Gabor Szendi:
Why is medicine averse to nutritional science?

While the diseases of civilization are clearly caused by Western diet, medicine has little or no understanding of the role of nutrition, and even if it is dealt with, breaks it down into atoms, instead of studying diet.

 

 

Today's medical thinking is severely distorted by the lack of an evolutionary approach. Evolutionary Medicine sees the cause of human disease in the fact that today's lifestyle and nutrition are fundamentally different from what human beings have adapted to over millions of years. But medicine, because of its historical traditions, sees the body as a biological machine that can be repaired, if only we understand how it works. The heart, like a motor, circulates blood, the intestines make fuel from food, the brain directs the body, and so on. In his book The rise and fall of modern medicine, retired Doctor James La Fanu sees the development of medicine as a triumph up until the 1970s, followed by a period of decline and confusion to the present.

During the ascension of medicine, the concept of the "machine" functioned well. The question was not why a disease develops, but how to intervene to get the "machine" working again. The pharmaceutical industry soared, with the attempt to understand how the body works by the mechanism and action of drugs. Doctors prescribed antibiotics against bacteria, antihypertensive drugs for high blood pressure, insulin for high blood sugar, and cholesterol-lowering drugs for high cholesterol. Since Doctors always meet with the sick person, it is understandable that they are not concerned with why the "machine" has gone wrong, but only how to "repair" it. In the meantime, the developed world was getting sicker, and medicine was in a serious crisis: There were no longer cures, only treatments.

In developed countries, health indicators have deteriorated without stop, and today the leading cause of death is medicine itself (Szendi, 2017). It has become clear that the operation of the body cannot be understood solely from the study of the "machine", but must be from the interaction of humans and their lifestyle. If the "machine" gets sick due to lifestyle, the Doctor intervenes in vain; because continuing the lifestyle will only further damage the operation of the "machine." So medicine must deal with lifestyle, including nutrition.

It is no accident that Doctors do not study nutritional science, and even if they did, it wouldn't be much use because their curriculum would be the same as that of dietetics, and dietetics is the covert protector of a dominant, disease-causing diet. No dietitian would dare risk their job by proposing the shutting down of sugar factories, the banning of alcohol, or stopping the sale of frying oils and margarine. Dietary recommendations leading to a truly radical improvement in health would also go against the economic interests of the agricultural and food industries, so these are now political issues too.

In 1979, the British Government set up a committee to investigate the continued weight gain of the general population. The committee's recommendations were not radical, but were rejected by food, agriculture and health ministries, so in the end nothing was done to change the situation (Maguire and Haslam, 2010).

Medicine can only be renewed through taking the completely different view of evolutionary medicine, but as American scientist Thomas Kuhn said, to do this the representatives of the old paradigm must first die (Kuhn, 2000).

The most important ingredient of lifestyle is nutrition. But why is it so foreign to medicine to think that most cardiovascular diseases and cancer, which are responsible for most deaths, are clearly linked to nutrition?

The reason for this is also related to the biological "machine" analogy. Food is just the "fuel" for the machine, and as long as there is enough, there should be no problem. Before the discovery of vitamins, people thought they needed fat, protein, and carbohydrates. After the discovery, vitamin supplementation began, but since there are no spectacular vitamin deficiency diseases in the developed world, the conclusion has been reached that nutrition must therefore be satisfactory. This also seems to be supported by the fact that pretty much everyone eats the same thing, but not everyone gets sick. The inference is therefore that some people from the same lifestyle will have cancer, heart disease, or become diabetic, while others remain healthy. The thinking is that this is not because of the food consumed, but for example because of genetic differences. The disease-causing role of poor nutrition is also questioned by the fact that there are many conflicting results from studying the relationship between diet and disease. Every day we can read that one study says that red meat causes cancer while another says it does not; that animal fat is harmful, while other studies say it is healthy; that refined carbohydrates are unhealthy, while other studies say this only applies in the case of excessive consumption.

However, once again, this confusing picture is only due to the erroneous starting point of medical research. According to evolutionary medicine, there should be no comparison between "healthy" and "patient" individuals on the same diet, because it will only show the difference in resistance, not what is harmful and what is healthy. In addition, by "healthy", medicine means "not yet ill." Obviously, a bad diet can also do its destructive work in the "healthy" person, only more slowly.

