The Gulf Between Medical Advice and Reality
I wI wrote previously about when to trust — or really, disqualify — health influencers. This is the online universe of personal trainers, fitness gurus, and content creators. Red flags include:
- Recommendations to eat pickles as a fermented food (most pickles are *pickled* in hot vinegar brine).
- Recommendations to consume yogurt as a source of fermented dairy (the probiotics in yogurt don’t make it through the digestive tract).
Likewise, doctors with a substantial presence also make easy-to-spot blunders that are immediately disqualifying.
If there’s one area of my heath I could improve, I would choose my high anxiety, which also causes me sleep issues. When I came across praise for the book Calm Your Mind With Food by Uma Naidoo, MD, I was excited to read about natural, cutting edge solutions from a Harvard-trained psychiatrist. The book was published just last year.
In her chapter about how to navigate a grocery store, Dr. Naidoo includes a section about protein. Eggs, she says, are a good source of vitamin A, B vitamins, choline, and other helpful nutrients. (I would add that B1 has a key role in nervous system function, energy production, and the body’s stress response, making the vitamin critical for controlling anxiety. I’m currently experimenting with supplementing 400 mg per day.)
For some reason, Dr. Naidoo also wrote that the relationship between the cholesterol in eggs and the effect on blood cholesterol is unclear. (Even the U.S. government has abandoned this position.) As a result, Dr. Naidoo says, “moderate consumption of up to one egg per day is safe.”
During the 2024 Summer Olympics, the organizers tried to force a vegan agenda on athletes in the Olympic Village — no doubt inspired by health care talking points like the ones from Dr. Naidoo. Eggs in particular were in short supply. Athletes revolted, Great Britain flew in their own chefs, and eventually organizers acquiesced to the Olympians’ demands. The competitors, whose life purpose is health and physical performance, knew they needed eggs — and lots of them.
You might think the doctors who parrot these ridiculous talking points would eventually realize how silly they sound. Given my consumption of three cartons of eggs per week, I actually laughed out loud. Still, I can picture Dr. Naidoo reading through her book draft, seeing her words on the page, and thinking: right on, right on.
Next, Dr. Naidoo gave her opinion on intermittent fasting and diabetes. “While there are several safe methods of intermittent fasting,” Naidoo wrote, “restricting calories for long periods can be dangerous, especially for people with conditions like diabetes, so it’s important to get professional guidance.”
Since a powerful remedy for diabetes is in fact calorie restriction, I had to do some research to figure out what Dr. Naidoo was even talking about. I think she means that if you continue to take insulin without consuming the sugar to offset it, you will go hypoglycemic. However, the whole concept of metabolic health is that with the right light environment and a proper diet, you can scrap your medications. There is even an emerging field in medicine that looks at how to de-prescribe diabetes medications for individuals who adopt an ancestral diet: “Ketogenic diets are so powerful for improving glycemic control that insulin injections sometimes need to be reduced or discontinued on the very first day a patient adopts the diet.”
On the one hand, Dr. Naidoo’s assertions highlight the difference between credentialed vs educated. I think often about what kind of persuasion could be successful in breaking the spell of Big Medicine. On the other hand, maybe we just leave doctors to their own devices as they continue to self-destruct. Rightfully so, trust in doctors and hospitals sits at an all-time low.