Food Over Medicine (9 page)

GM:
And that’s the next malady I was going to ask you about: celiac disease.

PP:
Celiac disease has a genetic predisposition. I don’t think somebody eats her way into celiac disease. There is some evidence that a virus or precipitating events can contribute to it. You have to do a couple of things to recover from celiac disease. One is to stop consuming any gluten; you eliminate any exposure to gluten at all, including tiny amounts of gluten as an ingredient in soy sauce and things of that nature. You have to be very diligent about it. You also take probiotics to restore the beneficial bacteria that’s been destroyed. Many people have been undiagnosed for years, so they present with considerable destruction to the GI tract. If they spend a long time taking a high-grade probiotic product, they can restore their health if they eat the right diet and abstain from all gluten products.

GM:
Do you advocate blood tests to determine if someone has celiac disease?

PP:
The blood test is not always definitive. The most definitive test is to take a biopsy and look at the tissue; if all the little villi are destroyed, then the person is a celiac patient. But I don’t think we have to go that far. If someone has a family history of celiac disease and has gotten better since giving up gluten, that’s enough evidence in many cases. Somebody asked me during a class why doctors subject these patients to a lot of these tests. I said, “Well, some people show up with a very big disadvantage when they arrive in a doctor’s office or a hospital; it’s called “good insurance.” One of the worst things you can have if you’re at a facility where they like to do testing is good insurance. If they know it’s going to be paid for, they’ll subject you to as much of it as can possibly be arranged.

GM:
We haven’t talked about one of the leading causes of death in America, which is iatrogenic death, or death caused by medical treatment.

PP:
The numbers are astounding.

GM:
And when I research it, I see wildly varying estimates. Wikipedia comes up with a figure of 225,000 deaths per year; critics of the American medical system will estimate more like 800,000 or 900,000 deaths per year.

PP:
Dr. T. Colin Campbell and Dr. McDougall are among those critics.

GM:
It’s obviously hard to know exactly what the correct figure is because so many people, especially older people, whose death may be brought on by a medication, never have that fact determined in court, and their death certificates don’t reflect that cause.

PP:
Well, I think the problem’s getting worse. I can just tell you from my own experience, people who join The Wellness Forum are often as sick from medical care as they are from whatever was ailing them when they first started receiving medical care. Or they were perfectly healthy people who were treated for mythical diseases like osteoporosis or carcinoma in situ and become sick patients as the result of being treated for diseases they never had. In terms of what the actual numbers are, the most reliable numbers I’ve seen come from sources like Shannon Brownlee’s book,
Overtreated,
³⁷
a well-referenced book on the topic. Even the
Journal of the American Medical Association
has published articles showing that between 230,000 and 284,000 deaths per year result from medical treatment. This does not include adverse effects from medication that result in sickness or disability, which are estimated to result in 116 million extra physician visits, 77 million extra prescriptions, 17 million emergency department visits, 8 million hospitalizations, 3 million long-term admissions, 199,000 additional deaths, and $77 billion in extra costs (equivalent to the total cost of taking care of patients with diabetes).
³⁸
It’s generally accepted that dying from medical treatment is the third- or fourth-leading cause of death in this country; at least a few hundred thousand or potentially more people die every year directly as a result of the treatment that they receive.

Now, I’ll mitigate that frightening statistic somewhat. Some of the people who die from medical treatment were really sick and decrepit when they entered the hospital; while they received treatment that may have been useless and may have sped up their death, they were going to die anyway. That said, there’s still an atrocious amount of death from medical treatment arising from the treatment of conditions that patients don’t really have. From overmedication or unnecessary surgery. From suicides brought on by useless antidepressant and antianxiety drugs. Overall, it’s certainly one of the leading causes of death in the country. That’s why Dr. McDougall says, “Stay away from doctors; they’ll kill you.”

GM:
Pam, having reviewed now a significant list of diseases and ailments, what’s revealed to me is the sweeping and I’d say revolutionary nature of your work. Under standard medical care, a very sick patient presenting with heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, acid reflux, and irritable bowel syndrome would spend his days shuttling between his cardiologist, gastroenterologist, and otolaryngologist, getting different medications or interventions for each condition. Then he’d have to hope that his medications don’t interact in a dangerous way. He’d find himself on a slippery slope to doom. And there are millions of Americans who live that way, if you could call it living. Now, you would argue that all these conditions are essentially expressions of the same disease that is the Western diet, and that the remedy for all the conditions is essentially the same: a low-fat, plant-based diet. With this diet, it’s quite possible no medications would be needed at all, for almost any condition.

PP:
That’s exactly right.

GM:
Unfortunately, there are only a few places in America that take this very simple and comprehensive approach to disease, most notably Dr. McDougall’s practice in Santa Rosa, California, and your own Wellness Forum based in Columbus, Ohio.

PP:
That’s why we need to get the word out.

GM:
Since food is actually the leading cause of disease, let’s get very specific now about different types of food. What’s wrong, for example, with fish?

PP:
There’s a misperception that fish is a healthier form of animal food when, in fact, it’s actually higher in fat than many animal foods. The misperception causes people to replace red meat with fish and feel that they have improved their health when they really haven’t. If they eat too much fish, they may have actually made things worse because of the high fat content.

GM:
But we’ve heard so often that it’s healthy fat; it’s full of omega fatty acids.

