6/1/23

Food Fixes

Food Fixes

As I frequently report, I’ve got a narrow set of obsessions and manias upon which to base a blog. This is why I try to keep the essays brief, although the linked bits for further consideration are often longer.

One subject that I return to is diet, since I’ve become fascinated by the idea that much of modern medicine is pharmaceutical-industry pill-pushing, whereas simple dietary change could probably fix most modern health problems. I have certainly put in a lot of time pursuing this particular set of ideas to know that it is a very strong bias of mine to believe so. I try to admit the biases that I know about to readers, too.

Also, by way of disclosure, after finding significant benefit from restricting my carbohydrate intake, I’ve begun to try the carnivore version of the low-carb diet to see how it feels. The most surprising thing that I’ve learned is that it is very, very hard to give up sugar. It was the one thing that prevented me from starting this personal experiment for weeks on end. Even artificial sweeteners were enough to remind me of the taste so that I would find myself obsessed with the thought of eating more sweet goodies. I had previously thought claims of food addiction were too dramatic. But that sort of response is indisputably similar the response of an addict. When addicts aren’t consuming the addictive substance, thoughts of the substance dominate their thinking.

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The low-carb diet space that I pay attention to is inhabited by quite a few physicians who have experienced the benefits of the approach on their own bodies. Many of them previously suffered from significant weight problems which the dominant recommendations from the health system failed to fix. In fact, as many other non-physicians have discovered, trying to follow the recommended low-fat, high-carb diet has only made the weight gain and so many other symptoms worse over time—symptoms ranging from overweight and joint pain to acid reflux/GERD, sleep apnea, acne, skin tags, PCOS, pre-diabetes, and many more.

Two of these physicians are Ken Berry and Lisa Wiedeman, a family doctor and an optometric physician, respectively. Here they discuss their own and their patients’ experiences that led them to turn their backs on the conventional modern medical advice for healthy eating. Dr. Berry started the interview in something of a grumpy mood, it seemed to me. But he soon settled down and got to the meat of the discussion, as it were.

At one point in the dialog, after around the 38-minute mark (to around 43 minutes), both talk about dealing with the fact that their beliefs and experiences part company with the standards of care, which are the professional benchmarks for doctors. In this particular case, the issue was statins, which are all but required when a patients blood tests reveal certain cholesterol levels. They discuss how practitioners deal with the inner conflict in strongly believing what the appropriate treatment is and being required and expected to tell patients to consume foods and even take medications that the doctors themselves believe are either ill advised or even harmful.