24 minute read
Ask not what the NHS can do
from Juiced! #16
by Juice Master
Health was headline news in 2020 and is likely to continue to be big news for the foreseeable future, but what can we do to reduce pressure on the NHS? In a personal essay, Jason issues a call to arms to take responsibility for our health. Turn the page and read his passionate and moving address to the nation...
first of all, please make sure either before or after you read this, you jump onto my YouTube channel, JuiceTube, and watch my Ask Not What The NHS Can Do For You, But What YOU Can Do For The NHS video. It is much easier, for me anyway, to get my point and passion across on a video than through the written word. Having said that, I hope both come across clearly in this article.
I have been in the health and wellness industry for over 25 years and, in that time, I have seen some truly insane things from those who are deemed to be ‘health professionals’ and ‘scientists’. I have also seen what amounts to blatant lies by governments surrounding this subject. However, I have never witnessed the scale of insanity and lies from the ‘experts’ and governments as those in evidence in 2020. I think it’s fair to say that when ‘scientists’ start advising the public not to play board games at Christmas because of COVID-19, you know that science has well and truly gone on holiday. Just because something is said by a scientist, the government or health professionals doesn’t mean it’s always true. Much of the time ‘scientific facts’ are no more than scientific hypothesis, which often comes back to bite them. Well, actually it never does. That’s the beauty of being a scientist. Years later, if what you hypothesised about turns out to be completely wrong, you have the neat little getout clause of, ‘What we didn’t know back then was… but what we now know is…’ Some of the ‘science’ during 2020 surrounding COVID-19 was laughable at best and dangerous at worst. Sadly, it was the latter for many and I’m unsure their usual get-out clause line will be swallowed in a few years when the true stats and facts come out. I say that, but they have managed to convince a significant amount of people that COVID-19 somehow knows what time it is, how many people you’re with, whether you’re stood up or sitting down, if you’re on a plane and also if you’re eating a ‘substantial meal’ or a bowl of chips. To be honest, this utter ‘pseudo-science’, at best, list goes on and on and I will be doing a separate video entitled, Welcome to COVID Crazy Town soon, but if I can try and find anything good about the COVID crazy year, it was that I can now finally start the conversation around doing what we can to
Welcome to COVID Crazy Town!
genuinely help the NHS.
Time to stop clapping and start getting some fruit and veg in us!
In the height of lockdown in the UK, we saw millions of people coming out of their homes every Thursdaynight to ‘clap for key workers’ – mainly, it’s fair to say, people were clapping those who work in the NHS. There were some people who even filmed themselves clapping the NHS and then posted that on Instagram, presumably to show the world what a nice person they are, that they are indeed clapping for the NHS and doing their part. The Thursday-night clap was well-meant, clearly, but a) we should have been doing this long before 2020 as the NHS is overwhelmed every year and b) it doesn’t actually do anything to help the NHS. The truth is you can throw all the money in the world at the NHS (and boy, oh boy, we do, but more on that later!) but it will – as has been proved – do little to stop it being overwhelmed. The only way to stop the NHS being overwhelmed is if we do what we can to try and make sure we don’t need their services.
Your health in your hands
What you may or may not be aware of is that according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) 85 per cent of lifestyle diseases are caused by what we do, or often don’t do, like eating more vegetables and exercising. This means we do indeed have the power to put our own health into our own hands and help to ease the growing burden on the NHS.
Let me be clear here, before the usual social media keyboard warriors start ranting, I am not saying even if you do all the right things when it comes to health and lifestyle that you won’t ever get an ailment or disease.
Disease, as we know, is often brutal and indiscriminate, but what I am saying is if you regularly exercise, cut out a lot of the junk and get more fruits and vegetables in yourself, there is no question you’ll give yourself a much better fighting chance. You’ll also, again, without question need the services of the
NHS a great deal less – which is the very point of this campaign.
The fact is the NHS is overwhelmed and has been for some time and will be forever unless we start taking some responsibility for our health and doing something about the situation. We also shouldn’t expect everything to be the NHS’s problem. I strongly believe many things that are currently available on the NHS shouldn’t be and if we removed them it would also do a lot to ease the burden on this much-loved and globally respected institution.
We are rightly protective of the NHS, one of the few, totally publicly funded, need-based healthcare services in the world that looks after us from cradle to grave. However, surely we have to accept that this wonderful institution is not serving in the same way that it was intended when it was formed in 1948, when the motivation was to provide good, strong and reliable healthcare for all.
