In a prior post I asked why there is no search for the origins of the widely-acknowledged obesity epidemic that harms so many people. I suggested that the data shows that there is an obvious cause: the government nutrition recommendations that pervade our society and prominently stated on packaged food. The overweight/obesity numbers started their steady growth shortly after these were promulgated and people followed the recommendations.
Ignoring overwhelming evidence, the authorities continue the health-destroying drumbeat of bad eating advice. Now, the medical people who are charged with dishing out this destructive nonsense are being criticized for making the people who follow their advice feel bad. When will it end??
Smoking
When I was growing up, I saw advertisements and commercials for smoking.
The Marlboro Man was particularly memorable. The ad campaign generated billions of dollars of sales.
The tobacco industry was always concerned about their image; throat irritation from smoking was a well-known side effect, not to mention the growing number of deaths by lung cancer. So ads were created and widely shown claiming the support of the medical profession for smoking, for example:
We know today that smoking causes lung cancer. It wasn't until 1964 that the Surgeon General declared it the cause, and many years passed before other measures were taken. For example, United Airlines was the first to create a non-smoking section of the plane, in 1971. It took until 1990 for smoking to be banned on domestic flights in the US, and later for international flights.
Obesity
So where do we stand with obesity compared to smoking? I would estimate we're at about 1960. The government is hard at work revising the nutritional guidelines most recently updated in 2017, and the drafts that have come out strongly resemble the equivalent for nutrition of what for smoking would be: "smoking unfiltered cigarettes is just fine, but don't smoke too many a day, and make sure you practice breathing exercises regularly to keep your throat and lungs healthy."
As a reminder, the science is solidly behind consuming whole-fat dairy, eggs and meat, while minimizing sugar and carbs. Here is an example of the current version of nutritional insanity:
Sugar-loaded Frosted Mini Wheats and Lucky Charms are better than a whole egg, and ice cream with nuts is better than ground beef. Sure! I wonder what the role of the processed food industry has been in all this...?
Doctors and obesity
Doctors are required to dish out their profession's broken nutritional recommendations to one and all. They are particularly supposed to give good advice to the obese people those recommendations continue to harm. But now there's a new twist -- doctors are being blamed for the on-going troubles of their obese patients!
Obese people are often “weight-shamed” by doctors and nurses — worsening their problem and causing them to wrongfully blame themselves for the condition, according to a new study.
Fat-shaming by medical professionals leads patients to feel humiliated and anxious about appointments — making them more likely to overeat, according to research from the University of London.
Researchers examined 25 previous studies centered on 3,554 health professionals and found evidence of “strong weight bias” — including that doctors and nurses tend to assume overweight people are lazy, according to the report, published in the journal of Obesity Reviews.
“[They] believe their patients are lazy, lack self-control, overindulge, are hostile, dishonest, have poor hygiene and do not follow guidance,” Dr. Anastasia Kalea, who authored the study, told the UK Guardian.
So what should physicians do?
The study concludes that medical professionals should be trained in “non-stigmatizing weight-related communication.”
Tam Fry, the chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said doctors and nurses should take responsibility for the role they play in the UK’s obesity epidemic.
“It is shameful that the condition continues to be regarded by health professionals as being solely a personal problem, little to do with them and it’s disgraceful that they stigmatize patients for being overweight,” said Fry, who was not involved in the study.
“This is the last thing a patient wants to hear from professionals who they trust will help them.”
It's clear that physicians are stuck between a rock and a hard place. If they dish out their profession's nutritional advice, the obese person will stay over-weight. If they dish out the limit-calories-exercise-more stuff, most people just can't keep it up -- as we know from the obesity numbers. And if they bend over backwards to make sure to avoid giving obese people the slightest impression that their own actions might, just maybe, have something to do with their condition, then they've really blown it! Can't talk and what they're told to talk doesn't work.
Conclusion
Remember what happened with smoking -- the decades it took for the cancer-causing truth about it came out, got proven, and the more decades it took for it to be acted on. We're still in the early innings here with nutrition in general, and saturated fat in particular. We can only hope that sanity and science can move more quickly this time.
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