Last week I delivered a keynote lecture at the Public Health Collaboration annual conference in Manchester where I explained to a crowd well over 200 comprised of doctors and medical professionals that we have a complete healthcare systems failure. This failure is rooted within an epidemic of misinformed doctors and misinformed patients counting on biased research and biased reporting in the media to create wrong choices. We have doctors practising defensive medicine, rather than supplying the correct care.
We have doctors practising defensive medicine, rather than providing the correct care.
The medical curricula has additionally didn't teach trainee and doctors to look beyond simply prescribing medication for every ailment. Everything is so dire that research conducted by among the cofounders from the Cochrane Collaboration Peter Gotzsche in 2023 found that prescription medications is the third leading reason for death in america and Europe after heart disease and cancer. Referencing the billions in fines the majority of the top ten drug companies have incurred within the last decade for illegal marketing
of medication and hiding data on harms in the last decade Gotzsche concludes that the behaviour from the pharmaceutical industry fulfils the factors for “organised crime” under US law.
Because the machine is becoming so corrupted by commercial influence trumping what’s truly best for patient’s health honest doctors can no longer practice honest medicine especially as we’re often making clinical decisions for patients
based on biased and manipulated information.
Many of the drugs which are commonly prescribed have a marginal benefit at best and often cause more damage than
good. They just provide the patient an illusion of protection.
And where is the actual health crisis? As of this moment, 60 per cent of adults in the UK are overweight or obese and something in three children is overweight or obese when they leave primary school. Diseases linked to obesity are dramatically increasing. The price of treating Type 2 diabetes in the UK to the NHS and lost economic productivity has already been running at lb20bn each year.
By 2035, which will have risen to lb40bn per year, a situation that's not sustainable. What's clear would be that the risk factors for obesity are in our environment and diet. It is now becoming virtually impossible to prevent processed food.
Even in hospitals, you will find outlets selling processed food and junk food. After i was practising like a cardiologist at Harefield Hospital, I operated on a man who had experienced cardiovascular disease. I went to his bedside afterwards and counselled him to review his diet and exercise regime and that he countered with ‘how do you expect me to make changes once the nurse had just afflicted me with a meal of burger and chips?’
From there, I had been on the journey to see how poor diet contributes to more early death than poor exercise, smoking and alcohol consumption combined.
My latest book takes a closer consider the village of Pioppi in Southern Italy in which the average life span is 90 years old almost a decade more than the average tour de France cyclist. And guess what? there are no gyms and no prescribed exercise! This village, where I filmed my documentary The large Fat Fix, was first pinpointed in the 1970s as a place where dietary norms appeared to have an amazing effect on longevity.
The book, The Pioppi Diet, tries to cut through the misinformation which has popped up surrounding the so-called Mediterranean diet, that has been misinterpreted for many years. For instance, so-called ‘bad’ LDL cholesterol is really good for you if you are older than 60 and will not increase your probability of getting cardiovascular disease. You can’t outrun a poor diet and no quantity of exercise can make up for eating refined sugar and processed carbs.
As a professional doctor for more than Fifteen years It’s become clear in my experience that good health rarely comes out of a medicine bottle. Dietary changes tend to be more powerful than anything when it comes to a healthier and happier life.
Purchase the Pioppi Diet: A 21-Day Lifestyle Plan by Dr Aseem Malhotra, Donal O’Neill (ISBN: 9781405932639) from Amazon’s Book shop. Free UK delivery on eligible orders. www.amazon.co.uk