HEALTH care, not health care

"[I] Went to a doctor and had high cholesterol. That doc immediately wanted to put me on statins. I adamantly refused due to the side effects. So finally the doctor suggested niacin and high fiber such as Metamucil or oatmeal. So why couldn't the FIRST recommendation be for niacin (a vitamin) and oatmeal? Because it is cheap and there are no bucks in it for big pharma. I had to tell the doctor that I was going to change my diet and exercise. That was never recommended. It is all about getting those bucks out of your wallet for expensive drugs and treatment."
-Anonymous

Excluding the hyperbole and possibly exaggerated claims, the story above illustrates what many of us already know. We are trying to treat the symptoms with expensive, possibly unnecessary treatments and we are doing little to solve the problems. This is health care in a nutshell, to me. The focus for so many, and the debate lies here, is on lowering costs to make health care more affordable for everyone, perhaps to the point that we do achieve universal coverage. Dare to dream.

I'm sure you've been beat over the head about eating healthy and exercising regularly. We all have. The refrain is tired and seems useless, at this point. But what does it mean? How do you "eat healthy"? Can you make something healthy by using an artificial sweetener? How about adding the latest fad supplement like Omega-3? Perhaps reducing the calories? Does any of that actually translate into anything resembling healthy? Not to me. And not to most people around the world, excepting those on the Western Diet. To me, for something to be healthy it has to provide a positive benefit for my health. Limiting my Oreo's to a 100-cal pack or taking out the trans fats does not do anything for me. It's still an Oreo. I don' get full from it. I don't feel satisfied. No nutrition. No naturally occurring vitamins and minerals. Nothing. But it tastes good!

So what do we do? Is it as simple as eating quality foods, which would result in less disease and ailments, thus reducing health care costs to the point of affordable (universal) care? Well, yes and no. It sounds easy but there a few small obstacles in the way. You may know them as industries. Job providing industries. The food industry. The pharmaceutical industry. The health care industry. The diet industry. The nutrition industry. Something has got to give for us to succeed. That something is a Rubik's cube of moves. These industries don't have to be destroyed, mind you, but they will be forced to substantially shrink and fundamentally alter their actions.

Take the food industry. The annual population growth is around 3% (correct me if I'm wrong), which means the industry, all things being equal, will grow at roughly the same rate. This is unacceptable for any business. 3% will get you fired. The industry has a few options. They could accept and deal with limited growth. I think this is a silly notion to even discuss. They could grow their market shares. This avenue will continue to be taken as our mega corporations expand beyond the US. This has (and hopefully will continue) been met with some resistance as other countries/cultures resist changing their fundamental views of food. The last option, as I see it, is to grow their market where it already exists. How do they do this? Get us to eat more, of course. And the best way (it seems) to get us to eat more is to give us less. Not less in the amount of food, but less of what makes food food. We've evolved over millions of years to need and utilize much of what is present in food. It's the reason you experience cravings.

Now I'm not sure there is some diabolical plan by the food industry to get us to be unhealthy and eat empty food-like substances, knowing that we will need to eat more, but the mind does wonder. What I do know is that when profits are the measure of success people will do what they need to do. Advertising, research, etc are heavily invested in. Countless amounts of money are poured into researching the value and effects of vitamins and minerals in an effort to understand what makes people tick. I favor this research and hope that our understanding continues to improve. My wish, though, is that people were not so easily deceived by the tactics of the food industry which uses the results of this research to get you to eat their product, thinking it is somehow better because it has the newest wonder vitamin or no longer has whichever fat is evil this month. We spend money researching why the French are more heart healthy. Sounds good to me. We are told, via advertisers and groups called "Science Research Council for Heart Disease" (I made that up, but they are virtually all made up to sound nice but are simply advocacy groups), that the reason is because they drink wine, which will improve your heart. The substance in wine that showed the best lab results was resveratrol. In steps the food and pharmaceutical industries to immediately sell capsules of this wonder drug, telling you the capsule has 6,000 times the power of one glass of red wine. Imagine how good it must be! Resveratrol is added to your favorite energy drink, so along with the other "beneficial" nutrients now makes this the healthiest substance on the planet. Aside from water, that is. And a glass of OJ. And a cup of tea. And on and on.

Now let's take a step back. First, what did the research actually show. Anyone who has been involved with or taken a deep look at such research will quickly and easily realize that science is never so straightforward as you are led to believe. Correlations are found, likelihoods for the correlations are given and possible explanations for the correlation are put forward. Research moves forward in answering the many unknowns. We still know very little about the hows and whys of nutrition. The many thousands of chemical interactions that take place from consuming different foods together isn't exactly something you can easily replicate in a lab or control for in a study. I'll liken it to one of my favorite topics-global warming. In order for us to accurately and predict and completely measure the impacts of CO2 on temperatures we would literally need two earths. They would need to be identical in every single way and we could add CO2 to one, measure the impact, and all of our questions would be answered! Such is the way in nutrition.

Stepping back further, we can see things a little more clearly. So, regarding the question of why the French are more heart healthy, we can simply look at the way they view food in general. We won't get the details (I leave that for the scientists), but I can recognize that they don't act the way we do. I cannot imagine millions of French people in their local Le Sam's standing in the aisles looking at a box of Fruity Pebbles to examine the nutrition information. Just using a little common sense and inherited knowledge they will take one glance at the box, not recognize exactly what it is (it's not food) and immediately leave this insane place that deceitfully claims to be selling food, but in actually is selling consumable products disguised as food. More likely to happen is these people will WALK to a local store and buy a baked product which was made AT the store by the person taking their money. This person will, more than likely, be able to name all the ingredients and not stumble over 17-syllable words.

I could go on and on (literally) about this, but hopefully you get the point. Unless we change the way we view food and nutrition fundamentally it is not going to matter what health care plan we adopt. it doesn't matter how many people are covered and how good the coverage is. It won't matter which country we emulate. The results will NOT be the same as the country we copy. The result will be bad. Tremendously high costs. A focus on treating diseases which, outside of our country, are hardly a blip. Unless we are willing to upset the status quo, make a few seemingly difficult choices and take responsibility for all of our choices (by first understanding the impacts of such choices), we are all going to lose.