I get really annoyed sometimes when grocery shopping by all the food manufacturers trying to manipulate us into buying their product by trumpeting whatever health angle they can get away with. "Only 100 calories!" "Good source of fiber!" "Low-fat!" Only 1g carb per serving!" "25% less sugar!" They sniff the air for whatever the latest health trend is and see how they can get their product modified a little while still remaining junk to cash in on the trend. They don't care about our health, they just want our money.

There is one thing I am unsure about regarding all of the 'omega-3' products -- is it even healthy for men to use omega-3 products derived from non-fish (flax)? ALA has been shown to raise the risk of prostate cancer, although some studies also show other aspects of flax decreases the risk (making it all nice and confusing). I've also read, that for some people, who can't convert ALA to omega very well in their bodies,  flax can also raise inflammation levels.

Should men even bother taking flax or products with  flax omega, at all? My own cardiologist pushes flax on me, oddly enough, even though I guzzle down plenty of fish oil. When I mention possible problems from flax, she basically drops the subject, leaving me in the dark as to why she suggested it in the first place.

I saw a commercial for baby food with added DHA being marketed at helping your baby's brain development.

I found this little article to contain very useful advice.  

How to Eat - in Seven Words

"Eat food," said Michael Pollan. "Not too much. Mostly plants."

Seven words - short ones, no less, totaling eight syllables. Easy to spell, translate, or jot on a sticky note. But really, is that all that needs to be said?

Pollan - a journalism professor at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the bestselling book The Omnivore's Dilemma - admits that boiling down advice on how human beings should eat to a mere seven words is dicey. A great deal, for example, depends on how one defines "food."

But in a rousing presentation to a packed room of health professionals at the Fourth Annual Nutrition and Science Conference in San Diego, Calif., on May 2, 2007, Pollan argued that Americans have gone astray when it comes to thinking about food. While other cultures define food in terms of pleasure, sociability, religion or history, Americans are uniquely mesmerized by its scientific aspect.

We are followers, Pollan said, of "nutritionism."

"It is an ideology, a way of organizing experience," he said. "Like other 'isms' it rests on a simple set of assumptions, though we don't realize it." The connection between food, science, and health is "a real linkage," he said, "but it has overwhelmed all of the other linkages in our culture."

Only in America, Pollan said, do people care more about food components - cholesterol, saturated fat, omega 3 oils, fiber and so on - than the foods themselves. And only in America can a low-fat craze grip the country, as it did from 1977 until 2002, to be displaced within a few months by a low-carb craze.

The problem with nutritionism, Pollan said, is that it gives processed foods a huge advantage over whole foods. "A banana or potato cannot significantly change its structure. But any processed food can be changed overnight to correspond with food fads. You can even rejigger bread along Atkins lines." So the "loudest foods in the market" he said, are processed foods, touting their nutritional virtues via a $42 billion marketing industry, while "these poor whole foods just sit there silently."

Thus, the irony: Americans are "a people obsessed with eating healthily, yet they are nonetheless very unhealthy."

Nutrition science has value, Pollan said, but unbridled "nutritionism," pushed by processed food marketers has simply left people confused. In an attempt to simplify food, he came up with his seven-word, three-sentence manifesto, though he concedes that each sentence needs amplification:

Eat food. The key term here, of course, is "food." We need to make hard distinctions between real food and "food-like products," Pollan said. Some guidelines:

Don't eat food with more than five ingredients, or with ingredients you can't pronounce, or that contain high-fructose corn syrup (which serves as a 'marker' indicating that the food is highly processed).

Eat only food that you have cooked, or could cook.

Eat only food that your great, great grandmother would recognize as food.

Not too much. The chief harm of nutritionism, Pollan said, is that processed food companies seize on "good nutrients" and "push us to eat more of them." The result is a tendency for Americans to eat more generally, which is one reason why we are consuming 300 calories more daily than in 1985. In the mass of verbiage surrounding food in America, plain overeating is "the elephant in the room." Pollan's advice to reverse the trend:

Don't eat alone.

Don't eat in front of the TV.

Don't eat seconds.

Perhaps most importantly, pay more and eat less. "I believe that the better quality food you eat, the less you need to feel satisfied."

Mostly plants. "It's not that meat will kill you," he said. "I eat meat. Small amounts of meat have much to recommend them in terms of vitamins, minerals and taste. Most traditional diets - whether Mediterranean, Asian, Indian or Mexican, use meat sparingly, as a flavoring. I think that's an important lesson."

By Brad Lemley
DrWeil.com News

http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/id/ART02840

For anyone who has not read Michael Pollen's book, I would strongly urge you to read this logical and entertaining discussion that attempts to re-introduce rational thinking back into diet.

Power to the people!
Thanks for leading the way.

Wow!  That sure is interesting.  I've run into so many lay people that know more than their specialists do about cutting edge treatments and preventions.  It *is* threatening to doctors and they lash out at us all the time.  

