Nutrition and Health: Connecting the dots

The way allopathic medicine works is that, when you are stuck at a red light, they will sell you a hammer to knock out the red light and after the accident they will offer to patch you up and send you the bill for that too.
(Reinoud Fentener van Vlissingen, MD, psychiatrist at Rotterdam, Holland, ca. 1965)

[Author's note: A more up-to-date version of this article now appears here.]

Into Pharmageddon

I grew up with often lengthy debates at the dinner table in our home in Rotterdam, Holland between my father and various medical colleagues about the complete bankruptcy of the Western medical model, also known as allopathic medicine. At other times, my father regaled us with stories of the various bribery attempts of the pharmaceutical industry to get him to prescribe their wares, which he steadfastly refused. He was offended by the innate corruption of that industry, often clearly at the expense of the Hippocratic oath: "Do no harm." Nevertheless, big pharma won, for now, but today the blow back is worse than ever.
The overuse of anti-biotics was a frequent topic of conversation, and I can't believe that 50 years later nothing has been done about it, except the concern has now made it to TV. At least it has become part of the public dialogue.

We are now living the apogee of the allopathic model and pharmageddon, where the final concept of medicine is symptom suppression and "a pill for every ill." Not only can it not explain the proven healing of many alternative modalities, it is a failure in dealing with such basic things as heart disease (see Esselstyn), diabetes (see Barnard), and cancer, or, as T. Colin Campbell recently said: The war on cancer simply has failed.
Seen in that light, the opioid crisis is merely the logical end result of the pharmaceutical approach to medicine. In actual fact, the numbers are small: 42,000 deaths in 2016, or about 115 a day. Heart disease, which is completely reversible and preventable with a Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet, killed 630,000 in 2016, or 1,726 people per day, but somehow that is business as usual and not any kind of a national crisis.
The bottom line is that the pharmaceutical industry, ever since drugs have been allowed to be advertised on national TV, has done an end-run around doctors, and makes them into pill pushers and not materially different from the illegal variety of drug pushers. It all revolves around the paradigm of a pill for every ill and symptom suppression. Meanwhile, medical science is hopelessly obsolete as long as it remains stuck in a Newtonian concept which puts the body first, and considers the mind an epiphenomenon of the body, the absurd concept that was ridiculed effectively a long time ago by sci-fi writer Terry Bisson in his piece on "Meat that thinks."
Allopathy is much like the drunk who is searching for the keys he lost under the streetlight and tells the passing policeman he is looking where there is light, and is completely dumbfounded when the policeman asks him logically, but where did you lose them? There is a brilliant documentary on the dysfuncition of the medical system: Escape Fire. Recommended! 

Whole Foods Plant-Based Nutrition to the Rescue

Vegetable to the rescue, from fill your plate.org

Dr. Esselstyn talks of "pharmageddon." In 2017, the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) hosted a conference where 700 physicians committed themselves publicly to the new model of "prevention over pills". In Holland, which has a single payer model that definitely does reduce the paperwork for doctors and is generally more efficient, doctors are leaving mainstream medicine in droves to practice "real medicine," in one form or another. Dutch author Jan Willem van Aalst published a fascinating book (In Dutch for now) about a whole new approach to medicine, in which he resolutely puts the patient in charge, which of course they always were, but which tends to get lost in the shuffle in our industrial medical model that is focused on symptom suppression. The book takes the form of an encyclopedia of healing modalities. His work is deeply grounded in the work of quantum physicist Amit Goswami and his book The Quantum Doctor.

Here in the US, a revolutionary change within medicine is taking form in many ways, but perhaps most importantly through the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM). Lifestyle Medicine is becoming the new specialty for any medical professional who understands the implication of the Whole Foods Plant-Based diet, and how it produces a natural nutritional abundance, in which the idea of nutritional supplements is completely moot, and probably 75% of prescription and over-the-counter medicines are furthermore unnecessary (think of a world without ant-acids or statin drugs, baby aspirin and a 75% reduction in insulin needs). The soon-to-be-released documentary Code Blue puts it all in perspective, following on the heels of Forks over Knives and What the Health and PlantPure Nation.

