A question that comes up frequently in my LCHF posts is this one:
"Why are the NHS not telling us the facts about diet? Why are they still pushing the low-fat, high-carbohydrate, calorie-controlled diet when it simply don't work?"
The UK now has one of the highest COVID-19 death rates on the planet, even discounting the elderly. Possibly the highest. It's well-established that people with Metabolic Syndrome are at higher risk of COVID-19 complications, and the UK has an awful lot of people with Metabolic Syndrome. Is it merely coincidence, I wonder, that the UK has been fanatically aggressive in pushing low-fat products? It is now almost impossible to find unadulterated/unmodified full-fat foods in the supermarkets. There are few other countries that have gone to such lengths to prevent its population consuming fat.
And at best, it's done us no good. Us Brits are still fat, and still chronically unhealthy. It may actually be killing us.
So here is my proposal, for the consideration of any NHS managers who may be reading.
Dear Managers,
Let's start by making one thing clear. We love the doctors and nurses who work for the NHS. It is they who make the NHS what it is. Britain pretty much invented socialized medicine, and although it's gone down the pan lately, we're still inordinately proud of what the NHS represents. And we really do love those guys who are always there, even when their equipment is substandard and their working conditions are less-than-world-class, to patch us up and send us home feeling better.
But they do waste an awful lot of their time, don't they? Endless queues of people who are overweight, prediabetic, unfit and/or with cardiovascular problems, and for whom medical science has only expensive band-aids, not solutions. Gastric bands. Stents. Statins. Orlistat. Metformin. And then there are the expensive and stressful "treatments" that follow in later years. Heart transplants. Kidney transplants. Hip replacements. Amputations. By the NHS's own estimates, about 25% of the operating budget is wasted on these things. I suspect it's considerably more.
It's common knowledge why these people are ill - and, therefore, why doctors face the Sisyphean task of getting them out of their waiting rooms (or operating rooms), clutching a prescription but with no long-term prospects of getting better. They're eating Bad Food, and they're eating Bad Food because for fifty years, they've been told to eat Bad Food by Experts. The outcome is hardly surprising.
And why are they being given bad advice? It's a bit of a mystery how this happened, but it appears the NHS has handed over responsibility for dietary advice to a shady organisation of amateurs. I won't name names. We all know who they are. The point is, it isn't doctors and scientists giving out the advice, but people whose pronouncements on healthy eating are suspiciously akin to religious beliefs. These beliefs are impervious to rational debate or facts. No amount of scientific falsification, it seems, can make them change their minds about the healthfulness of Bad Food.
Now, it would be politically ticklish to do something about this, wouldn't it? You've removed some of the scientifically-dubious claims from the NHS website - for example, that dietary fat makes you fat, or that it causes heart disease. Well done. But how on earth do you tell the public, that, for decades, they've been fed a load of hogwash by people who should never have been allowed to give advice in the first place? The ambulance-chasing lawyers would have a field day. The NHS would be laid low - possibly demolished - by compensation payouts. Nobody wants to see that happen: what would be the point? What good would be achieved?
But neither can the NHS continue down its current path. The longer it goes on, the higher the chances those lawyers are going to smell blood (and money). Somehow that oil tanker has to turn around. But how?
I think it may actually be simpler than it appears.
Just stop it already. Get out of the diet business, because it was never really a business you should have been associated with in the first place. Stand aside, and nobody else gets hurt. Take down the website pages. Delete all references to the Eatwell Guide. Pretend it never happened. Or pretend you've been hacked. It doesn't really matter: just delete the lot of it, and send the Nutritionism priesthood home on furlough.
You can replace the whole lot with one link to Health Unlocked, and when people come here feeling fat and desperate, we can tell them how damn easy it actually is. Doctors can be left alone, free from interference from unqualified fanatics ... hopefully to go back to their textbooks and figure out what healthy eating should actually look like. And Britain can get off it's well-padded knees, and stand up healthy, slim, and inordinately proud of the NHS.
Anyone else intentionally skip breakfast?