Today, we are using the NHS for a myriad of services which could not even have been imagined by the postwar government which created it. The first patient to be treated on 5 July 1948 was Sylvia Beckingham, aged 13, who was admitted for a liver condition. In the modern age, the NHS is as likely to be treating obesity – the biggest health crisis facing our and subsequent generations – or paying for someone’s breast job. I’ll address obesity operations and diet pills later, but my point, as I will repeat throughout this article, is that we need to stop having everything on the NHS and use it for its original purpose. It simply cannot do this if we aren’t doing what we can to help our own health and we continue to demand everything currently available on the NHS.
Save a penny, take a penny
In 1948, the NHS had a total budget of £280m in the UK, which was a phenomenal figure for that time. The forecast budget for 2020/21 is £129.9bn and yet, even without the current pandemic, following every budget announcement there are cries from officials that it’s not enough to deliver the health services we have come to expect from the NHS.
The NHS is the world’s fifth-largest employer, sitting just behind the US Department of Defense, China's People’s Liberation Army, Walmart and McDonald’s, with 1.5m employees. In 2017, the workforce comprised 419,019 nurses, 58,875 consultants, 31,395 GPs and 248,886 admin and management staff. Now, I don’t claim to understand the complexities of running a public service, but that sounds like an awful lot of clipboards compared with someone I’d be glad to see in a medical emergency.
Leaving this thorny issue aside, in my opinion there’s plenty we can personally do to play our part in reducing the demands placed on the NHS, and the first is surely a matter of common courtesy. In 2018-2019, of the 123,351,435
original purpose
overweight,
extremely low
hospital outpatient appointments made, 7,919,660 were DNA (did not attend). At an average cost of £120-£160 per appointment, this adds up to almost £1bn, equivalent to 257,000 hip replacements.
Doctors’ surgeries don’t fare much better and in January 2019, the NHS reported more than 15m GP appointments are missed each year at an average charge of £30, putting the total cost at £450m. To get that into perspective, the cost of those wasted sessions could pay for 8,424 more full-time nurses, 224,640 cataract operations, 58,320 hip replacements and 216,000 drug-treatment courses for Alzheimer’s.
It’s just plain, common sense
Thankfully, someone with a modicum of common sense took the decision to ban doctors from prescribing overthe-counter remedies such as paracetamol and cough mixture in 2018, a practice which was previously costing the NHS £100m a year. These medicines are freely available and cost pennies to buy, far less than the £9.15 price of a prescription, but surely there is more to be done in reducing unnecessary waste in the NHS? Despite being told not to, in 2019 GPs wrote £46,000 of homeopathic prescriptions for therapies which have been shown to have no real effect and are blacklisted by the NHS.
Prescriptions for nicotine dependence cost the NHS £23,253,612 in 2018. As a former heavy smoker and someone who has studied addiction for over 25 years, I know first-hand how hard it can be to quit if you are going about it in the wrong way, and I also know that giving nicotine (in patches, gums or any other
nicotine delivery device) to people trying to get off the drug isn’t the best way forward.
I also know that even if people think I am wrong and that nicotine patches, gums and the like are the answer and really do help, why on earth is the NHS paying for them? If a smoker can afford to smoke, they can also afford to pay for them.
Again, in case any social media keyboard warriors start saying things like, ‘Jason, these people need help to quit and if the NHS can help, they should’. All very fine and noble, but you don’t smoke while you’re having nicotine- replacement therapy, so therefore you aren’t buying cigarettes at the time and can therefore afford the ‘therapy’.
Personally, as I know from experience, you don’t need these aids – they actually prolong the process and many get addicted to them instead of the cigarettes. It can be easy to stop smoking if you understand the nature of the nicotine trap. Check out my Stop Smoking In 2 Hours plan on page 28.
A big fat problem
Then we have the not-so-delicate issue of treating obesity. In 2019, NHS data revealed that 29 per cent of adults are classified as obese and a further 36 per cent are overweight - that means a whopping 65 per cent of the population could do with losing weight to improve their health.
