Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, were some of history’s greatest scientists and the precursors of amazing progress. With a relatively small amount of money, I can board a very comfortable, high tech Airbus A380 in London and I am in Bangkok in under 12 hours. Phone SIM cards are as tiny as 6mm, we have Big Data technology and Artificial Intelligence.
We accomplished amazing things as a collective society and we should be really proud of it. Yet, despite the $300bn spent globally on biomedical research every year, the number of people with diabetes has risen from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million today. More than one third of American adults are obese.
How is this possible? Tiny cameras can travel into your arteries, rotate and take high-resolution pictures. And then we give sugary soda drinks to children. Stem Cell research on one side, margarine and low fat processed food for heart health on the other. We are so smart and advanced on one front, and fall very short on the basics. The total number of Americans dying from cardiovascular disease rose in recent years, following decades of decline. Heart disease is still the number one cause of early death and cancer is on the rise.
The idea of science, like the idea of most religions, utopian ideologies and legal systems is beautiful. So perfect! Then we put the theory into practice. And we are human beings, so by nature, self-servingly creative, biased, political, imperfect with every perfect science. This way we turn the supposedly exact scientific method into an approximation which serves us well, generally, yet falls short of expectations too many times.
What is wrong with science then? Nothing wrong in theory. It’s the best, most advanced methodology we know to understand and solve our worldly problems. What is really wrong and needs reforming is what the Economist magazine very well explains here. “Medical researchers hoard results for months or years until research is published in an academic journal (…) the data underpinning a study are often not made public…” This is where medical science becomes a political science. Where we move from an ideal theory to an opaque reality.
Pharmaceutical companies, which directly or indirectly control most of medical R&D, spend billions on “me-too” drugs. I suppose there isn’t a ton of media describing the issue.
By far the largest amount of medical budget is used on the very lucrative management of long-term chronic conditions and end-of-life care. Of the 2016 USD 32bn held by the National Institutes of Health’s, the largest biomedical research agency in the world, only 1.6bn was spent on nutrition. Prevention is very low on medical spending and education.
Much nutritional science is directly or indirectly sponsored by the big corporations behind your junk food. This way they can claim your kids’ processed, high GI chocolate cereals “may reduce the risk of heart disease”. These are the first 3 of 15 ingredients in one of the most popular brands: whole grain corn, sugar, corn syrup.
The subject of nutrition is highly polarised and controversial, and confusion suits them well. Vegetarian or high protein carnivore you might be, serious nutritionists overwhelmingly agree processed food should be reduced to a minimum, or ideally, completely eliminated. Whole, natural food is the only way to go. That’s definitely not good for multinational food companies which have an interest in… well, sell you their processed food and the more addictive it is, the more you will keep buying it.
This has happened before. The tobacco industry funded and used scientific studies to undermine evidence linking secondhand smoke to cardiovascular disease. You know what? There is plenty of proof Big Food Inc is doing something very similar. The evidence is overwhelming and you don’t need to be a Phd scientist to understand that. Soda drink manufacturers sponsoring the Olympics and other major sports events have millions of marketing money to associate themselves with a healthy lifestyle and make their brands shine. The pharma industry, overwhelmingly, leads the ranking in lobbying money spent to influence Washington politicians.
And that’s why, on this very specific issue at least, we can’t rely on public policy, academia, self-regulating industry bodies and the mighty, obviously imperfect, worldly representation of science. We can’t wait 10 more years before health authorities make it official, proven, certified, that this c*ap is not good for your kids. We have to get smarter now.
Maybe you should stop buying the scientifically endorsed, processed, packaged junk. Let’s take medical science for what it is: a very developed human approximation of a great methodology for knowledge and progress. A system that served us very well and still does particularly with regards to the treatment of acute illness. An industry that needs to be reformed and made much more transparent and accountable too.
Let’s open our minds and give alternative therapies a chance. There is a wealth of knowledge in ancient systems like Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda or Naturopathy. They too have their limitations but traditional wisdom can serve us well to complement Western medical science, at least with regards to prevention and management of early-stage disease. We can’t hold on eating terrible processed food and popping pills to switch off symptoms until serious researchers, with serious research capital and more productive agendas, are allowed to revisit these thousands of years old systems with modern methods.
I don’t like to be critical of this beautiful world of ours. I am very proud of what we, as a society, accomplished over the centuries, I read history and I am very aware of that. I also know many women and men working at pharmaceutical and packaged food companies are good, decent people, like you and I.
When I see the effect of food diseducation, confusion, and even deception, I know we can do much better, and that is the constructive message of this blog post. Keep an open mind. The future, the way I see it, is overwhelmingly Functional and Integrative Medicine where science remains central, but conventional medicine is combined and enhanced by complementary therapies.