-Excerpt from ‘The Optimum Nutrition Bible’ by Patrick Holford

“Nothing in Western culture really, teaches us to be healthy. Apart from a little wisdom imparted by our parents, most of whom spend their later years in increasing pain, we are not taught how to be healthy at school, at university or by the media. Government campaigns may advise against smoking and drinking, but there is little real guidance and few results. Each year in the UK alone, we consume six billion alcoholic drinks and seventy-five billion cigarettes despite these campaigns.

What we call ‘healthcare’ is really ‘disease care’. Described by Dr Emanuel Cheraskin, Emeritus Professor at  the University of Alabama Medical School, as ‘the fastest-growing failing business’, modern medicine is failing to provide true healthcare and making a lot of money out of it. It is, says Cheraskin, ‘primary prevention of health deterioration’.

Take health disease as an example. Currently, you have a 50 per cent chance of acquiring heart disease during your life. It accounts for a quarter of all deaths before the age of sixty-five, and one in four men has a heart attack before retiring from work – half of these men don’t have high cholesterol! It is well accepted that high blood pressure is the leading warning of serious cardiovascular problems. Conventional medicine recommends weight loss and drugs to lower high blood pressure and cholesterol, but little heed is paid to the many dietary factors also known to achieve this end. Even 1,000mg of vitamin C can significantly lower blood pressure, yet this is rarely recommened. A mere 500mg of vitamin E reduces the risk of a heart attack in those with cardiovascular disease by 75 per cent, according to a large-scale placebo-controlled trial undertaken at Cambridge University Medical School. Supplementing B vitamins which lower homocysteine, an often ignored risk factor greater than cholesterol, can also halve the risks of both heart attacks and strokes.

Contrary to popular belief, the risk of death from many common types of cancer is increasing not declining.  Consider breast cancer, which accounts for one-third of all cancers diagnosed in women and around 12,000 deaths each year. If treatment was working, women with breast cancer would live longer and be at less risk of dying. We are told, that in the last thirt years, the survival rate has increased from 60 to 70 per cent. However, the death rate from cancer over the same period has steadily increased. What has happened is that people are being diagnosed earlier, and appearing to survive longer. We are losing cancer war, not winning it.

According the medical researcher Dr John Lee, breast cancer is occurring more frequently and earlier in women’s lives than in the mid-1980s. Mammograms show microcalcification in the breast that could never had been picked up before. These are not invasive tumours we need worry about, but they skew the statistics to show better survival rates. The usual treatment is surgery following by the drug Tamoxifen, yet medicated and non-medicated patients do just as well. Dr Lee believes the major cause of breast cancer is ‘unopposed estrogen’ (normally balanced in the body with progesterone), and there are many factors that would lead to this situation. Stress, for example, raises levels of the hormone cortisol, which competes with progesterone. So does insulin resistance, which is the consequence of eating to much sugar and refined carbohydrates. Xenoestrogens from the environment, found in pesticides and plastics among more common sources, can damage tissue and lead to increase cancer risk later in life. Milk, too, is a known promoter of breast and prostate cancer growth.

Clearly there are also nutritional elements to consider. Yet doctors have continues to prescribe unopposed oestrogen for women  on hormone-related therapy (HRT) for decades, despite clear evidence of risk back in 1989, when Dr Bergfist’s study in Scandinavia showed that if a woman is on HRT for longer than five years she doubles her risk of breast cancer. This was followed by a study by Emery University of Public Health, which followed 24,000 women for eight years and found that the risk of ovarian cancer was 72 per cent higher in women given oestrogen. However, it was only when the ‘million women study’ was published in the Lancet that HRT started to be phased out. The authors, whose research showed of combined oestrogen/progestin HRT increases the risk of breast cancer by 66 per cent and the risk of death of 22 per cent, estimated that 20,000 women had contracted breast cancer because of HRT in the last decade.

Taking another example, by the age of sixty, nine in every ten people have arthritis. Once the level of pain is unbearable, sufferers are recommended steroidal or non-steroidal anti-inflammatory  drugs. While both classes of drugs reduce the pain and swelling, they also speed up the progress of the disease. In the US non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs are a $30 billion industry – $17 billion for the drugs and $13 billion for treating the side effects. Thousands of people die from the side effects of these drugs alone. Yet there are proven, safe nutritional alternatives that have as great an anti-inflammatory effect without the harmful side effects.

Put all these and other risks into the health equation and it is easy to understand why the average person today is destined to live a measly seventy-five years and spend the last twenty in poor health, when it is an established fast that a healthy human lifespan should be at least a hundred years. And the sad truth is that the statistics are not getting any better. For all our advances in drugs, surgical procedures and medical technology, a man aged forty-five today can expect to live for only two more years of than the man same in 1920; until seventy-four, instead of senevty-two. Conventional approaches to healthcare are clearly barking up the wrong tree. Perhaps what is needed is a new tree.”

For more info see Patrick Holford’s Institute of Optimum Nutrition Website here

No related posts.

Health