Why the Doctors Don’t Tell You to Eat Healthy

I have a family doctor who I really like. I recommend him to people often. I asked him once, “The top two causes of death are food related: heart disease and type two diabetes. How well do you know nutrition?”

He said, “In medical school I took a class on nutrition that was 45 minutes long, and that’s it!” That’s why I like him so much — he’s honest and doesn’t step outside his realm of expertise. Doctors are important, but they don’t deserve the near-all-knowing status people have given them in recent years.

What people really want to know is “is this whole ‘eating healthy thing’ scientifically proven?” To really appreciate the question, we need to understand what “scientifically proven” means. To scientifically prove that something is helpful, you have to test it against a placebo, which is something that is for sure useless (like a sugar pill). The gold standard for testing is called a “double blind” study, where both the tester and the testee don’t know whose getting the real thing and whose getting the placebo. The study also has to be conducted on lots of people, and when I say “lots of people” I mean lots of people.

I was talking with a medical research doctor about his study on echinacea, an herb said to help the immune system. His test was conducted on 10,000 people, and did not conclusively show that echinacea helped. So I said, “Ok, so the stuff doesn’t work then.”

“Oh no, we don’t know that yet.”

“Whadda ya mean? You just tested 10,000 people!”

“That is not so much for a test,” he said.

So you see, to really find out if something is heathy you need a lot of time and a lot of money. The best proof is called “meta-analysis.” This basically means taking thousands of tests and looking at the results from all of them to see if this product actually helps.

All of this was done for food, and it has been conclusively found that eating more veggies and fresh fruit is healthier then eating processed food. Or as fitness legend Jack Lalane says, “If man made it, don’t eat it.”

All of these tests were also done for anti-depressants, and the results were not so good, even for the new ones. But since it cost so much money to produce these drugs, the medical world didn’t back down from selling them. The New England journal of medicine went ballistic on them in a string of articles in 2004. These medicines have lots of side effects. The medical world’s greed cost lots of people their lives. The FDA does not actually require all these tests in order for a product to be approved, so it approved the anti-depressants, and selling them is legal. But if you value your life, I suggest you look more closely at the package inserts to see the side effects, and at how many studies were actually done showing that it is safe.

Be careful of all advertisements though, even for food. If an ad says “reduces risk of heart disease by 25%,” all that means is that instead of 1 out 200 getting sick, it’s 1 out of 215.

There’s an easier way to know if something is healthy for you or not. Try it! If it works for you, that is the best scientific proof. You just don’t want to try that with something that has dangerous side effects. Most family doctors don’t know about the studies on nutrition. Most only know what to do after we are sick. This is very important, but don’t ask them about a topic that they don’t know.