Celebrating The First International Day of Yoga
Yoga_Life_Winter_2015_WEB
Yoga_Life_Winter_2015_WEB
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DIET AND NUTRITION<br />
<strong>The</strong> Failure<br />
<strong>of</strong> Preventive<br />
Medicine<br />
By Dr. Gerhard Brand, MD,<br />
Munich, Germany<br />
“We seem to be losing the fight against obesity, because pills don’t<br />
make anyone any healthier, at best they enable people to live a bit<br />
longer with their disease.”<br />
<strong>The</strong> onset <strong>of</strong> the global obesity epidemic and the global<br />
explosion <strong>of</strong> diabetes is based on the most funda -<br />
mental misconception in the history <strong>of</strong> mankind about<br />
“proper nutrition”. A hundred years ago in the United<br />
States <strong>of</strong> America, the quintessential country <strong>of</strong> affluence and<br />
immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries, sugar consumption<br />
was 3 kg (6.6 lbs.) per capita per year and obesity was virtually<br />
nonexistent. Three quarters <strong>of</strong> a century later the per capita<br />
sugar consum ption has increased to 75 kg (165 lbs.) per year<br />
and obesity affects more than a third <strong>of</strong> the population.<br />
On behalf <strong>of</strong> the government,which has the people’s<br />
mandate to promote good health for all, researchers and<br />
nutritionists developed a new nutritional concept which they<br />
hastily announced to an astonished world whose residents<br />
were already burdened by their increased body weight. <strong>The</strong><br />
concept was that fat makes you fat and eating easily digestible<br />
carbohydrates five times a day makes you slim and healthy. Up<br />
until this point food corporations had already been very successful<br />
with their slogan: “Don’t just sit around – eat something“,<br />
paving the way for this new dogma to herald the worldwide<br />
success <strong>of</strong> the fast food culture and finger food consumption.<br />
“<strong>The</strong> treatment <strong>of</strong> diet-related diseases<br />
in Germany now takes up one third <strong>of</strong><br />
all health sector costs”<br />
<strong>The</strong> age-old adage: “Chew well and digest well” was quickly<br />
ignored as well as the crucial insights <strong>of</strong> the great nutritionist and<br />
physician Dr. Franz Xaver Mayr that the fast in fast food leads to<br />
too much and too much leads to too <strong>of</strong>ten, because we start to<br />
feel hungry again too soon. An unhealthy diet composed <strong>of</strong> the<br />
wrong foods and their hazardous effects on acid base balance,<br />
together with the habit <strong>of</strong> eating at the wrong time, contributed<br />
to this imbalance.<br />
This resulted in an unprecedented nutritional disaster in countries<br />
with a western diet and the development <strong>of</strong> hitherto largely un -<br />
known morbid obesity. <strong>The</strong> European study “Aspire” which ran<br />
from 1995 to 2007 shows that both medical pr<strong>of</strong>ess ionals and<br />
patients increasingly rely on pills and hospital treat ments to deal<br />
with this global health issue without addressing a change in lifestyle<br />
and eating habits. Adherence to drug prescription guidelines increases,<br />
for example cholesterol-lowering drugs with dubious and some -<br />
times considerable side effects are prescribed twice as <strong>of</strong>ten today<br />
as they were 12 years ago. <strong>The</strong> same goes for anticoagulants, betablockers<br />
and other blood pressure lowering agents. Nevertheless,<br />
there is no improvement in hypertension which still affects 60%<br />
<strong>of</strong> the population. According to a big German public health insurance<br />
company (Barmer Ersatzkasse) the treatment <strong>of</strong> diet-related diseases<br />
in Germany now takes up one third <strong>of</strong> all health sector costs, about<br />
80 billion euros per year in a total budget <strong>of</strong> 240 billion euros.<br />
As we have seen, prescriptions alone don’t solve the problem.<br />
We seem to be losing the fight against obesity, because pills<br />
don’t make anyone any healthier, at best they enable people to<br />
live a bit longer with their disease. It would be too easy to once<br />
again blame the doctors and especially the chronically ill and<br />
thus incurably ill patients for this dilemma, because we only cure<br />
the symptoms and not the cause. Thus we find ourselves in the<br />
same seemingly hopeless situation as Goethe’s sorcerer’s<br />
apprentice: “From the spirits that I called – Sir, deliver me!”<br />
Our situation, however, may not be that hopeless.<br />
22 YOGALife |Autumn/Winter 2015