Best Kept Secret Or Do People Want To Believe Their Illnesses Are Not Mostly Due To Poor Diet?
If you could rid yourself of chronic diseases or stop them from developing in the first place, would you do it? Chronic diseases include but are not limited to heart disease, stroke, cancer, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes.
The World Health Organization lists the major factors contributing to the development of these diseases as unhealthy diet, lack of physical activity, and smoking tobacco.[1] Now I ask again if you could stop yourself from developing these chronic diseases by removing these risk factors, would you do it?
The most well-established chronic disease guidelines[2] call for lifestyle change as the leading form of therapy in combating chronic diseases. Could it be that these guidelines or kept a secret and if people knew about them they would make diet and exercise changes immediately, and would work harder to stop smoking?
Well if this was the case, then doctors are not sufficiently helping their patients because they are not pushing lifestyle change as hard as they are pushing drugs. You have to question the medical industry’s intentions when health organizations and numerous studies indicate,
“…that lifestyle intervention is often more effective in reducing cardiovascular disease, hypertension, heart failure, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and deaths from all causes than almost any other intervention.”[3]
Proper nutrition may play the strongest role in the protection against all chronic disease. A whole food plant-based diet is the most health supporting diet within that role, because is focuses on the consumption of plant foods which are the natural sources for vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients, and healthy fat and protein.
The whole food plant-based diet excludes the consumption of meat, dairy, and processed foods which provide concentrated sources of pathogens and toxins.
Maybe doctors don’t deliberately focus on prescribing medicine to keep money funneling into the medical industry, and they just do so because the majority of doctors are nutritionally illiterate.[4][5]
Conquering chronic disease may start with doctors because patients who did receive advice from their doctors to eat healthier, which included reducing the consumption of meat, dairy, and fries foods, were more likely to make lifestyle changes.
Doctors who actually applied lifestyle changes to their own lives and spoke about or displayed their lifestyle changes actually made an even greater impact on their patient’e lifestyles.
[1] Chronic Diseases are the Major Cause of Death and Disability Worldwide.
[2] L Lianov, M Johnson. Physician competencies for prescribing lifestyle medicine. JAMA. 2010 Jul 14;304(2):202-3. doi: 10.1001/jama.2010.903
[3] M A Hyman. The failure of risk factor treatment for primary prevention of chronic disease. Altern Ther Health Med. 2010 May-Jun;16(3):60-3.
[4] M A Hyman. The ecology of eating: the power of the fork. Altern Ther Health Med. 2009 Jul-Aug;15(4):14-5.
[5] Stop Trusting Doctors For Their Nutrition Advice – They Have Little Nutrition Education