Radio Food Programme says doctors not taught about food

Yes ironic really, she was advising me on my diet and yet she died before me!

 

I really hope that wagon wheels are some kind of biscuit. I thing custard would make toast rather soggy. I prefer to eat mine separately.

 

Personally dietary changes has done nothing for my ME and I am still sick, but it’s just not me there are others too. People who have attempted dietary approaches and claim they have improved still frequent the forums and for the most part still experience symptoms and are still sick. So are the improvements due to the diet, to placebo effects, or is it due to the fluctuations of the disease?

One need to be careful not to generalise to everybody. There are folks gluten intolerant who do not have ME so the gluten thing is not necessarily caused by the ME. Who knows if it’s even linked. Personally i do not experience anything bad if i eat bread and pasta, so it is included in my diet

For physicians to recommend drastic diets such as ketogenic or other kinds of diets, one need to make sure there is good evidence. We simply do not have that kind of evidence.

As for the ability to propare meals, this is related to nutrition, however this is not necessarily of physician jurisdiction. This is more about social justice and access to food, and access to help should you be too disabled to prepare meals. In that case, programs such as meals on wheels can prove helpful, but then there will always be some who turn their nose on this saying the food is not fresh or organic enough.

I would suggest that food does not have magical or healing properties. Food can be rich or poor in certain vitamins and minerals and in energy needed for daily living. In general, each country have recommendations as for what a healthy diet should be like, and there are daily recommendations for vitamins, minerals, proteins and so on. My diet has nothing to do with why i got sick or why i remain sick, and this is the same for patients with rheumatoid arthritis, cancer, multiple sclerosis, and so on. Until proven otherwise, food has nothing to do with it.

 

The only thing worse than soggy toast is burnt toast ...although if burnt to a crisp it may hold up to the custard layer. I think that product innovation needs some work....perhaps a layer of chocolate spread as a moisture barrier?

Yes wagon wheels are a very retro brand of biscuit ...chocolate, biscuit, marshmallow and jam...what’s not to love?

 

I would disagree re dieticians. My cousin had cancer- her recommended diet was shockingly bad for that condition.
Guidelines re diet are not based on much solid science, more vested interests.

But then we have fostered 2 generations who cannot cook from scratch. That is a bigger issue.

 

And what is the evidence for this statement?

 

Indeed.

The NHS food fact sheet (one side of A4) for type 2 diabetes is shocking re what's officially not okay to eat, and what's recommended to eat, if a patient has blood glucose issues. Basically just limit obvious sugars, white bread, biscuits and cakes. No mention of the fact that all carbs will be turned into glucose, so the advice to eat brown (brown not wholemeal - doh!!!) bread instead of white etc. is at best misleading and at worst deliberate sabotage of a patients attempts to control BG by diet.

Coupled with diabetic nurse practitioners who have no knowledge or understanding of the condition and it's hardly surprising things have got out of hand, even once identified as diabetic the management approach is led by inaccurate and harmful dogma, diabetes is "caused" by lifestyle, therefore following a "healthy" diet, for a non diabetic, will correct it.

Maddening.

 

I used to have wagon wheels in my packed lunch box often when I was at school. I used to really hope they were some kind of biscuit too.

eta - I don't want dietary advise from my GP; I'm not overweight because he hasn't coached me in healthy eating. I want an appropriate response to my medical problems.

 

I think this is where one should start for general lifestyle advice in th UK

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-eatwell-guide

It’s not perfect but should be the starting place before attacking your GP...if you type ‘healthy eating uk’ in google it’s one of the first sites on the rankings. If your GP says anything different you can challenge them why

If the general public want something less dumbed down then they can go here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-diet-and-nutrition-survey

I guess it’s easier for some to look at pictures on a random cronies blog though and buy into a conspiracy theory that the reason that people are fat is because someone’s done this to them with a sinister back of house plan whahaha!

 

I really believe in preventative medicine, I think there should be so much more emphasis on diet in the primary practice. Could be a dietician giving the advice off course. Not knowing anything about food as a GP, just makes you look a bit dim.

Food is not a medicine, a medicine is curative. Food is a very good preventative measure.

In some diseases in can be (partly) curative as well, like diabetes and IBS.

With all we are finding out about the microbiome, I think diet will prove to be even more important than we thought.

 

Yes but there is no evidence for this ...all speculative at the moment with regards to microbiome. We are miles off knowing anything useful about this or even if this is not just a lot of hot air. There is nothing for gps to do on this until there is a prescribably treatment and diagnostic criteria for it.

The point is that there is line to be drawn between medicine and lifestyle.

For instance the recent increase in type 2 diabetes is not a result of an inadequacy in medicine...it’s a lifestyle thing which means it goes back to public education and about saving healthcare costs based on changing people’s behaviour in some way. Using GPS as an educational tool is inefficient and it almost certainly will increase overall costs without a very good Return On Investment.

There is a big debate about fortification of staple foods for vitamin D for instance...this has a potential impact on people’s health in terms of prevention but nothing to do with a doctor. It is more to do with public health and legislation. Similarly for the sugar tax on soft drinks.

It is better to make GPS accountable for things they can manage with treatments like patient care for specifics not general well-being.

The preventive education needs to sit with central government who can: devise policy, review the legislation and can run campaigns etc. to get the best bang for the taxpayers buck.

 

Refs at work so may post something later, meanwhile as the sugar industry keeps to the tobacco playbook this may be of interest

https://twitter.com/user/status/983219433576464385

 

How does this relate to your claim that the the science behind nutritional guidelines is inadequate or is misinforming the guidelines/European law?

Perhaps post sometching that we can discuss rather than a book publicity event advert?

 

I'll let you try that out and tell me how it goes.

We have cookies similar to that, but no jam. I guess that means we are deprived.

 

It’s very cheap jam if that helps?

 

Not a great day yesterday, so will get back to this later today hopefully.

This is a talk to the European parliament to address nutritional diseases via diet not pills.

No doubt it will touch on the science as Aseem Malhotra is one of the few doctors who can statistically interpret research papers.

It is being livestreamed on Facebook

 

No worries, perhaps we should wait until he has done his talk and see what the content is? I don’t really do Facebook, but I’m sure it will pop up in the media I do read and we can discuss it properly around what he has said or claimed. Just bear in mind though he is a lobbyist and not an expert in law (a bit like Jamie Oliver is a cook and not a particularly good scientist...he isn’t as bad as delia smith but in the same vein).

He does make some quite outlandish claims about what should be done and pretty mush is hard line in terms of infringing people’s rights to choose what they eat (taxing cakes and sweets is his next hobby horse...and I’m sure more will follow). We haven’t had VAT on cakes ever ...and there is not a lot of evidence that the tax on soft drinks will have a massive impact on anything other than make poorer people poorer. Taxing biscuits with chocolate on it doesn’t seems to have modified behaviour over the years, but education slowly has.

I am always wary of when people insinuate that food law and businesses are deliberately compromising people’s health...this is normally by cock up rather than sinister plan in my experience.

Let’s see what he has to say for himself.

 

A relative in his very late 80's had a stroke. He recovered extremely well and on her last home visit the young ish GP (who had demonstrated very poor bedside manner throughout) started lecturing him about diet - there were to be no more cooked breakfasts ever again etc. etc..

He looked at her incredulously, told her to come back for a chat after she'd spent well over 80 years on the planet & suggested she show herself out.

He told us about it the next time we visited - he'd just spent the morning happily digging over his veg plot.

Eta - typo

 

No cooked breakfasts? I have cooked breakfast every day. What does she recommend - starch-laden cereal?