John Nicholson, author of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me, on the importance of alternative research when it comes to healthy eating.
Every week since the publication of The Meat Fix: How A Lifetime of Healthy Eating Nearly Killed Me I’ve had emails from people who have either gone through similar experiences or for whom my account has helped them refocus how they eat and to understand how their health is influenced by their food choices. All good. I’m so happy to help in any way possible. I needed help when I was sick from eating ‘healthily’ but the one place I didn’t get it from was the place where I should have got it from and that was the doctors.
A few readers have been critical of my attitude toward the medical people I met, which is, to be fair, bordering on contempt. I don’t question that they were well-meaning people, but I do question how much they knew, and indeed know, about food and diet. Time and again they said things to me that simply were not true or were very debatable and they asserted this information as though it was stone cold fact. I found them to have closed minds even in the face of evidence that their diagnosis was wrong.
When, as a vegan, I was put on statins to reduce high cholesterol, no-one ever said that there were side-effects such as memory loss and an increased likelihood of a stroke. No-one ever raised the possibility that my high cholesterol could have been caused by my not consuming any cholesterol and thus causing my liver to over produce it. Indeed, because I was a healthy-eating, brown rice, lentils and veg munching dude, my diet was not considered as related to the condition. This is odd because if I had been a chocolate and cake machine you can be sure it would have. In other words, they blame people’s diet when it seems to fit their reasoning and ignore it when it doesn’t.
How and why I’d ended up with high cholesterol was also never diagnosed, nor any theory suggested. And of course, the idea that high cholesterol is statistically less likely to kill you than low cholesterol wasn’t raised. Shut up, take the bloody tablet, was the advice. This is why, in The Meat Fix, I am scathing about your GP’s understanding about food and diet. Until proven otherwise, I would suggest they are badly informed and are following information they learned one afternoon at medical school and which has been little updated since.
Now, as I’ve mentioned in weeks gone by, the lipid hypothesis has been questioned in detail over the last 50 years and many believe it is totally erroneous in acting as a marker for heart disease. Indeed, in the last 10 years, some more mainstream doctors are starting to accept that cholesterol is less important than they used to believe. I didn’t see any but I’m told they are out there.
This info was always available to my doctors, but they chose not to tell me about any of it. They treated me like a big fat dummy, and this is why I’m so indignant about the whole experience and actively encourage people who have also sat in front of the medical brick wall to ignore the advice and do their own research. People say it could be dangerous and I say, yes, but have you seen how many people it is estimated the NHS kills every year through mis-diagnosis, slow diagnosis and by prescribing the wrong drugs? It’s a lot of people. And anyway, I have sat in a surgery before now and been diagnosed by a doctor using nothing more learned than a web site called patient.net
When a doctor has run out of ideas and you are still sick, but they still won’t accept any alternative theory, you are entitled to say sod you pal, I’m off.
The trouble is, they want to present their diagnosis and prescriptions as the ultimate solution, as though there are no margins, grey areas or controversy about their diagnosis. I suspect this is because this makes them look and feel weak but in reality, it would be a stronger, more confident doctor that said, ‘look, there are a range of opinions on these matters,’ especially when it comes to diet and lifestyle issues, which are caused by a myriad of hard-to-tie down things.
On top of this, clearly, many are not up to date on their reading. There are plenty of studies that suggest statins are useless for women in general, certainly for women over 50 and for men who do not have pre-existing heart disease; rather, they are deleterious to such people’s health. I quoted one such study from San Diego University to a doctor once and they hadn’t heard of it and were, frankly, sneery about the fact that I had.
They assumed it was some bit if internet quackery, which it most certainly wasn’t. I understand that no-one wants a smart arse telling them what to do but hey, these are our bodies; we should be well educated and they should listen when our education exceeds theirs in some aspect.
I sympathise to some degree with your typical GP because their life is doubtless full of stupid people who don’t understand that hitting themselves in the face with a brick is causing their nosebleeds, but you can’t and shouldn’t treat us all as though we’re that dumb.
Change is hard to accept for most people. For thirty years, most GPs have pushed this healthy eating status quo at us like it has been handed down from god. Even if you don’t believe the diet I detail in The Meat Fix is right, even if you think I’m a hairy lunatic who is just trying to wind people up, please do realise this; that which is sold to us as healthy eating is merely one view of the research. There are other stories to tell and other views to take and many do take them and are healthy because of it.
So your take home point from all this anti-GP ranting is simply this; question everything.
Trust me, I’m not a doctor.