Even more shockingly, just the year before, the National Audit Office reported that 9.7 per cent of 4-5-year-olds and 20.2 per cent of 10-11-year-olds were obese. How have we got to a stage where children are obese before they even reach their teenage years? The truth is parents are killing their kids with poor nutrition choices, maybe not right now, but certainly in the future – studies show that obesity can reduce your life expectancy by 20 years. The government estimates the cost of obesity to the NHS is £6.1bn and £27bn to wider society, and the NHS reports that 355,000 items were prescribed for the treatment of obesity in primary care in 2019, at a net cost of £10.4m. We know obesity is a major factor in many lifestyle diseases including type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke.
Diabetes alone is estimated to cost onetenth of NHS overall health spending and it is estimated 4.7m people in the UK have diabetes, 90 per cent of these type 2. Obesity is responsible for 80-85 per cent of someone’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes and more than 500 people each week die prematurely from the condition.
Again, worryingly, in February 2020, NHS figures recorded that 2m people in England, including 115,000 younger people, are at risk of developing type 2 diabetes, exacerbating a spiralling situation.
In comparison, 7.4 million people in the UK are living with heart and circulatory diseases. The British Heart Foundation (BHF) reports 27 per cent of all deaths in the UK are related to heart or circulatory disease.
It is also worth considering that studies show you are ten times more likely to die with COVID-19 if you are significantly overweight or obese. One cardiologist I know, Dr Aseem Malhotra, was shouting from the rooftops during the pandemic that most deaths from COVID-19 were ultimately down to diet-related issues. The stats on people actually dying from COVID-19 who weren’t overweight, had underlying health conditions or were under 75 are, in fact, extremely low.
This is not about fatshaming, but we’ve clearly got a growing issue (no pun intended) on our hands, so how do we tackle obesity? The NHS’s approach historically has been cure rather than prevention. In its longterm plan, the NHS recognises that GPs receive only eight hours’ training on nutrition during eight years of medical training, yet there are no plans to remedy this situation and focus on getting people to eat healthily.
Instead, clinically obese patients are offered Orlistat, sold overthe-counter as Alli, a drug that works by preventing your body absorbing a third of the fat you eat, which is instead passed with faeces. Should the drugs fail, you may be considered for bariatric surgery, with a range of surgical procedures including gastric band, gastric bypass, gastric balloon and sleeve gastrectomy, all of which reduce the size of your stomach to help you eat less. In November 2020, the National Institute for Health and Care
Excellence even published an evidencebased recommendation for swallowable balloon capsules for weight loss in adults. Welcome, again, to Crazy Town!
Cut it out!
Bariatric surgery is usually only available on the NHS to treat people with severe obesity with a BMI of 40 or more, or with one of 35-40 if they have a serious health condition such as type 2 diabetes or high blood pressure that could be improved with weight loss. Bariatric surgery costs between £4,000 – £10,000, and in 2018/19 there were 7,011 hospital admissions for it at an estimated cost of £28m-£70m. The NHS picks up the tab for the vast majority of bariatric procedures and, in 2019, 4,509 (74.7 per cent) of ops were undertaken at an estimated cost of £18m-£45m.
While the majority of these procedures are performed on people aged 35-64, in 2015 it was reported that a 13-year-old boy had become the youngestever person to receive gastric-band surgery on the NHS – yes, really, 13 YEARS OLD! This is blatant child abuse and an act of criminality, in my opinion.
There will be some who will say that his parents or guardians are responsible for allowing him to become obese at such a young age. There are many complexities to this which would involve a separate argument so I will not join in the parent-bashing here. What I will say is that it is wrong and indeed criminal to surgically remove part of a 13-year-old’s stomach.
The Government forced everyone to be effectively on house arrest in 2020 and prevented them, by law, from seeing their own friends and family and even from attending the funerals of loved ones. However, they cannot find a way to ensure this young boy and other children whose health are at risk change their diet and start to exercise? Instead, it is felt that the only answer is to remove part of a teenager’s stomach?
If that seems like madness, how about the NHS’s latest ‘remedy’ for addressing the growing obesity bill? In September 2020, following trials, the NHS launched a soup and shake weight loss plan to tackle type 2 diabetes for 5,000 patients in ten areas. The year-long plan provides ‘total dietreplacement products’ for three months, alongside support to increase exercise levels. Subsequently, patients will be offered managed plans to reintroduce solid, nutritious food with ongoing support from clinicians and coaches. The cost of the plan has not been revealed.
