Why Most Doctors Don’t Know Much About Nutrition
Many of our diseases trace to nutrition. Somehow in their training doctors forget what Hippocrates said, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Medical Schools focus their training on pharmaceuticals and advanced surgery techniques. Nutritional education is given short shrift. Andrew Weil, M.D. [X] notes: “Nutrition is still slighted in medical education. It is considered a soft subject akin to home economics, not worthy of the time and attention commanded by fields like biochemistry and pharmacology. The latest word on this gap in medical education came from a study published in 2010 showing that only about one quarter of more than 100 medical schools surveyed provided the 25 hours of nutrition instruction recommended by the National Academy of Sciences in 1985.”
One Green Planets’ article titled “Why Your Doctor Can’t Help You With Nutrition” agrees and adds, “all medical students received on average only 19.6 contact hours of nutrition education while in school.” The article quotes The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition saying, “In its 1985 survey, the NAS found that, overall, an average of 21 hours of nutrition instruction was required in medical schools, but only 34 of the surveyed US medical schools (27%) had a separate, required nutrition course.” article continues: “…Dr. William Davis, a Milwaukee preventive cardiologist, says: ‘There’s tremendous ignorance about nutrition among physicians. It has never been part of the culture.’ One survey published in 2003, ‘found that 96 percent of internists and 84 percent of the cardiologists who responded did not know that a low-fat diet, in general, would increase triglycerides in the blood. High triglycerides increase the risk of heart disease,’ according to The Chicago Tribune.”
The information most medical doctors receive on nutrition comes from meat and dairy industry lobbying of congress and the FDA. In an article for CNN, Jonathan Safran Foer (author of Eating Animals) writes: “We are constantly lied to about nutrition… I’m not impugning the scientific literature but relying upon it. What the public learns of the scientific data on nutrition and health, especially from the government’s nutritional guidelines, comes to us by way of many hands. From the start, those who produce meat have made sure that they are among those who influence how nutritional data will be presented to the likes of you and me.… Our present federal ‘nutritional’ guidelines come to us from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the very same government department that has worked so hard to make factory farming the norm in America.…Our nation gets its federally endorsed nutritional information from an agency that must support the food industry, which today means supporting factory farms.”
Because medical schools deem nutrition far less valuable than the “miracle drug” symptom relievers produced by their Big Pharma donors, medical doctors are trained to believe that diet is unimportant and that drugs are in their patients’ best interest. True, miracle drugs help relieve symptoms, may prolong life, and to those suffering with disease it is a miracle. However, even with all the technology and research, cures are rare. Do you think this may have something to do with the economic fact that a cure is less profitable to pharmaceutical companies than a dependent patient’s repeat business? If not then you don’t know how capitalism mixes with health care in countries without single payer. It’s not that doctors are as corrupt as the drug industry. It’s that they are oblivious true-believers that the pharmaceutical companies have their patients’ best interests at heart. They are taught to think “miracle drugs.”
A good example of this thinking is the idea that lactose intolerance should be treated with medication. Big Pharma spent a great deal of money researching ways of treating symptoms of “lactose intolerance,” and doctors are taught to write prescriptions for “the little purple pill.” Hippocrates answer would likely have been “stop consuming dairy products – duh!” Okay maybe he wouldn’t have used those exact words. Mammals (including humans) produce lactase to break down lactose until they are able to eat solid food. After weaning, nature dictates no more need for milk, so no more need to produce lactase. But a species that behaves contrary to nature and continues to consume dairy products into adulthood, is asking for lactose intolerance. The cure is to not consume dairy after you are able to eat solid food. The cure is not to take a pill so you can continue to be a baby into adulthood. Yet doctors are trained to think “lactose intolerance” is a disease to be treated with purple pills.
Doctors used to recommend patients smoke cigarettes to reduce stress until the Surgeon General accepted irrefutable scientific evidence that smoking was horrific for human health. Similarly, the agricultural industry’s propaganda may eventually fall to overwhelming recent scientific evidence showing that meat and dairy products are poisonous to human health. Perhaps one day a future Surgeon General will lead the medical community in the right direction toward a vegan diet.
