FO O D AS MEDICI N E
Doctors can only tackle chronic disease with the right tools. Teach them nutrition Jerome Burne Editor, HealthInsightUK
The current mismatch between what doctors know and what patients need must change. The College of Medicine’s recent conference presented the case that doctors should have a stronger grasp of nutrition. GPs dealing with chronic disease need the options that the latest research into food as medicine can offer. Many controversial about turns are in the offing: do animal fats have important benefits; are low carbohydrate diets the way forward; will probiotics be the new key to regulating weight gain, how well do we handle fats?
© Journal of holistic healthcare
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I am an award-winning journalist specialising in medicine and health for the last 10 years. My most recent book is 10 Secrets of Healthy Ageing, written with nutritionist Patrick Holford. I blog at Body of Evidence – jeromeburne.com and was a finalist for the 2015 Blogger of the Year award from the Medical Journalists’ Association.
Here’s a really bad idea. Send a dozen nutritionists to work alongside regular doctors in a Medecins Sans Frontières team providing emergency treatment to the wounded in a war zone. It’s a bad idea because they would lack any relevant skills. They might help speed up recovery but in the operating theatre they’d be worse than useless as the wounded come in. It’s obviously a ludicrous idea but how is it different to GPs trying to deal with a daily stream of people with chronic disease? With (usually) the most cursory knowledge of nutrition and ways to change lifestyle, aren’t they doing something very similar? Everyone agrees we have an increasingly unhealthy population with rates of obesity, diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s soaring. And many estimates put the proportion of cases that could be avoided by eating well and following a healthier lifestyle at around 50%. Yet 40,000 skilled and expensively trained GPs sit on the front line to deal with patients needing help with nutrition and lifestyle with no real knowledge of how best to do it. The only difference between them and the theoretical nutritionists in an operating theatre is that their patients
Volume 13 Issue 2 Summer/Autumn 2016
die over years rather than hours. The GPs’ toolbox needs a major upgrade. Why this mismatch between medical skills and what patients need has to change was the focus of the Food: The Forgotten Medicine conference, organised by the College of Medicine. The speakers were nearly all doctors or clinicians who had already incorporated nutrition into their practice. They talked with passion and authority on how this approach can offer GPs a far more sophisticated set of options to deal with the myriad problems that come with chronic disease. By the end it was all too clear that the existing toolbox GPs and other medics rely on to deal with chronic metabolic diseases – eat a healthy balanced diet and try to get a bit of exercise – is desperately in need of a massive upgrade. The grand old man of nutritional medicine, the American doctor Andrew Weil, took us on a whistlestop tour of some of the possibilities. ‘A patient is more than just a physical body’, he began, immediately introducing a much broader perspective than the one usually available in a time-poor GP’s surgery, 3
