Life-changing ideas and insights from some of the world's greatest thinkers.
Gandhi said, ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.’
Two-thirds of the US populace continue to believe and perpetuate the myth that ‘fat makes you fat.’ While it’s true that dietary fat could become fat, it does so only in response to insulin. And so weight isn’t driven by dietary fat, which doesn’t raise insulin, but rather by dietary refined carbohydrate and sugar, which do.
Chronic disease is mitochondrial dysfunction, and mitochondrial dysfunction is chronic disease. They are one in the same.
People think supplements are the antidote for bad food. They’re not. Rather, Real Food is the treatment, while bad food is the poison. In particular, we’ve learned that sugar, the main component of processed food, is the primary driver of four chronic diseases. It’s also a likely candidate for another five. These nine diseases together total about 75 percent of the healthcare burden in the US, and 60 percent globally. Processed food is behind them all, sugar makes them worse, and there’s no drug that prevents or reverses any of them.
If there’s a single theme that pervades this book, it’s that the problem isn’t what’s in the food, but rather what’s been done to the food.
It’s clear that sugar and processed foods drive obesity, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and fatty liver disease, and there’s emerging data that processed food is responsible for cancer and dementia as well. It’s also clear that low-carbohydrate diets haven’t worsened this trend, and in some cases have reversed these diseases. Yet the medical establishment refuses to be reeducated, and instead prosecutes the educators.
Next time you go to the doctor, time your visit. Talking about lifestyle changes takes time that we don’t have—because that’s how we’ve been trained and how we get paid.
The good news is that for chronic disease, genetics only explains about 15 percent of the variance in risk. The other 85 percent is environmental, which means there’s plenty you can do to mitigate your risk for diabetes, cancer, heart disease, dementia, and virtually every other chronic disease.
The holy grail of Modern Medicine is you can’t fix healthcare until you fix health; and you can’t fix health until you fix the food. Everyone is talking about healthcare, few people are talking about health, and nobody is talking about the food.
If you think that seeing a therapist is shameful, consider how you might handle a physical injury. If you’re hurt and want to overcome your injury, then you’ll see a doctor, get the surgery, and do the physical therapy to return to form. The same holds true for psychological injury. If you want to get better, then you’ll see a therapist and do the work, including being honest with yourself.