On the one hand, I find it crazy that ‘packets of powders’ are being prescribed by the NHS. However, it at least means that medical professionals might start focusing on nutrition rather than Big Pharma’s medicines or surgical procedures to ‘fix’ obesity. There are welcome signs that a new generation of GPs
are open to prescribing lifestyle changes instead of simply scribbling a 'script' for the next impossible wonder-cure.
It is also interesting to observe that on the one hand medical professionals attack my ‘liquid only’ fruit and vegetable juice plans, yet here they are using a similar method themselves. Well, when I say similar method, they are prescribing highly processed ‘powdered shakes’, not a patch on the genuine live juices and blends I have promoted for health over two decades. It is also interesting to observe that they recommend their liquidonly regime for three whole months, and yet have gone bananas at me for many years over my one-week juice plan!
Mind matters
It’s not just the phenomenal cost of treating obesity which concerns me, it’s also how effective these treatments actually are. A study by the University of Michigan between 2006-2013 revealed that one in five – 20 per cent – of lapband surgeries require a second procedure, while gastric-bypass and gastric-sleeve procedures have a 3-9 per cent re-op rate.
The long-term effectiveness of bariatric surgery is also questionable. A 2015 study examining laparoscopic sleeve gastrectomy concluded that, despite a ‘honeymoon period’, after five years, nearly half of patients experienced significant weight gain. In 443 patients, while excess weight loss was at 77 per cent after a year this decreased to 56 per cent five years later, and diabetes remission shrunk from 51 per cent to 20 per cent over the same period. A smaller Brazilian study of 782 patients showed that 63 per cent regained weight within two years of their operation.
Having worked as an addictions specialist for many years, I fully understand that weight loss is about what’s going on in our mind as much as what we put into our mouths. Often there are issues we need to deal with before we can make long-term positive changes and lead a healthy lifestyle.
Research by the University of Pittsburgh in 2019 concluded that gastric-bypass patients are three times more likely than the general population to die of drug- or alcohol-related causes. Separately, a Canadian study of 8,815 adults over three years showed that self-harm emergencies increased by 50 per cent after bariatric surgery, prompting calls for increased suicide screening and mental-health support. And a Swedish study, published in January 2020, concluded that adolescents who undergo bariatric surgery continue to experience mentalhealth problems five years after their surgery, despite achieving weight loss.
It may sound harsh, but why are we spending £18m-£45m a year of the NHS' funds on a procedure which doesn’t exactly work in fixing obesity?
I made this statement at the very start of the UK’s decision to lockdown. I was totally against it and knew that the impact on the economy and people’s wellbeing would be far worse than doing what we can to protect the vulnerable and cracking on. It was never a case of lives vs the economy, it was always lives vs lives. Everyone knows that the more people who are unemployed, the worse the economy is, the more deaths there are.
Here’s just one example of one life that never made the news, and there are thousands more like it. I was being
picked up by the driver we always use when travelling to and from Juicy Oasis, and he told me a story that shook me to my very core. The week before he had dropped me at the airport and said his friend was really struggling during the pandemic on every level, as his business had been decimated due to the decisions the Government had imposed. As we started the trip back to the retreat a week later, I asked him, ‘How is your friend?’ He started to look teary-eyed and then replied, ‘He bought a gun and shot his brains out’.
This is just one story out of millions around the world and the true cost to lives and the economy will not be realised for many years to come, but we are already starting to get some idea.
The ultimate price to pay
Let’s start with looking at the finances, which the Office for Budget Responsibility has estimated will cost the UK an eyewatering £394bn in borrowing between April 2020- April 2021.
Alongside this vast debt, which will take decades to repay, the economy is predicted to shrink by 11.3 per cent, the largest decline in 300 years. Unemployment is also expected to surge to 2.6m (7.5 per cent) by mid-2021. The UK endured two lockdowns in 2020 in a bid to ‘protect the NHS’ from being overwhelmed by COVID-19. The impact of this to many businesses and their employees has been catastrophic. BP, Boeing, Marks & Spencer, Shell, Virgin Atlantic and Whitbread are among the many UK employers axing tens of thousands of jobs, and in October 2020 the Office for National Statistics (ONS) reported that 64 per cent of businesses were at risk of insolvency.
It is also highly debatable that lockdown actually did anything to curb the spread of the virus, despite the rhetoric. The ‘curve’ had already started to come down before the first lockdown came in and we need to remember that correlation doesn’t mean causation. The best analogy I heard in regard to this was the following: A person goes to see their doctor with chickenpox. The doctor says I know how to treat this – I need to cut one of your legs off. The doctor proceeds and cuts the leg off. The patient comes back a few weeks later and the chickenpox has completely gone away. The patient says, “Thank you doctor, it worked!”
