It all starts with diet

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Center for Family and Community Health
School of Public Health
University of California, Berkeley
http://cfch.berkeley.edu
A CDC Center for Chronic Disease Prevention
and Health Promotion Research
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It all starts with diet

Federal 'guidelines' are too fatty

T. Colin Campbell,Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr., San Francisco Chronicle,
March 17, 2009

As scientific researchers who have spent our careers establishing the
link between diet and disease, we find President Obama's directive on
"restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making" very
welcome news.

We hope this will lead to health care policy that is informed by
America's most ignored scientific fact on health: That a whole-foods
plant-based diet can prevent and in many cases reverse heart disease,
diabetes, cancer and other chronic diseases.

Today's health care debate has very little to do with what makes us
sick. It is centered almost entirely on who gets covered and who
pays. Extending coverage to more people is a good thing. But
Americans who already are covered are suffering rising rates of
chronic disease. Lack of coverage is not causing their disease, and
expanding coverage won't cure these diseases in others. We have to do
more than increase coverage.

The No. 1 cause and cure of America's health care crisis is right
under your nose - it's what you put in your mouth.

Unfortunately, the scientific findings on diet and disease are
marginalized by the political power of huge, mutually reinforcing
commercial interests - meat, dairy, sugar, drugs and surgery.

These industries are desperate to sell a solution that obscures their
part in the problem. If they can convince people that the cause of
our health crisis has nothing to do with eating unhealthy food, and
everything to do with increasing access to drugs and surgery,
Americans will spend trillions more on health care without improving
their health. That's what happens when you leave science out of public policy.

If President Obama wants Americans to get the full benefit of
scientific research on health, then he should add three measures to
his health reforms.

One: Change the way government develops its dietary guidelines. Right
now, the U.S. government's most widely publicized dietary
recommendations are deadly. The Food and Nutrition Board's 2002
report says that to reduce degenerative diseases like heart disease
and cancer, we can consume up to 35 percent of our calories as fat,
up to 35 percent of our calories as protein and up to 25 percent of
calories as added sugars.

Here is a daily diet that meets those nutrition guidelines:
Breakfast: 1 cup Fruit Loops; 1 cup skim milk; 1 package M&M milk
chocolate candies; fiber and vitamin supplements. Lunch: Grilled
cheddar cheeseburger. Dinner: 3 slices pepperoni pizza, with a
16-ounce soda and 1 serving Archway sugar cookies.

This helps explain why 12-year-old schoolchildren develop thickening
of their carotid arteries to the brain, and 80 percent of 20-year-old
soldiers, dying in combat, are found to have coronary artery heart disease.

How could the government distribute this information and call it
science? Members of the committee had financial ties to industries
that benefit from higher protein and sugar allowances, and the panel
was partly funded by corporate money.

The Obama administration should establish a rule: No scientist with
financial ties to the food and drug industries should chair - or
choose the members of - panels that set dietary guidelines.

Two: President Obama should establish a new institute at the National
Institutes of Health dedicated exclusively to exploring the link
between diet, health and disease. Today, there are 27 institutes and
centers at the National Institutes of Health, but none devoted to
nutrition, despite the great public interest in the subject. For the
sake of the people who pay the bills, it's time for NIH to dedicate
an institute to studying the effect of nutrition on health.

Three: Congress should require that medical schools - as a condition
of receiving federal grants - offer residency programs on dietary
approaches to preventing and treating disease. Americans don't
understand the disease-fighting power of a good diet because their
doctors don't. Medical schools teach a drug-centered curriculum. They
do not learn about the many population-based studies that show the
connection between diet and disease. They do not review the
biochemical studies on disease formation that support the
population-based studies. And they do not study the results found in
treating disease with diet in clinical settings. Drugs and surgery
can offer miraculous benefits in certain cases. But it's
unconscionable for doctors not to know about - or tell their patients
about - the preventive and healing power of food.

These three proposals won't cost much, and they will pay back our
investment a million-fold by making people healthier and reducing
health care costs. Moreover, they reflect a commitment - expressed by
the White House last week - to finally let the public enjoy the
health benefits of scientific research.

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of nutritional
biochemistry at Cornell University. He is co-author of "The China
Study." Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr., M.D., former president of the
American Association of Endocrine Surgeons, is a preventive medicine
consultant at the Cleveland Clinic. He is the author of "Prevent and
Reverse Heart Disease."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/03/17/ED3K16FAI8.DTL