PP:
I think that there isn’t any such thing as healthy fat beyond a certain percentage in the diet. The idea is to eat a very low-fat diet: 15 percent at the upper end and 9 to 11 percent at the lower end for people who have coronary artery disease, obesity, and certain other conditions. So when more than 50 percent of the calories in salmon are from fat, you can’t eat a whole lot of that and keep yourself within that range.

GM:
Is the fat from fish better than the fat from beef?

PP:
If you’re crossing that 15 percent line, I don’t think it makes any difference at all. And while many claim that fish is somehow protective, there have been some interesting studies on Japanese men that show that the more fish they eat, the higher the incidence of prostate cancer.
³⁹
At a certain point, you cross that threshold in terms of the allowable amounts of animal protein and fat; fish becomes just another flesh food, and bad things start to happen. There are also the dangers presented by mercury and other toxins in fish. At the end of the day, the source of that animal fat and protein doesn’t make much difference; it doesn’t matter if you’re getting it from eggs, fish, chicken, turkey, pork—it’s really all the same thing.

GM:
We’ve all heard studies reported in the news that fish allegedly protects the heart. My theory is that when they do these studies and they compare fish eaters to beef eaters, it’s possible that salmon is marginally less bad for the heart than beef. People have better outcomes in terms of sudden cardiac death with fish than beef, but they’ve never done a study comparing fish eaters to vegans.

PP:
Right. But there’s another complication, too. There are some studies that show that eating fish and or taking fish oil capsules will raise HDL, or “good cholesterol,” levels, which is one reason it’s touted as being protective. But that doesn’t make any difference. In other words, we don’t really have any evidence showing that higher HDL levels are the key to better cardiovascular health. And, in fact, two drugs never made it to market, very promising drugs, not by my definition, but by the definition of drug companies and the traditional cardiology profession. These two drugs, dalcetrapib, which was developed by Roche, and torcetrapib, which was developed by Pfizer, were designed to elevate HDL cholesterol; both did that quite well. The one little problem was that the people with the higher HDL levels were dying off faster than the people with lower HDL levels, so those drugs never came to market. The concern with the ratio of HDL to LDL is completely misplaced.
⁴⁰

GM:
So have doctors across America misunderstood this, or have they all been misled? How did this happen?

PP:
It’s a fundamental misunderstanding about the role of HDL, which is to help to clear the bad cholesterol from the bloodstream. As your LDL levels ratchet down, which they do on a low-fat, plant-based diet, the need for HDL will also ratchet down. If you look at populations like the Tarahumara of northwestern Mexico, who typically have very, very low cholesterol levels, they also have low HDL levels. I love Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn’s line; he says “the HDL levels of the Tarahumara Indians would make the average cardiologist in the United States apoplectic.” Why? Because they would be certain that it would be deadly. We’re talking about HDL levels in the range of fourteen to twenty-four milligrams per deciliters, which is very, very low.
⁴¹
The Tarahumara eat a plant-based diet centered around corn and have a low incidence of heart disease.

GM:
We’ve talked about fish. What do you think about chicken?

PP:
I sometimes refer to the strategy of replacing one bad food with another as rearranging the deck chairs on the
Titanic
. Chicken is just another animal food, and a particularly filthy one at that. It’s another food that has a face and a mother, which is how we define animal food around here. The same detrimental effect that we would expect to experience by consuming too much beef in our diets, we’ll see with too much chicken in the diet. We’ve got to stop imagining that there’s some animal out there that’s really healthy to consume. We’ve got to understand that if animal foods are consumed more than two to three times per week, and even that may be too much for some people, we’re going to have problems; it really doesn’t much matter what animal we pick. Chicken, even white meat chicken, is high in fat. Again, it’s extraordinarily difficult if this is going to be part of the daily fare to keep fat consumption in line.

And it’s not just the excessive fat that’s a problem. There’s no fiber. There are no phytochemicals and antioxidants. When people develop cancer, what really is going on, on a certain level, is that cancer promoters have outnumbered the anticancer agents in the diet. We have to consider the anticancer properties of food, the phytochemicals like indole-3-carbinol that we see in, for example, cruciferous vegetables. Well, chicken doesn’t contain those, or any other antioxidants. It offers absolutely no protection, and that’s why I say if it rises above the level of condiment in the diet, it’s deadly. There are no “better” animal foods. When we start talking about grass-fed beef and organic beef and organic chicken and those sorts of things, we’re still talking about a product that has no fiber, no phytochemicals, no antioxidants, and is high in fat. Yes, we avoid some of the hormones, steroids, and antibiotics that are given to conventionally raised animals, but the amino acid chains that make up those animal foods are exactly the same, and they’re just as cancer promoting at a certain concentration in the diet. All the evidence points in the same direction: you should not consume much of this stuff, or any of it at all. My preference is none at all.

GM:
I like to look at it this way: carbohydrate is the most efficient fuel for the human body.

PP:
Right. And when the body is forced to use fat or protein for fuel, it’ll do it, but it’s a very cumbersome process; it’s very stressful and quite toxic to the body to do that.

GM:
So we know that carbohydrate is the natural fuel for the human body and we know that fiber is necessary and health promoting to the human body. Yet we look at these flesh foods and they have no fiber and no carbohydrates. It strikes me as a clue that they’re not human foods.

PP:
Right. These are not the foods we were designed to live on. Our intestinal tracts are long. We need a lot of fiber to push food through the system, and the primary enzyme that’s secreted in your saliva is amylase, which is an enzyme that breaks down starch. We could anatomically take a little tour through the digestive system, starting with what happens when food enters the mouth, and make a strong case for our design being geared toward consuming plant food.