Patient-centric Medicine

There is only one form of patient-centric medicine, and that is the realization that the mind of the patient is the healer, which follows directly from Goswami's work The Quantum Doctor. The health insurance industry has it's own pretend "patient-centered healthcare," which is just a more effective way of delivering care and billing you. In fact, their model sets patients up to keep chasing their tail in a maze of "specialists," all operating within a Newtonian model of our reality that cannot possibly provide he answer. When all else fails, diseases are then called "psychosomatic."

Note: Early Encounters with the Medical Paradigm

At approximately age 13 or 14, I had an interesting conversation with my father, who was musing out loud about psychosomatic illness as if only some illnesses were psychosomatic. (With the benefit of hindsight, I now understand that "psychosomatic," is a typical term that betrays the failure of the mechanistic, Newtonian model of allopathic medicine to grasp the nature of illness and disease.)

Upon his remark about psychosomatic illness, I asked my father a simple question:
"But are there any other?" [than psychosomatic illnesses or diseases]
After a few moments of reflection, he answered:
"You may have a point."

While, needless to say, I had not fully grasped the insights of Amit Goswami of why the quantum model simply implies that the body is in consciousness (the mind) and not the other way around, I was reasonably familiar with the fundamentals of quantum mechanics at that age. In fact, I wrote an essay on nuclear genetics at age twelve that won me a prize, a book by the nuclear physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. It seems that indeed, I intuited the paradigm that is now explained so clearly by Goswami, which implies that it is the mind of the patient that is the healer, and doctors are only incidental to that, at best a help, at worst a hindrance. Reading Goswami today was an Aha! Erlebnis for me, finally connecting the dots on why this is so.

The concepts of The Quantum Doctor hark back on millennia of spiritual tradition saying the same thing. It is simply about who we are, and the realization that it is the mind of the patient that is the healer, quite in line with the work of Mary Baker Eddy. The doctor or other medical professional then plays the role of a subject matter expert who temporarily knows more and helps facilitate the healing. The doctor/patient relationship becomes a growth opportunity for both and doctor and patient are co-equal in that relationship and not codependent, as is the case in the dysfunctional allopathic medicine model. The reason the doctor/patient relationship is so totally dysfunctional today is because it is based on the patient deferring to the expertise of a doctor who operates within a mechanistic, Newtonian paradigm that is of necessity totally hit or miss in explaining or diagnosing his disease.
The experience with Whole Foods Plant-Based (#WFPB) nutrition shows that time and again, people are getting off of sometimes hands full of medications completely, while in other cases they can substantially reduce their dosage of medications. In other words, nutrition is the first step and it firmly puts the patient in the drivers seat: first get your vital stats as healthy as you can get them on your own, and the reversal for many diseases can be quite rapid. Except in acute conditions, any other form of intervention is pointless unless overall health is addressed first and the body is enabled to heal itself.

Amit Goswami on Quantum Physics, Consciousness and Health

The upshot of the #WFPB nutritional regime is simply that the single biggest thing patients can do for themselves is improve their diet, and not just by tinkering in the margin with any number of "diets" that are marginally better than the so-called Standard American Diet (SAD), which is a total nutritional disaster. Most so-called diets amount to little else than somebody's pet theory of what diet should be, with little or no peer-reviewed science to back it up.
The Whole Foods, Plant-Based nutritional paradigm is in fact a radically new paradigm for nutritional science as a whole, and it is solidly rooted in the work of T. Colin Campbell that was first published in his book The China Study, which recently saw an updated, 2017 version. It was followed by his book Whole, which reframes nutritionial science altogether. In the meantime, a whole avalanche of related information has resulted, including the clinical work of a growing list of physicians, including Caldwell B. Esselstyn, Jr, Neal Barnard, John McDougall, Dean Ornish, Michael Greger, Robert Ostfeld, Saray Stancic, and many others. One after the other will tell you that no drug in the world ever made such order-of-magnitude differences as the Whole Foods Plant-Based diet. Or, as Dr. Robert Ostfeld frequently says, patients frequently come to his office in tears to thank him for how rapidly they are making progress, which never happens for a prescription of statin drugs.

