Food as Medicine — The Answer to Mounting Health Crises by Dr. Joseph Mercola
Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco, has written a number of excellent books about health. His latest, “Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine” goes deep into the details of how changes in our food supply have damaged our metabolic health. (The created term “metabolical” is actually a portmanteau of the words “metabolic” and “diabolical.”)
“I wrote it because nothing else has worked,” Lustig says. “Part of the problem is this is such a complicated issue. There are too many stakeholders and you have to find a method for making everyone happy. Until you do, you can’t solve it.
There is a way to actually solve this, [but] every stakeholder, whether it be the patient, the doctor, the food company, the insurance industry, the medical profession, Wall Street and Congress … has to understand the same thing. They all have to be working off the same set of facts. You see what happens when you don’t work off the same set of facts.
So, my job was to put all of this in one volume so that everyone had access to the same information, and then we can go from there. I lay out in the book what the argument for fixing the entire food system is, and how everyone can benefit from it, even the food industry.”
The Two Primary Keys
In summary, it boils down to two primary key issues or problems. The first is that the medical establishment doesn’t want you to know that drugs were never intended or designed to treat the foundational cause of chronic disease. They merely treat the symptoms.
“In the book, I make it very clear that modern medicine has two factions, two paradigms,” Lustig says. “One is treatment of acute disease, and for the most part, they’ve gotten it reasonably right. I was part of that system for 40 years and was comfortable within it.
But for chronic disease, Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, lipid problems, cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, polycystic ovarian disease — all of which are chronic metabolic diseases, all of which are mitochondrial diseases — we don’t have anything. We have symptomatic relief only.
So, we have LDL lowering agents — and if LDL were the problem, that would be fine — except LDL is NOT the problem. LDL is a symptom of the problem. It is a manifestation of the metabolic dysfunction. Same thing with hyperglycemia.
Same thing with hypertension. Same thing with osteoporosis. Same thing with autoimmune disease. All of these, we have symptomatic treatments. We don’t cure or reverse the disease; we just treat the symptoms. And so the disease gets worse.
The way I describe it in the book is, it’s like giving an aspirin to a patient with a brain tumor because they have a headache. It might work today, but it’s not going to solve the problem. And that’s what modern medicine is throwing at people with chronic disease, and it is, of course, breaking the bank.”
The other problem is that the food industry doesn’t want you to know that virtually all foods are intrinsically good for you until they’re processed, and processed foods make up a majority of the foods people eat.
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