Verner Wheelock - Healthy Eating: The Big Mistake

Healthy

Eating:

The big

Mistake

How modern medicine has got it wrong about diabetes, cholesterol, cancer,

Alzheimer's and obesity

Dr. Verner Wheelock

with Marika Sboros

Published by Columbus Publishing Ltd 2017
www.columbuspublishing.co.uk

ISBN 978-1-907797-613
Rev 20171218

Copyright 2017 Verner Wheelock
Verner Wheelock has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise without the prior permission of the author.

Typesetting by Raffaele Bolelli Gallevi

Brand and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks
of their respective owners.

The content of this book is intended to inform, entertain and provoke your thinking. This is not intended as medical advice. It may, however, make you question current medical and nutritional advice.
Thats your choice. Its your life and health in your hands.

Neither the authors nor the publisher can be held responsible or liable for any loss or claim arising from the use, or misuse, of the content of this book.

Dedication and thank you

Dedication

Dedicated to all those diabetics who have lost their sight and/or had limbs amputated because they complied with advice to reduce their intake of fat and increase consumption of carbohydrates.

Thank you

Grateful thanks to Kevin Young, Rachel Coote and Alison Wheelock for their contribution to the cover design.

CHAPTER ONE

Standards of public health are deteriorating

Despite the substantial resources devoted to the treatment and health care in many countries, all indications are that standards of public health are deteriorating. The growing incidence of type 2 diabetes ( T2D), which can be regarded as the tip of the iceberg, illustrates this. Those with T2D have an increased risk of many other diseases/conditions including cardiovascular diseases ( CVD), obesity, hypertension, cancer, and Alzheimers Disease (AD) as well as an increased risk of blindness, amputation and kidney failure. If present trends continue, the future looks very bleak indeed.

Here in the UK, the incidence of . As many as one in three people could be affected in 2050.

Cancer is a leading cause of death but despite the resources ploughed into research, the progress is not encouraging. A recent article in The Lancet states bluntly:

Current strategies to control cancer are demonstrably not working. Already one of the worlds leading causes of death, the annual death toll from cancer has risen by almost 40% since 1990 and this rate of increase is set to continue..

Dementia is a major cause of disability and its incidence is rising worldwide, especially as people are living longer. In the USA, estimates are that around 25% of the population suffer mental health issues. Between 2000 and 2010, the incidence of autism in young children in that country has doubled. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), about 10% of the population have autoimmune diseases. The American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association claims that the incidence is much higher because the NIH only includes those diseases for which robust epidemiology studies were available. These diseases are among the 10 leading causes of death in girls and women in all age groups up to the age of 64.

TABLE 1 Expenditure on health care as a % of GDP

This is an appalling state of affairs. The information in Table 1, which has been collected by the .

The inevitable conclusion is that the public health policies in many countries, especially the USA, are not working. Much of the money that is being spent is obviously not effective as a means of achieving high standards of public health.

Dr. Atul Gawande, who delivered the BBC Reith Lectures in 2014, gave valuable insight into why there are such high costs of health care in the USA.

Gawande is a surgeon and commentator on health policy issues and was named by Time Magazine as one of the worlds influential thinkers in 2010. In an article in the New Yorker in 2009, he compared the medical facilities between two communities in Texas: McAllen and El Paso County. Both these counties have a population of roughly 700,000, similar public-health statistics and similar percentages of non-English speakers, illegal immigrants and the unemployed. Yet in 2006, .

There was no evidence to indicate that the treatments and technologies available at McAllen were any better than those found elsewhere in the country. The annual reports that hospitals file with Medicare show that those in McAllen and El Paso offer comparable technologies, which include neonatal intensive-care units, advanced cardiac services and PET scans. Public statistics show no difference in the supply of doctors. In fact, McAllen has fewer specialists than the national average.

Gawande eventually gained access to commercial insurance data, which revealed that compared with patients in El Paso and the country as a whole, patients in McAllen were given more diagnostic testing, more hospital treatment, more surgery and more home care. More detailed information was obtained from Medicare payment data. This showed that between 2001 and 2005, critically ill patients received almost 50% more specialist visits in McAllen than in El Paso, and were two thirds more likely to see 10 or more specialists in a 6-month period. In 2005 and 2006, patients in McAllen received 20% more abdominal ultrasounds, 30% more bone-density studies, 60% more stress tests with echocardiography, 200% more nerve-conduction studies to diagnose carpal-tunnel syndrome, and 530% more urine-flow studies to diagnose prostate troubles. They received a fifth to two thirds more gallbladder operations, knee replacements, breast biopsies, and bladder scopes. They also received two to three times as many pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, cardiac-bypass operations, carotid endarterectomies, and coronary-artery stents. And Medicare paid for five times as many home-nurse visits.

Gawande had no doubt that the primary cause of McAllens extreme costs was, very simply, the across-the-board overuse of medicine. This analysis proves conclusively that many treatments and procedures are unnecessary and do not contribute to improving the health of the patients. It is significant that this study makes no attempt to assess the usage and costs of drugs, even though many of them are clearly ineffective and have adverse side-effects that contribute to various forms of ill-health.