These new insights place the patient central in the healing process, which of course they always were. Step one is the realization that the mind of the patient is the healer and the healing modalities offered are merely a way of empowering the patient. The patient's will now moves center stage, including all our innate self-destructive tendencies that form the blocks to healing. Consequently, the new healing paradigm of true integrative medicine will have to include all viable healing modalities, including psychotherapy. In the process and in-line with what Amit Goswami has developed in the Quantum Doctor, the field of medicine has to move from Newtonian physics, which is the mechanistic paradigm of allopathic medicine to the paradigm of quantum physics, which makes it clear that of necessity the body is in the mind, and the mind is in charge at which point any healing modality that works for you is valid.

In the context of a conversation about these issues, someone asked me why it should take this long for our society to fully accept and embrace the implications of quantum mechanics in medicine. I responded with a question: "How long did it take the Vatican to embrace the heliocentric model?" and I added the observation that what else is the AMA today, but the keeper of socially embedded paradigm, like the Catholic Church was in the Middle Ages? The book on Rockefeller's Medicine Men (see bibliography) should make that much clear.

The New Healthcare Model

Recently, I wrote about the merger of Aetna and CVS under the title of  The Worst of Sick-care Under One Roof and used the opportunity to point out that, when seen by the clear light of economic logic, the healthcare system is sinking under its own weight since it creates an economic incentive to provide more treatment and as long as we focus on the treatment of disease and not on health, we are creating the runaway nightmare that is now called the healthcare crisis. In the public dialogue, so far, nobody is addressing the real heart of the crisis.

My main suggestion in that article was that the Personal Care Physician should evolve in to a personal healthcare coach and a subject matter expert who is on retainer to the patient, and organized with their own mutual society. The effect of the solution would be that your personal physician is beholden to you and only to you, and is your go-to expert in terms of any treatment you may ever need, to select appropriate healing modalities. Based on the numbers, a 65% reduction of healthcare costs can eventually be realized based on diet alone, and the remaining 35% should become the domain of catastrophic health insurance that kicks in to complement your #WFPB diet and your supervision by your own PCP. It would be an approximation to the traditional Chinese model where you paid your doctor while you were healthy and stopped paying him when you were sick.

The fundamental assumptions for this back-of-the-envelope calculation of the economics of this paradigm change in health and nutrition are taken from the documentary Code Blue. The fundamental insight is that 86% of healthcare spending is on treatments for diseases of affluence that are all capable, in varying degrees, of being prevented or reversed with a Whole Foods, Plant-based lifestyle. Therefore, over time, as our society begins to implement this transition more and more, it is proposed that we can reduce that 86% of total healthcare spending by 75% as a result of a shift towards a better diet and lifestyle, in line with the precepts of the American College of Lifestyle Medicine. If so, we will reduce total healthcare spending by 65% which will solve our healthcare "crisis," and make the American economy competitive once more, all else being equal.

Two Birds with One Stone: the Environment

The transition towards a vegan lifestyle is the biggest single thing we as a society can do for solving our environmental problems. A growing list of official reports speak to this, and generally the conclusion is that vegans are 14 times less resource intensive than meat eaters.

From the cover of the book Meatonomics:

Meatonomics is the first book to add up the huge “externalized” costs that the animal food system imposes on taxpayers, animals and the environment, and it finds these costs total about $414 billion yearly. With yearly retail sales of around $250 billion, that means that for every $1 of product they sell, meat and dairy producers impose almost $2 in hidden costs on the rest of us.  But if producers were forced to internalize these costs, a $4 Big Mac would cost about $11.

