How to Save a Trillion Dollars

From The New York Times Opinion Pages
How to Save a Trillion Dollars
By MARK BITTMAN

Interesting article! Too bad he picks on Ornish as an example of healthy eating. He's headed in the right direction except for his misplaced fat phobia. People are forever misunderstanding the value of natural saturated fats to avoid excess carbs and excess polyunsaturated fats, and spare the essential fatty acids.

I should add that the biggest barrier to sensible healthy eating government policy is the adverse affect it would have on the ag, food, pharm, & medical industries, which have far too much influence on our politicians and bureaucrats. Otherwise why would they continue to promote a low saturated fat ,high carb diet in spite of all the evidence that saturated fat is not bad and limiting carbs can be very helpful.

The unemployed could be put back to work at satisfying and rewarding work raising the high quality food needed on well managed ecological farms, preparing that food for sale, and doing all the 'green' jobs that need doing to rescue our environment from the edge of disaster. And if we didn't have the worry and expense of rampant disease, we could support the arts, education, and other worthy enterprises that get short shrift these days.

Some have commented that ill health is mostly hereditary - this is only slightly true. Unfortunately unhealthy parents pass on their unhealthy habits to their kids. Actually the holistic doctors and naturopaths would be kept busy helping everyone fine tune their health, helping them recover from the ravages of our present junky food and toxic environment. It is the experience of many people who have changed to a healthier diet and lifestyle to overcome one health problem, that other problems are also resolved - health problems are often linked in ways we don't understand. A truly health body resists cancer, supports a healthy heart, healthy blood sugar, healthy blood pressure, healthy digestion, and has a happy disposition.

Don't tell me you can't afford to buy healthy food - you can't afford not to! You can even start to raise some of that food yourself. The higher the quality the less you'll need or want to eat!

There are links to a variety of healthy eating guides on my website. Just remember, people vary - some do better eating more vegetable, others do better eating more meat (with the fat). Refined carbs and omega-6 polyunsaturated fats need to be limited. And the best news is that high quality healthy food is wonderfully tasty!

Happy Eating!

Kris

Controlling Health Care Costs

This is a letter I wrote to Public Citizen recently. Public Citizen has been pushing for a single payer system as a far more efficient way to take care of our health care needs:



Dear Public Citizen,

I agree that a single payer health care system makes a great deal more sense than preserving the profits of the health insurance and drug industries, but whatever the system, we will never get health care costs under control until we break the control that the drug industry has on our medical education system. The teaching of nutrition as a healing art has been deliberately removed from the education of our health professionals, thanks to an accreditation system that focuses on diagnosis and drug treatment. Yet a truly well nourished body that is free of toxins has a remarkable ability to heal itself.

There are a growing number of doctors who are learning to guide their patients toward healing with nutrition, herbs and supplements and detoxification (see list below), freeing them of the poor health and financial burden of chronic disease, though they must pay for these therapies, which are rarely covered by insurance. Unfortunately these doctors are often attacked by medical boards and blackballed by their fellow professionals because health professionals are taught to view these therapies with great skepticism (Trust Us, We're Experts!).

I reviewed my nutrition textbooks and found that each has a section on 'food fallacies.' I was appalled at the mis-information in those chapters - so even dietitians have been brainwashed in these matters. Even worse, some of the common dietary advice given is based on poor and misinterpreted science, such as the advice to avoid saturated fats and cholesterol, which the food industry has exploited to convince the public to use unsaturated vegetable oils that we now realize contribute to inflammation, an underlying cause of many health problems (The Oiling of America).

These problems are complex, as they involve not only the drug industry, but also the food and agriculture industries that supply us with poor quality, over-processed foods that contribute to poor health (and damage the environment in the process). But we will never solve these problems if we do not understand them. I urge Public Citizen to become acquainted with these issues, as they are all intertwined - health care reform, organic farmers producing quality food and carbon sequestration, advertising of unhealthy products, even Wall Street money-makers. There are many links to useful information and commentary on my website.


Kris Johnson, retired dietitian



American Holistic Medical Association http://www.holisticmedicine.org/

International College of Integrative Medicine http://www.icimed.com/

The Institute for Functional Medicine http://www.functionalmedicine.org/