Originally published June 27 2010
To save America's health, we must end nutritional illiteracy among doctors, patients
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) An obese doctor comes home to his wife at dinner time carrying yet another bag full of drive-through junk food from a local restaurant.
Worried about his health, his wife asks, "Don't you realize all that junk food you keep eating is destroying your entire body?"
"That's not my concern," the doctor replies. "I'm only an ear, nose and throat specialist."
This joke illustrates an important point: That even the most brilliant scientists, doctors and researchers can seem downright clueless when it comes to their own health. And this joke isn't really a joke at all: It's a sad but true commentary about the blind spots in the knowledge of those who are among society's most intelligent thinkers.
I've known many brilliant people. Even a few geniuses. But rarely do I meet anyone whose knowledge of food and nutrition rises very far above outright ignorance. Perhaps one in a hundred people in the western world today have taken it upon themselves to actually learn about foods and health -- the rest simply wing it, going along with the mainstream. (And the mainstream is diseased...)
Brilliance in one field doesn't always translate into nutrition
But here's the really interesting part: The more intelligent a person is in their own field of specialty, the more informed they think they are about foods and nutrition (even if they aren't). A typical rocket scientist, for example, is so used to being right that when it comes to his dietary decisions and food shopping habits, he thinks he is right by the mere fact that he is the one making his food consumption decisions. Because he's always right, then whatever decision he makes -- whether it deals with food, finances or relationships -- must also be the right decision.
Making matters even worse, really smart people are especially susceptible to strategies of non-conscious persuasion -- such as those used by food advertisers. Food companies don't appeal to logic and reason when advertising their junk foods because there really isn't much logic or reason behind consuming their products at all. Instead, they use emotional anchoring to unconsciously attach feelings to brands. That way, when you're in the store shopping, you unconsciously experience a preference for a particular product or brand without knowing why.
This gets the smart people every time, it seems. They may have superior logic and intellect compared to the rest of the world, but when you examine their grocery store receipts, they're buying all the same junk as the guy with an IQ of 70 who lives next door.
Having brains, it seems, doesn't necessarily translate into making good decisions about food and health. And yet these people should know better.
Food and consequences
Most scientists, doctors and high-IQ people believe in The Law of Cause and Effect. Every action (a cause) results in some reaction (an effect). Every input has an output.
Most people acknowledge this universal truth, and yet when it comes to foods and health, there's a bizarre disconnect about this. People have been trained by the big food companies -- and even government regulators to a large extent -- that what they choose to eat has almost no bearing on their health outcomes. The establishment would rather have you believe that your genes control your health while glossing over the far more important point that it is your diet that controls the expression of your genes.
They would rather ignore the truthful fact that vitamin D prevents infectious disease 500% better than a vaccine because this allows them to promote vaccines rather than teach nutritional responsibility. Even mainstream dieticians from the American Dietetic Association are taught that there is no difference between dead foods and living foods. A calorie is a calorie, they're taught, no matter where it comes from or whether it's in a plant from Mother Nature or a sugar factory made by Man.
The nutritional ignorance in our culture is astounding, and as long as such ignorance remains so widespread, we will never achieve a health care system that's both effective and affordable. As long as our doctors remain nutritionally illiterate, we will never have a health care system that values educating patients about what they put in their mouths.
Ignorance is the enemy of lasting health, and sadly our own government institutions such as the FDA maintain policies of enforced ignorance that outlaw companies selling natural products from linking to scientific studies that discuss the health benefits of their products. Everything from cherries, green tea and walnuts have been under relentless attacks by the FDA, which threatens company founders with arrest and prosecution unless they remove their website links that point to scientific studies published in peer-reviewed science journals. (http://www.naturalnews.com/019366.html)
One important victory over FDA censorship has just been achieved in the courts (http://www.naturalnews.com/028929_FDA_health...), but the FDA's campaign of enforced ignorance continues.
Even our public schools reinforce nutritional illiteracy among our children. While nearly everyone agrees it's important to teach our children how to read, write and understand math and science, there is no real effort to teach children how to feed themselves in a healthy manner. Health class is a nutritional joke, and school lunch programs actually teach students precisely the wrong message by serving up dead, processed "institutional" foods that promote diabetes, cancer, heart disease and behavioral disorders. (You can also find McDonald's restaurants in many U.S. hospitals, by the way, but that's another story...)
Nutritional ignorance may be fantastic for generating obscene profits for the drug companies, but it's a terrible policy for public health. Americans will only achieve true lasting health when they are granted open access to truthful information about the healing capabilities of natural foods, superfoods, nutritonal supplements and herbal remedies.
Until that day comes, we will remain a nation locked in a cycle of ignorance and disease that will ultimately bankrupt us at every level. Nutrition can help us break that cycle, but only if we can get past the ignorance and unleash a new era of nutritional literacy for our people.
Read my related report, "Nutrition Can Save America!" for more details on how this might work: http://www.naturalnews.com/report_Nutrition_...
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