Conclusions: Connecting the dots

Here are the steps to the new paradigm:

1. #WFPB nutrtion is the largest single thing the patient can do for their own health and wellness, and with it, the annual physical moves towards an assessment of health first, not a mere screening for illness. Most importantly, it empowers the patient to be in charge of their health. The key driver is the first ever evidence based nutritional paradigm being #WFPB, paired up with the clinical experience with a growing number of disease models, some of which were alluded to above.
2. Taking responsibility for your health also points in the direction that the human will is central, and that realization leads directly to the new paradigm of Quantum Healing and the Quantum Doctor. Ergo, Lifestyle Medicine, which is now focused on diet and exercise alone, must of necessity evolve towards quantum medicine. The role of the primary physician must be first as a health/nutrition coach, and second as a subject matter expert on the full complement of healing modalities where intervention or treatment in any form is called for.

In both areas we now have a fortuitous meeting of theory and practice.

• In the case of #WFPB the experience with plant-based nutrition by a number of physicians in different fields, found their theoretical foundation in the research work of T. Colin Campbell. 
• In the field of alternative medicine and various attempts at a model for integrative medicine, real progress was not possible until these efforts met up with the concepts of the Quantum Doctor to provide the theoretical foundation and the model for a comprehensive understanding of the meaning of integrative medicine.

The Quantum Doctor provides a logical and sound explanation as to why the allopathic model repeatedly falls short - because it is based on an obsolete and simplistic model of the human experience. More importantly, the Quantum Doctor also provides a satisfactory explanation why many alternative healing modalities can work, when the traditional allopathic model has no explanation for them. Obviously, this new paradigm for medicine perfectly complements the implications of the #WFPB model: the patient must take responsibility for their own health and well-being.

The final payoff is that besides simply solving the healthcare crisis, the path to the Whole Foods, Plant-Based diet also solves our environmental crisis at the same time, since vegans provably are 14x less resource intensive than meat-eaters.

Bibliography

Note: The following might be considered the seminal books that can help the reader understand the parallel paradigm changes that are now going on in the areas of medicine and nutrition. I include the book Meatonomics because it provides good documentation of how our mistaken nutritional paradigm of prioritizing (animal) protein is absolutely woven into our society and extracts value because of its seriously distorted economics. Thomas S. Kuhn's classic, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, even if you once read it, is worth rereading by way of a refresher to understand just how deeply these paradigms are embedded in everything in our society, and how painful the change can be.

• Ivan Illych, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health 
• E. Richard Brown, Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in America
• T. Colin Campbell, The China Study, revised and expanded edition (2017)
• T. Colin Campbell, Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition
• Amit Goswami,   The Quantum Doctor: A Quantum Physicist Explains The Healing Power of Integral Medicine
• David Robinson Simon: Meatonomics: How the Rigged Economics of Meat and Dairy Make You Consume Too Much and How to Eat Better, Live Longer and Spend Smarter
• Thomas S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Plantricious to the rescue

This is a name to remember: Plantricious.

Finally, a label that means nutritionally sound vegan food: Certified Plantricious.

Certified Plantricious label

Confusion abounds about vegan food, and marketers are having a field day. Many, many vegan foods are not healthy. Start with things like vegan mozarella that is made from canola oil, and it goes downhill from there... marketers confuse a sociological term "vegan," for a nutrition label and peddle any amount of garbage. Canola oil is not suitable for human consumption on the best of days. Most people think "vegan" is only defined in the negative, as an absence of animal products, but that is no way to approach nutrition.

The only serious research base in plant-based nutrition is the work of T. Colin Campbell, beginning with the China Study, and now continuing in his Center for Nutrition Studies. It is the foundation for all serious work in plant-based nutrition, including the work of Esselstyn, PCRM (Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine, and the American College of Lifestyle Medicine.

Plantricious will be rating both restaurants and foods, and looking to create some order, by providing consumers with one label that actually means something. Follow Plantricious on Pinterest for the latest.

General Guidance

First, you need to understand how simple the plant-based nutritional paradigm really is. It is defined on Nutritionstudies as the Whole Food, Plant-Based Diet Guide, and it can be summed up simply as Whole-Foods, Plant-Based without added SOS (Sugar, Oil, or Salt). That's it #WFPB without added SOS.

