If you could wave a magic wand and cause your doctor to have a brilliant Food IQ, what would she/he tell you about how to be healthy?
That magic wand is in my hand right now. I have a huge opportunity to impact the Food IQ of a nearby medical school as part of a new course in Complementary Alternative Medicine for 4th year medical students. I will have these future physicians for 3 hours of lecture time plus a full day of “clinical rotation”.
I’ve already got the “clinical rotation” figured out. I’m going to take them on a tour of the toxic food environment: the supermarket. We’ll explore what is hype and what is health supporting. Time permitting, we’ll hop on over to the nearest health food store to see some more hype.
Of course, I’ll teach them the top ten toxic ingredients along with my evaluation continuum. They need to learn that language is important and the power of advertising/ health hype. But I want to take it even deeper. I want to shake up their core belief system on health and healing. I want them to look in the mirror and begin with what is at the end of their own fork.
So here’s a question for you: What do YOU think your doctor should know about food? Post it in the comments section. Pass this around to your friends and family too, let’s get a good long discussion going so I can share it with the medical school.
Here are my suggestions. First make sure they all subscribe to Stephan Guyenet’s Whole Health Source (http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com). While some paleo folks (e.g., Cordain) are down on grains of all types, there are good reasons for seriously considering the anti-nutrients in grains and grain oils (e.g., lectins, high omega 6). Stephan also has some good stuff on the question of saturated fats too. From there, connecting the dots with the Weston Price Foundation probably would be useful too. WAP did some amazing research nearly a century ago!
Next, whether you agree or disagree, it makes sense to at least consider Taubes’ argument on obesity. As he says, if you don’t get the cause right, you can’t ever get the cure. This is a medical grand rounds presentation, so should be very suitable for a med school audience: http://www.dhslides.org/mgr/mgr060509f/f.htm
Similarly, there’s Robert Lustig’s Sugar: The Bitter Truth here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM This ties in with your concern with HFCS, but it also points out the problems with added refined sugar and others like agave that are even higher in fructose than sucrose and HFCS!
3 hours huh? Another sign of our dismal medical educational system. Oh well, it’s a start.