by Dr Mike Fitzpatrick The history of medicine reveals that doctors resort to recommending diets when they have no effective treatments - a state of affairs that prevailed from antiquity until the 1930s. Dietary protocols for numerous conditions, from insulin-dependent diabetes to pernicious anaemia, have disappeared with the development of new drugs or other forms of therapy.
The food issue: why food is at the heart of social care
Today, in relation to common conditions such as coronary heart disease
and cancer, where the scope for both preventive and therapeutic
interventions is limited, doctors find themselves thrown back on
dietary measures. Just as doctors have done through the ages, we issue
detailed dietary instructions with a level of authority and conviction
that goes far beyond the scientific rationale for them - and any
evidence of their efficacy.
Dietary dogma
Things were bad enough when such dietary dogma was largely confined to the surgery. But now it has been elevated to become a central feature of government public health propaganda, in programmes such as the "five-a-day" fruit and vegetable promotion.
From any objective assessment of health trends in the industrialised world over the past half century, it is readily apparent that diet plays a marginal role in both the causation and the prevention of disease. There is a consensus that since the Second World War we have all been eating too much saturated fat, too much refined carbohydrates, too much salt, indeed too much of everything. Yet life expectancy has increased by about 10 years over this period - and it continues to increase.
Nightmare scenarios
While prophets of doom promote nightmare scenarios resulting from epidemics of obesity and diabetes, death rates from coronary heart disease continue to decline - and rival scaremongers raise the spectre of a demographic timebomb of the elderly.
Mike Fitzpatrick is a GP in Hackney, north east London
Dietary dogma
Things were bad enough when such dietary dogma was largely confined to the surgery. But now it has been elevated to become a central feature of government public health propaganda, in programmes such as the "five-a-day" fruit and vegetable promotion.
From any objective assessment of health trends in the industrialised world over the past half century, it is readily apparent that diet plays a marginal role in both the causation and the prevention of disease. There is a consensus that since the Second World War we have all been eating too much saturated fat, too much refined carbohydrates, too much salt, indeed too much of everything. Yet life expectancy has increased by about 10 years over this period - and it continues to increase.
Nightmare scenarios
While prophets of doom promote nightmare scenarios resulting from epidemics of obesity and diabetes, death rates from coronary heart disease continue to decline - and rival scaremongers raise the spectre of a demographic timebomb of the elderly.
Mike Fitzpatrick is a GP in Hackney, north east London