Second, you also need to get some clue about the economic (and environmental) significance, meaning that with a plant-based diet you consume on average 14x fewer resources than someone on a Standard American Diet (SAD).

Third, you need to understand that the plant-based diet can prevent 7 of 10 of the leading causes of death in the Western world, and it is therefore the only realistic solution to the healthcare crisis, as I have argued in a recent article on the CVS/Aetna merger.

The upshot is that the plant-based nutritional paradigm is the key to a sustainable world,  and the solution for our healthcare crisis and our environmental crisis all in one. Plus, you will feel better to boot!

KISS: 80/10/10, carbs/protein/oils

In general terms, you end up getting 80% of calories from complex carbohydrates, 10% from (plant-based) protein, and 10% from naturally occurring oil - never added oil. You want to watch it on the oily fruit such as avocado, nuts, or coconut. Serious heart patients, according to Esselstyn should even cut those out, but a normal person can have a little bit, like a handful of walnuts, or a quarter of an avocado in a day. It is easy to go over 10% because many plants naturally contain oil.

No more need for most supplements or pills. Take a B12 every other day, and you should be fine.

Bad Diet Advice

Most diet books and videos and the like live off of confusion. The tell tale signs are when they promote single ingredients. It makes no sense to not look at the total diet and figure out if one ingredient or another makes a difference. If you are on a healthy #WFPB-SOS diet, there is NO need for supplements, except for some B12.
Just one example of such consumer confusion was a good looking PDF document that was sent to me the other day, titled African American Vegan Starter Guide. It remains focused on protein, as if that were an issue and also uses added oils and fried foods, all of which are a no-no, for both heart disease and diabetes, as well as many other health problems, of which the book correctly represents that the African American population is particularly vulnerable, yet they don't make an effort to provide nutritionally sound advice. Unfortunately, this type of consumer confusion is more the rule than the exception.

All dietary advice that remains concerned with protein is suspicious. These folks are stuck in the old wives tales that it is somehow hard to get our protein, whereas the truth is that we tend to get too much protein, not too little. The first step is no animal protein whatsoever. Animal protein is proven to stimulate cancer growth. We need plant protein ideally for about 10% of our caloric intake, not much more. Again, it is very easy to overshoot the target.

Another tell-tale sign is using added oil. Vegetable oil is made from plants, but we do not need the added oil in our diet, for oily food directly affects your arteries, preventing them from flexibly expanding and contracting with physical activity for 3-6 hours after an oily meal. Oil simply paralyzes your arteries and while Extra Virgin Olive Oil may seem to taste better than motor oil, its nutritional value is about the same. Avoid!

About Omega-3 and Omega-6: It's the #WFPB Paradigm, stupid...

The correct balance of Omega-3 to Omega-6 is hard to get, nutritionally, except if you are following the #WFPB program. This is just another way of realizing that #WFPB, or also the "plant strong" and "plant perfect" diets, as Rip Esselstyn likes to call them are not "diets" per se, but more variations within a new nutritional paradigm.

The point was driven home to me rather forcefully again the other day, when I ended up facilitating an exchange between T. Colin Campbell and a biochemist friend. The said biochemist is a researcher who knows a lot about different nutrients, and often from first hand research. He is also a great critical thinker. Among other things, he made me aware of the ignominious start of the Harvard nutrition program under Frederick Stare, one of the seriously compromised researchers in the health field, who essentially was a paid promoter for the Standard American Diet, which we now know is making people sick. Nevertheless, on this occasion he was limited by the paradigm he spoke from, i.e. the Standard American Diet, and various diets that are variations on it.

The standard advice to vegans is to get some vegan EPA/DHA supplements, but it turns out that if you eat a reasonably balanced Whole Foods Plant-Based diet, you end up with Omega-3 and 6 in the proper balance almost automatically. Understanding this underscores again the fact that #WFPB is a nutritionally complete paradigm, with almost the sole exception being some B12, and maybe some D3 in winter.

