My readers likely understand by now that I am not fond of the conventional allopathic medical system. My years of study and experience in these realms have convinced me that the modern medical system may have useful diagnostic tools, but their hopelessly limited and sometimes fraudulent paradigm (fed by conventional medical school training) do not provide MDs with the necessary tools for understanding causality and providing cure. But every so often I encounter an “outside the box” enlightened unconventional doctor whose work I appreciate and recommend to others. Cate Shanahan is one such doctor. It is obvious that she refused to remain inside the limited paradigm her medical education provided. In her entertaining and easily accessible book, Deep Nutrition
: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food, Shanahan explains, in layman’s terms, the science behind a truth I have been longing for our culture to accept: You can change your DNA. You are not the fatalistic victim of “set in stone” genetics as much as you are of the choices you make about what goes into your body. Shanahan shows how you “create and preserve genetic wealth.”
I believe Deep Nutrition
is a basic primer on health, wellness, disease prevention and essential nutrition. Every American family should have a dogeared copy on the shelf. Because I am so encouraged by the wisdom and honest science that Shanahan has shared, I am giving away two copies (to two different readers) of Deep Nutrition
in this month’s Reading Room installment. By way of introduction to Shanahan’s perspective on the medical industry and human wellness, I share an excerpt from her epilogue: When I interviewed with the chief of family medicine at a large medical corporation on the West Coast he explained that, since he was part of a team of people who arranged for pharmaceutical companies to issue cash grants, he was in a position to offer me a particularly enticing salary.
“What are the grants for?” I asked.
“We have a quality improvement program that tracks physician prescribing patterns. We call it ‘quality’ but it’s really about money.”
And that’s all it’s about. It works like this. In his organization, any patient with LDL cholesterol over 100 is put on a cholesterol lowering medication. Any person with a blood pressure higher than 140/90 is put on a blood pressure medication. [my note: It’s important to understand that these “diagnostic” numbers have been lowered over the years so more prescriptions could be pushed. Read Selling Sickness.] Any person with “low bone density” is put on a bone-remodeling inhibitor. And so on. The doctors who prescribe the most get big bonuses. Those who prescribe the least get fired. With a hint of incredulousness in his voice he explained, “So far, every time we’ve asked for funding for our program, the drug companies give it to us.” If this is where healthcare is headed, then these hybrid physician/executives will instinctively turn their gaze to our children and invent more creative methods to bulldoze an entire generation into the bottomless pit of chronic disease.
Merck CEO Henry Gadsen’s 30-year-old dream was to make healthy people buy drugs they didn’t really need. But he was dreaming small. What I see happening now is more sinister, more profitable, and promises to have longer-lasting repercussions than merely creating diagnoses that lead to unnecessary prescriptions. What I see is a massive campaign of nutrition-related disinformation that has reordered our relationship with food and reprogrammed our physiologies. Industry has moved past selling sickness and learned how to create it. Whether by intent or simply fortuitous coincidence, today’s definition of a healthy diet enables corporations to sell us cheap, easily stored foods that will put more money in their pockets and more people in the hospital. By denying our bodies the foods of our ancestors and severing ourselves from our culinary traditions, we are changing our genes for the worse. Just as corporations have rewritten the genetic codes of fruits and vegetables to better suit their needs, they are now in effect doing the same things to us.
But there’s one thing they’ve overlooked. Fruits and vegetables can’t fight back. We can.
Exactly! Thank you Cate, for so succinctly and convincingly sharing your testimony of the truth about the fraudulent medical and food industries. I really enjoy reading a holistic-thinking MD with integrity! I hope Shanahan’s message will get through to the fence sitters who are still content to trust the conventional system.
Deep Nutrition
covers a lot of excellent territory without overwhelming the reader. Shanahan explains the science of how your genes change (epigenetics) and she exposes the truth behind why we’ve ended up with distasteful genetic soup, and what we can do to alter it. Building on the pillar of traditional nourishing foods, Shanahan shows why good fat is your body’s best friend, why sugar is its enemy, and why calorie restriction is not the key to losing weight. She discusses nutrition and physical degeneration, skin and bone formation, and why our children are being robbed of healthy anatomical and physiological development. All moms should understand and embrace these truths, and will be fascinated and admonished by the facts of second sibling syndrome and more. Shanahan echoes the work of Price in his native physical degeneration studies, but her book is far more digestible for most readers. If you have desired to read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (a must-read) but have not been able to do so, start with Shanahan’s Deep Nutrition. Please use the Rafflecopter widget below to enter to win a copy of Deep Nutrition
. Tell your friends. If I’ve set up the widget correctly, LOL, you’ll just need to answer a simple question. I will have Rafflecopter randomly select two winners at the end of the week. This post is linked to Kelly the Kitchen Kop's Real Food Wednesday Carnival. Check it out!
a Rafflecopter giveaway
