What if calories don't matter? What if the purported health
benefits from the famed Mediterranean Diet were drawn from a tiny study done in
an economically depressed island off Greece? What if fat doesn't make you fat
and is instead a really important nutrient your body needs? What if exercise
does virtually nothing to help you control your weight and instead just makes
you hungrier? What if everything you think you know about diet and nutrition
isn't just a little wrong, but a whole lot wrong?
It's been almost 20 years since a car accident started the
constant pain and unending migraines
that ended my career and continue to rule my life every day. I still miss work. I still miss being a policy
analyst. I still like to say I'm a policy wonk both by nature and by training. I
find it impossible to turn that part of my brain off. I also like to remind my
children that I didn't choose to be a stay at home mom. Not that being a stay
at home mom is a bad thing or a choice I don't respect - it's just not the job I think I'm best at. If someone
could get my pain to disappear tomorrow, I'd be back at work the day after.
The accident and my injuries also marked the beginning of my
disillusionment with the medical establishment and the way medicine is
practiced in the U.S.. While I'm loath
to attribute anything arising from my injury as a good thing, my struggles to
obtain adequate care for myself certainly prepared Stuart and I to be assertive, questioning advocates for Jake when
he fell from the high dive at Wilson High School in June of 1999 and sustained
his severe traumatic brain injury. The
ignorance (as in the real definition of ignorance: The condition of being
uneducated, unaware, or uninformed) of various doctors at some of this
country's "best" hospitals almost killed Jake on several occasions in
the 5 months he spent hospitalized. If we'd blindly followed all the "experts'"
advice given in the years since, he'd be far more disabled than he is today.
Along the way I've been astounded to discover that despite med school pre-requirements in organic chemistry and the like, the vast
majority of doctors don't actually think like scientists at all. Many have no
inclination to think outside the box, to problem-solve, to question . Even if
what they see before them is glaringly different from what they've been taught, they stick with - almost cling
to - what was in their text books. Far from being scientists, they are much
more akin to cooks - following recipes word for word. And as my friend Wendy
(who also suffers from chronic pain) likes to put it - not only that - they're
cooking from a pretty limited Betty Crocker cookbook rather than Mark Bittman's How
to Cook Everything.
As my family and friends know, my constant pain imposes significant limits on what I can do, yet
I continue to read voraciously and I am especially driven to follow the
evolving science in all matters health. What my reading and personal experience
has revealed is that increasingly, what doctors give out as daily advice to
live by and the actual science has diverged so much as to be terribly dangerous
for all of us. Sometimes when I think about these disparities and the real
negative impact it has on friends and family it's overwhelming - it makes me
feel like I'm carrying around really important information that would help the
people I love, which makes me feel guilty - and deep down it makes my inner
wonk really, really mad.
A recent segment on NPR's Science Friday about the negative
impacts of sugar and especially high fructose corn sugar in our diets, lead me
to a series of articles and books by esteemed science writer Gary Taubes. Like
many of us, he wondered why our 30 year battle with the obesity epidemic has
only led to more obesity. Over the last 10 years he's dug through the entire
history of our knowledge about food, diet and exercise and found we've got it
all wrong.
His work is fascinating and impeccably researched. I worked
my way through his 600 page book Good Calories Bad Calories and all
the footnotes. His work is so provocative I think I have written a note in the margin on every page! Then I went
online and read all his articles for the New York Times Magazine on the subject
and then his book Why We Get Fat. My inner wonk is screaming! (I
also read rebuttals from many of his critics, all of whom I found completely unconvincing - people blindly
defending the status quo - or their agribusiness funded research grants!)
A calorie in does not require a calorie out. Fat (at least
non-adulterated, natural fat - even lard!) does not make you fat and may indeed be an essential ingredient for a healthy diet. For the majority of us, exercise
just makes us hungrier and drives our bodies to look for more food. That Mediterranean Diet? Well, it sure can be
tasty, but the science behind the concept comes from a sketchy study in 1960 of
men living on the islands of Crete and Corfu - in that same study, none of the diets in other
Mediterranean cities studied showed any heart-healthy benefits.
In short - we are not fat because we can't control ourselves
and eat too much and don't exercise enough. All that negative self-talk you've
given yourself your whole life - all of it wrong, unnecessary and so, so mean.
Over time I hope to share with you the things I've learned. I'm not a doctor,
nor a scientist, but I am an analyst and my inner angry wonk thinks there are things you should know.
