope but the problem is this:
No one is doing anywhere near “small amounts of toxins” and we haven’t for a while now.
The reality is that most peoples livers are overwhelmed with chemicals and toxins from our food on a daily basis and these toxins will build up over a period of weeks, months and decades so your liver never really has a chance to properly detox these nasties from your system.
And it doesn’t stop there; most of these toxins have a very negative health effect on the body.
Pesticides
Let’s take pesticides as an example. Pesticides used by commercial farms that are sprayed on our crops to help them grow.
Pesticides are designed for one thing and one thing alone.
TO KILL pests right?
So who’s to say over a period of years, decades they’re not going to do the same to a human being?
And it just so happens that there’s now very strong and alarming research linking pesticides to Parkinson’s disease.
Some pesticides are also designed to make these crop pests infertile so they stop reproducing. It just so happens that male infertility has gone up dramatically over the last 100 years as well.
You don’t need to be a rocket science to work out that ingesting pesticide is bad news – for ANY species on this planet! It’s poisonous.
Preservatives & Processed food
Most of the food we see in our supermarkets these days has been denatured. Anything tinned canned or packaged has some kind of preservative in it to preserve its lifespan. Even the pre-packed meats and fish that you see have been treated with chemicals so that they last longer.
Cereals, breads, anything tinned that you might consider to be healthy (like tinned tuna) would all come under this category. Sugar has also found its way into pretty much EVERYTHING these days. We have become a fast food nation. We live our lives at 100mph and want everything quickly, even our food. We very rarely find the time to cook our food how it should be.
Basically, any food that has been processed before it gets to you, or any crop that has been sprayed with chemicals, then the nutritional value will decrease. This means on a cellular level, your body won’t get enough nutrients and will eventually become sick. Sick cells lead to sick organs, sick organs lead to a sick system, a sick system (e.g. digestion, cardiovascular, hormones) leads to more sick systems and sick systems lead to a sick body which leads to the body breaking down which in time, results in disease.
Medication cannot stop this from happening. Medication is a disease management. Doctors can only help when your body is broken. Disease is the end result of a body that’s been sick for quite some time.
A doctor is happy to label conditions and offer prescriptions, but cannot offer any sound protocols on burning fat or how to heal with wholesome foods.
What can we do?
Now before you get your knickers in a twist, I’m not suggesting for one minute that we should all come off our medication and slag doctors off for the rest of our days but simply understand that with the right lifestyle and the right nutrition then our bodies can heal ourselves naturally without the aid of medication.
Removing chemicals from our diet, eating organically whenever we can and eating the way Mother Nature intended us to eat is a start. Although taking control of your health is more than just sticking to a diet. It means asking questions like "What lifestyle would suit me better?" It means no longer seeing the doctor as "the go-to guy" for your health but more as a partner to help find the best healing process for you.
In part two of this article, i'll be talking about how we can achieve all of the above and before you say eating organically is expensive and eating healthy is really boring and it feels like you’re denying yourself then you should definitely read part two of this as this will apply directly to you.
Here’s to a healthy toxic-free 2012,
Sam Winkworth – the south east’s leading fat loss coach
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