Here it is in the words of Colin Campbell (in private correspondence):

quote
When one consumes a truly whole food plant based diet, without added oil (it is the added oil not the high fat plant foods), the ratio will be around a very healthy 1:1, to 3:1 (omega 6 to omega 3). The problem with people speaking about this ratio out of context is that they are grossly omitting the myriad effects of other dietary component and, worse, the underlying biochemistry. 

unquote

In short, don't mess with success. If you're doing #WFPB, things take care of themselves nutritionally, it is within the SAD and its dietary variants where one is constantly at risk of not getting sufficient intake of one nutrient or another.

The Paradigm Shift

I remember growing up, when my parents became vegetarians, my mother was always concerned about:  but how are you going to get your proteins. And her cooking pattern for two decades largely was potatos, vegetables, and something in the place of meat. That last piece would be the protein source. There was zero knowledge or awareness that vegetables and grains have proteins, let alone enough proteins, but the truth is that spinach is 51% protein, and the lowly potato or brown rice each have about 9% protein. Plus, of course, we know now, since the China Study, that we want to beware against over consuming protein. The ideal range is 5-10% and not the more typical 15-25% which we see in SAD. More importantly, we want our proteins from plant sources, not animal sources.

What really is scary about this paradigm shift, is how long it has remained a secret, or, in the words of T. Colin Campbell:
quote
The research in "The China Study" was handsomely funded by NIH (a very competitive process, 70 grant years of funding), was published in the very best nutrition and cancer journals and I have since presented this material to well over 150 medical schools and their conferences (over 700 total invited presentations since the book was published).
unquote
It is now forty years since Campbell began publishing papers, followed by the first edition of the book in 2005. Still, this information is not well known, although that is rapidly changing.





What is hard to fathom for many is that suddenly maximizing protein intake is no longer a virtue and, if you maximize anything, it is fiber. The other thing that is hard to understand is the no-added oil precept. We hear too much about supposedly healthy oils, that may be healthier compared to the worst, but the body still does not need them. As Dr. Ostfeld from Montefiore Hospital likes to put it, added oils are like inviting Mike Tyson to practice on your veins. For six hours after an oily meal, your veins loose their oompf. Along with that, adding oils the balance of Omega-3 to Omega-6 is upset, and you don't want that.

Sources of Omega-3 fatty acid for vegans

You can find ample articles online that document good sources of Omega-3 and/or how to achieve a balanced Omega-6 to Omega-3 ratio. Most of it is geared to the wrong paradigm for veganism, and not to the #WFPB diet, or plant strong or plant-perfect. Often times articles point to supplements, but if you follow what Colin Campbell says above, you need not worry. Good sources of Omega-3 for vegans are Chia seeds, Flax seeds, and various vegetables. One that is especially good is Verdolaga, a.k.a. Purslane. 

https://worldcrops.org/crops/verdolaga

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portulaca_oleracea

http://www.gracelinks.org/blog/4236/real-food-right-now-and-how-to-cook-it-purslane

Purslane from Wikipedia

I recently discovered that Verdolaga grows between corn, and it was available at our Parkchester Green  Market, along with some of the sweetest corn I've tasted in years.


Simple recipe, based on the one listed on Gracelinks above: 

Potato salad with Purslane

• essentially follow their (Gracelinks') steps, except:
• If you can't get fresh dill, use dried, and reconstitute it with some lime juice and lemon juice. That will do the job very quickly.
• if you do the above, you barely need and dressing for this salad other than the lime/lemon juice. But if you need more dressing, obviously you make it oil-free. 
• That's really all, and itś finger-licking good. 

For the Potato salad, I used the leaves, with the stems I made a sauce, with onions, garlic pimentos, some turmeric, and a cup of vegetable bouillon and a bit of arrowroot to thicken it. Et voilà, that made a great sauce over a plate of long beans over rice.

You can also add the leaves to salad, and the next project will be to cook a split pea soup with the remainder of the purslane.