The body is not just a gas tank. A calorie is not just a calorie. As Ludwig’s colleague Mark Hyman, an author and physician at the Cleveland Clinic, says, “Food is not just food—it is information used by the body.”
It also meant that the past 40 years of food advice had been a terrible, costly mistake.
The study involved a pooled analysis of data from 2 prospective studies that included 60,310 persons living in the United Kingdom. Mortality by diet group for each of 18 common causes of death was estimated with the use of Cox proportional hazards models. The study concluded that UK–based vegetarians and comparable nonvegetarians have similar all-cause mortality. Differences found for specific causes of death merit further investigation.
Doctors and patients alike should be thoughtful about starting antibiotics—not only because of the well-publicized resistant bacteria that are proliferating thanks to overuse of those drugs, but also because, a new study illustrates, there could be serious consequences for the individual. As well as for, you know, humanity in general.
Scientists suspect our intestinal community of microbes, the human microbiota, calibrates our immune and metabolic function, and that its corruption or depletion can increase the risk of chronic diseases, ranging from asthma to obesity. One might think that if we coevolved with our microbes, they’d be more or less the same in healthy humans everywhere. But that’s not what the scientists observed.”
The data analysis revealed a high level of variability in glucose responses to identical meals among participants. Because they standardized some of the meals, the researchers were able to verify that the glucose response to the same meal for the same person at the same time of day was consistent—yet between participants, responses to the same meal could be very different.
This diet certainly doesn’t make sense from a Chinese medical perspective, which asks us to eat with the environment, seasons, a balance of foods, and, of course the individual constitutions of our patients. The Su Wen and other medical classics such as the Qian Jin Yao Fang all suggest that whole grains are the staple food of humanity, not meat.
Here we have an excerpt on fats and oils from the book Food as Medicine by Todd Caldecott. It is a superb book for the modern physician and recommended reading for my patients.