Evolutionary medicine suggests that the comparison should be based on a population where arteriosclerosis, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are unknown. Such populations are the indigenous peoples who, contrary to popular belief, live roughly as long as Westerners (Gurven and Kaplan, 2007). That is, they are not free from the diseases of civilization only because of premature death - they live long enough to get the diseases, and yet do not. But we can even see that people in the 18th and 19th centuries, mostly, and surprisingly, also lived to the age of 70-75 (Canudas-Romo, 2010). Ischemic heart disease, infarction, or diabetes were as rare as a white raven in the 19th century (Taubes, 2007; Szendi, 2011).

We see a huge difference when we compare the nutrition of a indigenous man, or the 19th century average man, with the man of today. In the past people ate a lot of vegetables, fruit, and all kinds of meat, but little or no refined carbs and milk. Paul Clayton and Judith Rowbotham reconstructed the diet of English workers between 1850 and 1970, reporting: "Their diet is in many ways reminiscent of the recommendations of today's advocates of Paleolithic nutrition" (Clayton and Rowbotham, 2008).

Take atherosclerosis as an example. No matter how many tests we take, each one finds that atherosclerosis is simply age-related, and can even be detected in thousands-year-old mummies. That is, it is simply a curse of humanity (Thompson et al., 2013). However, numerous autopsy tests confirm that atherosclerosis is not detectable in indigenous people, even in old age (Lindeberg, 2010).

Research over the last 20 years has shown that atherosclerosis is caused by a deficiency of vitamin K2, meaning that the population of developed countries is consistently suffering from a deficiency disease. In a famous Rotterdam study, many K2 users had 52% less aortic calcification (Geleijnse et al., 2004), however due to our changed eating habits, vitamin K2 has disappeared from our diet (Szendi, 2013).

We could go on with a series of examples, but this would just underline the following: medicine has a huge amount to do in researching the links between nutrition and disease, but to achieve this, we would have to compare the effects of today's diet with the diet we were originally adapted to. The "machine" model of humanity must be replaced by the evolutionary view.

 

References

Canudas-Romo, V: The modal age at death as an alternative measure of longevity: an appraisal of current research. Lecture at University of Copenhagen on the 7th of June 2010. Web: http://www.demografi.dk/andet/ku7june.pdf

Clayton, P.; Rowbotham, J.: An unsuitable and degraded diet? Part one: public health lessons from the mid-Victorian working class diet. J R Soc Med, 2008, 101(6):282-9

Geleijnse JM, Vermeer C, Grobbee DE, Schurgers LJ, Knapen MH, van der Meer IM, Hofman A, Witteman JC. Dietary intake of menaquinone is associated with a reduced risk of coronary heart disease: the Rotterdam Study. J Nutr. 2004 Nov;134(11):3100-5

Gurven, M; Kaplan, H: Longevity among hunter- gatherers: a cross-cultural examination. Population and Development Review, 2007, 33:321-365.

Kuhn, TS: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

La Fanu, J: The rise and fall of modern medicine. Little, Brown and Company, 1999.

Lindeberg, S: Food and Western Disease. Health and Nutrition from an Evolutionary Perspective. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

Maguire, T.; Haslam, D.: The obesity epidemic and its management. Pharmaceutical Press, London, 2010

Szendi G: Paleolithic diet for beginners. Jaffa, Budapest, 2011

Szendi G: New vitamin revolution. Jaffa, Budapest, 2013.

Szendi G: Dangerous medicine. Interpress Magazine, 2017, 1:40-45.

Taubes, G: Good calories, bad calories. Alfred A. Knopp, New York, 2007.

Thompson RC, Allam AH, Lombardi GP, Wann LS, Sutherland ML, Sutherland JD, Soliman MA, Frohlich B, Mininberg DT, Monge JM, Vallodolid CM, Cox SL, Abd el-Maksoud G, Badr I, Miyamoto MI, el-Halim Nur el-Din A, Narula J, Finch CE, Thomas GS. Atherosclerosis across 4000 years of human history: the Horus study of four ancient populations. Lancet. 2013 Apr 6;381(9873):1211-22.