Culinary, Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

Appalling Nutritional Ignorance Among Doctors

18 Comments

…on parade:

The event, which sold out all 4,000 tickets in 25 minutes, offers something to make every swine lover swoon: unlimited bacon samples, a bacon-eating contest, educational lectures, a bacon-themed songwriting contest and crowning of a new bacon queen. Organizers plan to serve up about three tons of the fatty strips.

They’re also prepared for a bit of oinking from outsiders.

A group of vegetarian doctors has been skewering Iowans over the event for months. Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, says he wants to publicize the flip side of bacon.

He says the PCRM plans to hand out fliers with warnings about how bacon “rotting in your mouth” potentially has various health risks, including cancer and diabetes.

I am aware of zero scientific evidence that anyone has ever gotten diabetes from eating bacon. And this is great:

Growing up in Fargo, N.D. …Dr. Barnard chowed down on bacon.

Both his father and grandfather were cattle ranchers. His palate changed, though, when he went off to Washington, D.C., for medical school.

A pathologist told Dr. Barnard, then 22 years old, to unlock a morgue freezer, pull out a body and help him examine the patient, dead from a heart attack.

The patient’s arteries were “hard as a rock,” Dr. Barnard recalls. The pathologist replied: “There’s your bacon and eggs, Neal.”

Soon, the medical student began to leave his carnivorous ways behind.

Primitive thinking like this is how ignorance is propagated. “You are what you eat.” “Big chief make crops grow.”

And we’re supposed to rely on these people for nutritional advice? And then let them force-feed our kids awful meals?

Hey, if you have ethical problems with eating animals, then be a vegan, but don’t delude yourself that it’s healthy, or that even if is for you that it will be for others. Now I’m curious as to what his cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood glucose levels are.

18 thoughts on “Appalling Nutritional Ignorance Among Doctors”

  1. And we’re supposed to rely on these people for nutritional advice?

    Rand, just out of curiosity, what scientific studies do you rely on for nutritional advice? Why do you think they’re being ignored by medical doctors?

    1. I think that Taubes has done some of the best work in gathering up real controlled studies. As for why MDs ignore it, not all do, obviously. But the nutrition taught in med school is seriously deficient, as far as I can tell, based on the kinds of statements that you see physicians make, and mostly based on folk knowledge and FDA crap. The anecdote above is a perfect example. That medical professor probably had no idea what the diet of the deceased was — he just went with the conventional wisdom. I had a conversation with my dentist about diet the other day, and she was completely unaware of the latest research, and quite interested when I sent her some links on paleolithic stuff, because she’s trying to eat healthier, along with her family.

    2. Here’s a 1985 report on nutrition taught in medical schools. The US average was 21 hours of medical school devoted to nutrition. Not 21 credit hours, 21 hour hours. What it shows is that doctors have to go through the same required nutritional classes as aerospace engineers, plus one weekend seminar.

      The report also includes some interesting historical background. The “golden age of nutrition” was 1900 to 1920, when the basics of calories and vitamins were discovered and doctors were making important breakthroughs in identifying and eliminating nutritional deficiencies. After 1920 interest and education diminished, and the last major discovery was vitamin B12 in 1949.

      My mother was a dietitian, and she always complained about the woefully inadequate training doctors received. But just about every one of them can slap their name and “M.D.” on a diet book, start a new fad, and be declared an expert in the field.

    3. You need to realize that doctors are NOT scientists, they seldom have a grasp of experimental method or statistics; they are more like highly trained technicians. I’m not disparaging doctors, they are good at what they do. I wouldn’t ask an aerospace engineer or biochemist to perform brain surgery, but I wouldn’t expect a brain surgeon to perform analysis of noisy data either…

      1. Two particular areas highlighting what Cthulhu said:

        1) Correlation is not causation. The type of direct, tightly-controlled experimentation necessary to actually prove ‘causation’ is also found under the heading ‘War Crime’, so hardly surprising that it isn’t common. But doctors will often firmly state things as ‘proven’ when the only studies available are correlation studies, not causality studies.

        2) ‘Statistics of the group’ do not apply to the individual. Just because 83% (or whatever) of people that take Sudafed have some drowsiness doesn’t mean that -my- chance is 83%. Nor anywhere near that. (It’s actually more like -zero-, Sudafed makes my hyper and sends my blood pressure through the roof.)

        We don’t have anywhere near the genetic understanding necessary to tell when someone’s reaction will be an ‘outlier’. In the physical sciences, outliers are more often measurement irregularities. But in medicine, that outlier is an individual who could be endangered by treating them as ‘average’.

  2. You realize, of course, that as soon as enough bureaucrats are convinced of this they will pass a law mandating bacon consumption … and will blame the earlier pro-carbohydrate consensus on Big Grain.

    1. In my grandfather’s time (and perhaps yours, depending on how old you are), it was “The average person has five pounds of undigested red meat in his colon!” If you can’t dazzle ’em with science, scare ’em with shit (literally, in this case).

      Incidentally, does anyone know at what ages Dr. Barnard’s father and grandfather died at?

      1. Incidentally, does anyone know at what ages Dr. Barnard’s father and grandfather died at?

        Shsss, you ask questions like that and Dr. Bernard might start wondering what affect his own DNA has on his determining his health. He’s probably silly enough to try and excise it from his body as well.

  5. As of today I’ve lost 50lbs since aug, so I have personal practical experience with this subject.
    Gary Taubes book: “Why we get fat, and what to do about it ” is an excellent book with detailed references to scientific studies calling the conventional nutritional wisdom into question. If you want a book that is even denser with more research references try Taubes, good calories bad calories….. One can also look at all the recent comparative diet studies, low carb has the highest compliance rate and most weight loss.

  6. just who is this Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and why should I listen to them? Is their membership just the “board members” listed on the website? Honestly, anybody that shares Adolf Hitler’s dietary philosophy 😉 has an uphill battle ahead of him to prove to me that his judgement is anything but crap.

  8. It’s the PCRM.

    They’re not “doctors” in the general sense (though I’m sure a number of them are in fact MDs); they’re an activist group, and everything they say is stupid and wrong.

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