Well, I'll be happy when this crop of fuddy duddies retires and some newer, hopefully better educated about how to utilize wonderful resources their patients are using, takes their place.

It's the 'doctor as god' syndrome.

Even more important it that ordinary folks have instant access to the medical journals. In the 1980s, to read journal articles and follow the citations I used to have to drive to a medical school, go into the basement stacks, and hunt up each journal individually. To see the online indexes I would have to wait patiently until all the medical students were done with the 4 terminals and one was free.

It would take a whole day to follow one series of citations.

Now I can do the same operation in minutes, at home.

What I find sad though, is that of all people I know, physicians are the least likely to read the actual research articles involving new drugs and treatments, or even, at times, to have heard about their findings beyond the soundbyte level that shows they read about it in a summary newsletter.

Doctors are often annoyed when patients have done research they haven't bothered to do, but sadly, this does not seem to motivate them to dig in.  

This is one reason why doctors are often years behind the patient community in learning about the dangerous and even fatal side effects of the drugs they prescribe.

I had posted about the heart-related dangers of Avandia, for example several years before they were "discovered" by doctors. The research data was there by then. And even now most doctors are not aware that both Avandia and Actos cause dangerous levels of osteoporosis with long term use. That information has been around for more than two years.

I took an article that I printed from the internet to my doctor . He told me that he never reads anything patients bring him from the internet. When I said it was from a peer reviewed journal, he told me that did not matter as it came from the internet - huh?

Patients also need to take responsibility. They need to understand how activity, diet and lifestyle impact health. They need to question their doctors and get copies of all tests. On this forum, and ones similar to it, we meet people who are well informed on health issues. I know too many people who tell me "If my doctor thought that (insert vitamin D, blood glucose, heart scan, etc) needed to be checked, he would have done it".  I can't believe all the people who accept "normal" as the answer to test results. I had a doctor tell me "normal" once and then I found out the wrong test had been done!!

Kudos to the docs who are willing to listen to their patients and make them partners in health care. Kudos to the patients who learn about their health issues make changes in their lifestyle to optimize their health.

I love the leveled playing field - it saved my life.

Oh Dr. Davis, you make me think!

Perhaps the beautiful text of the _Gray's Anatomy_ we had around the house (the real one, my father had been a chiropractic student post WWII) may have sowed the seeds of dissent with many aspects of common "modern" medical practice?  An inquiring mind and a little common sense is a... dangerous thing?  Hardly!

Knowledge is powerful... so what if it makes some cold, rigid and paternalistic doc uncomfortable?  It's MY health and MY life at stake, not his or hers.

If history is a guide, I think it's fair to say that what is common practice today, will be outmoded and archaic in a few years.  Hopefully in it's place will be a true HEALTH care system, not the current pharma and equipment-driven SICKNESS care system.

Thanks for the great blogs, so thought provoking AND informative.

Regards,

madcook

The problem is exponentially compounded by the intrusion into the physician/patient relationship of the insurance companies, and by the fear of litigation if "standards of care" which are imposed by professional associations are violated.  As regards standards, they are desirable and necessary, but how are they derived?  In many cases, guidelines such as those put forth by the American Diabetes Association, which blatantly advocates a carb-rich diet which is harming, even killing, people  daily, must owe their existence at least in part to influence by drug companies.  In the light of the latest fiasco about obesity in children and the advocated use of statins for them, unless a miracle occurs, we will see  pediatricians forced to adopt a standard of care which will inevitably lead to great harm.  When will the litigation be brought to bear on the real culprits?  There is not enough money in the world to compensate.  I don't mean to imply that these are the only factors in the "I know better than you and your health is more my concern than yours" attitude, but they complicate and compound it greatly.  Even genuinely caring and open-minded health professionals, and I'm sure there are many, are caught in this corporate/state web.  Power to the people, and to the free market, indeed-- and it may come about through forums like this one if we are determined and lucky.

There was a blog entry in "Kevin.MD" last year that said it all - "Do you know more than your doctor?"  Of course, this piece totally put down anything that the patient/client might bring to the mix.  When will doctors realize that their clients have brains?

This thread could go in many directions, but having worked in a hospital during college (as a computer engineering student) - what amazed me is the requirements for pledging the medical fraturnity.  Multiple days without ever leaving the hospital.... Then my cousin's daughter finishes Stanford Med School and almost dies in a car accident falling asleep after two days without leaving the hospital.

How do we expect doctors to read new materials when they have been programmed to work more than any union would allow, or any person should.  Can you image Pilots being allowed to work a 24 hour shift?

Doctors are over committed and they shouldn't be - they should have time to "give care".  Not sure if this is greed, the need to pay litigation insurance or what.. but it seems the root cause of much of what is discussed here.

Drugs are easy solutions to a lack of time to learn about alternatives.