Celebrating The First International Day of Yoga

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