Metabolical Chapter 1. “Treatment” Is Not “Cure”—It’s Not Even Treatment
Author: Robert H. Lustig Publisher: New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers. Publish Date: 2021-5-4 Review Date: Status:📚
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Metabolic syndrome started rearing its head in the 1980s to become the scourge of the twenty-first century. Think about diseases that killed large numbers quickly in ancient and modern societies—leprosy, bubonic plague, syphilis, tuberculosis, influenza, malaria, HIV. All of them are infections. You’d think the diseases of metabolic syndrome have nothing to do with infection. After all, anyone can die from infection, as rapidly demonstrated by the coronavirus pandemic. But if you have metabolic syndrome, your risk of death goes up twenty-fold—and it’s your fault—because you’re a glutton and a sloth. Wrong on both counts. The simple fact is that, just like coronavirus, anyone can get metabolic syndrome—even those who are normal weight. Everyone is at risk—both ways.
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each of the chronic, noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) associated with metabolic syndrome—including diabetes, hypertension, and heart disease—are due to abnormal metabolism (burning of energy) in different cells in different organs of the body.
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While you could argue that this is akin to price gouging—what happens at the gas pump whenever there’s a shortage—this is going on across the entire medical landscape. Currently sixty-four million people—35 percent of the adult US population—can’t pay their medical debts. Of course, the US government and the insurance industry blame it on the patient—but what if Modern Medicine actually made you sick? What if seeing a doctor was actually the cause of these chronic diseases? I know this sounds preposterous—but there’s actually data to support it. Medical economist Dr. Jay Bhattacharya at Stanford Medicine analyzed millions of medical records, and the factor that most correlated with increasing weight gain in the population was the number of visits to an HMO doctor. Now, that’s correlation, not causation, but you have to wonder. Back in 1970 we spent 6 percent of our GDP on healthcare, and now fifty years later we spend 17.9 percent. Yet the average American’s weight is up, health is down, and wallet is underwater.
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Modern Medicine Is Not the Solution to the Problem, Modern Medicine Is the Problem
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It’s an axiom that Modern Medicine works to keep people healthy. The thought process goes—people live longer today than a hundred years ago, and healthy people live longer, so people today must be healthy. But is that really the case?
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Academics and clinicians nationwide stand by both Modern Medicine and our healthcare system. They feel that investing in areas and “personalized medicine” technologies that “cure” people diagnosed with cancer, cardiovascular diseases, or neurological diseases will ultimately yield better long-term results than focusing on public health measures. This conclusion is wrong, both at the individual and societal levels, and shows at best the misconception of what the real problems are, and at worst a perverse desire of various stakeholders to maintain the status quo at the expense of both lives and dollars. We spend 97.5 percent of our healthcare budget on individual treatment, and only 2.5 percent on prevention. Not a very good bang for the buck.
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Third, those that advocate for Modern Medicine argue that the investment in curing chronic diseases like cancer allows for a better understanding of its causes. I’m not so sure. In the case of cancer, there remains a colossal debate on whether cancer is due to genetics or environment, and whether cancer is in fact a metabolic disease, a by-product of the conversion of food into energy. Similarly, in the case of Alzheimer’s disease, in the last decade we’ve blown through $2.3 billion per year on research and over one hundred drugs have been tested and discarded. We’re as close to finding the cause of Alzheimer’s as we are to landing a man on Mars. And don’t even get me started on heart disease. There are at least four theories that try to explain its causes. And please don’t mention “good” and “bad” cholesterol. That’s so twentieth century (see Chapter 2).
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If doctors and medical professionals made their money with the expectation that they were actually treating or mitigating our chronic disease while disavowing all culpability, that would be prototypical moral hazard—like the insurance industry. But what if they treat us and take our money, knowing full well that they’re not even remotely coming close to addressing the problem? That is immoral hazard—knowing that what they’re doing is nonproductive, generating charges at their and society’s expense, price gouging off the sick, all in direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath.
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Yet the solution to this metabolic, economic, and environmental Armageddon is safe, simple, cheap, and green. It’s called Real Food. This book will show you why, and why there’s no other choice.
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It’s easy to imagine type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and hypertension as diet-related; after all, they’re all associated with obesity. Yet there’s another collection of chronic diseases that is also increasing in incidence and prevalence, but which the public hasn’t yet associated with food. People don’t normally think of cancer, autoimmune disease, dementia, and psychiatric disease as food-related. In fact, they are processed food– related. All of them are increasing in prevalence, and in the same fifty-year time span as our diet has gone to hell.
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Cancer is being diagnosed at earlier ages than has occurred in previous generations. Cancer is thought to have a genetic basis, or perhaps is a result of environmental exposures causing mutations in DNA. And that’s likely true for cancer initiation, which likely occurs in each of our bodies every day (but the immune system clears those mutations out before they cause havoc). However, cancer promotion is the real issue because that’s how it spreads and grows. And processed food is feeding those mutated cells exactly what they need.
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In the last few decades, as we’ve eschewed proper nutrition in favor of processed food, the incidence of obesity-related cancers (e.g., colon, liver, pancreas, kidney) has continued to grow at annual rates of 2 to 6 percent a year for people in the thirty to fifty age bracket. Processed food (e.g., Doritos and Kit Kats) uniquely feeds cancer growth. Specifically, sugar supplies the backbone for the structural elements that allow the cancer cell to divide and multiply (e.g., lipids, ribose, amino acids) that allow cancer cells to multiply.
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Autoimmune diseases (like Crohn’s disease) are thought to attack randomly, but we now know that intestinal bacterial pathogens are frequently the target of a disordered immune response to the consumption of processed foods. As I said in the introduction, the key to your health is to protect the liver and feed the gut. Before the advent of packaged and microwavable food, gut bacteria were used to getting what they wanted to eat—fiber (see Chapters 12 and 19). But now those same bacteria are starving, and they’re not happy. They are causing the normally impervious intestinal barrier to become “leaky,” leading to inappropriate immune system activation and chronic inflammation (see Chapter 7). Worse yet, the antibiotics we give animals raised for food kill off the good bacteria in our intestines, allowing the bad bacteria even more access, and thus driving even more chronic disease (see Chapter 20).
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The holy grail of Modern Medicine is you can’t fix healthcare until you fix health; and you can’t fix health until you fix the food. Everyone is talking about healthcare, few people are talking about health, and nobody is talking about the food.