While it is incredibly debatable that lockdown, as well as all the other often non-scientific – make it up as you go along – restrictions that went on and continue to, make a difference, it isn’t debatable that these things have potentially devastating effects on other areas of the population's mental and physical health.
Long-term prognosis
In July 2020, The Lancet published a study into the impact of lockdown on cancer screening and the effect of delays in diagnosis for cancer patients. It concluded: ‘We estimate that changes in healthseeking behaviour and the availability of and access to essential diagnostic services resulting from national pandemic measures will result in a large number of additional deaths from breast, colorectal, lung and oesophageal cancer in the medium (one year) and longer term (five years).’
The nation’s mentalhealth is suffering too and rates of severe depression in adults doubled during the pandemic, rising to 19.2 per cent in June 2020, up from 9.7 per cent between July 2019 and March 2020.
In November 2020, the NHS launched a campaign to encourage people with mentalhealth issues, including panic attacks, social anxiety, OCD and PTSD, to seek help after referrals fell during the COVID-19 crisis. In April 2020, there were only 57,815 referrals compared with 133,191 in April 2019. Figures for July 2020 improved but were still down 11 per cent year-on-year. At the same time, the ONS reported that one in five adults were likely to be experiencing some form of depression during the pandemic.
Separately, in October 2020, a NHS Digital survey reported there has been a rise in mental-health problems among children and young people during the pandemic too. Data reveals that one in six children and young people had a probable mental-health disorder in July during the first wave, compared to one in nine in 2017. The social and economic effects of mental-health problems are already spiralling and the legacy of COVID-19 may impact on future generations long after the virus has been got under control.
While experts have warned against creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, the long-term effect on suicide rates is an area of concern, and in Japan statistics show that suicide claimed more lives in October 2020 alone than COVID-19 had since the start of 2020.
Shockingly, figures from the ONS show a seven per cent spike in domestic abuse, accounting for one in five crimes with twice as many women killed by men in the first few weeks of lockdown, while Ofsted reported a 20 per cent rise in the number of babies being killed or harmed during the first lockdown. These are hugely worrying trends with devastating effects.
Your country needs you!
Whatever your view on each of these issues, I think I can vouch for all of us when I say we want the NHS to not just survive but thrive. This is where you come in. It is time that we all do what we can to step up to the health plate and start taking personal responsibility for our own health.
This doesn’t mean not having the odd tipple or a little junk from time to time – we are all human, after all, and should remain so. It simply means making sure that we up our intake of fruits and vegetables and move our bodies more often. These actions will do way more to actually protect the NHS than standing on a doorstep and clapping. We need to go way beyond virtue signalling on social media and genuinely raise our health game as a nation.
The BHF states that only a quarter of UK adults and one in six children in England and Scotland consume the recommended five portions of fruit or vegetables each day. The BHF also notes that more than 37 per cent of the UK adult population does not achieve the recommended level of 150 minutes of physical activity each week. It says that by being more active we could reduce our risk of developing heart or circulatory disease by as much as 35 per cent. That's not an insignificant figure! A 2014 UK study published in the British Medical Journal states that those who eat seven or more portions of fruit and vegetables a day have a 33 per cent reduced risk of dying prematurely, compared to those who eat less than one portion a day.
And if you want to take things a step further, a study by Oxford Martin School researchers into the future of food found that adopting a vegan diet globally by 2050 could prevent 8.1m deaths a year.
There is no medical drug on earth which can deliver these type of results and the evidence is compelling – in a world where statistics seem to govern our every action, I think it’s worth investing our efforts into simply eating more plants and being more active each day to improve our health and wellbeing.
We can all, if we are committed, do more on the personal health front and small changes can make a big difference – especially to the NHS. Surely it makes total sense to give yourself a fighting chance to beat this virus and any other health threat which might come along.
As I said at the outset, ask not what the NHS can do for you, but what can YOU do for the NHS. NOW is the moment to make a change – eat well, drink well, move well and think well. It’s our collective duty to take action and save the NHS! •
THE LAW OF 4 TO HELP THE
NHS
Stop polluting your body and mind with poor nutrition, negative news and inactivity. Make 2021 the year you make positive change and improve your health, for you, for your family and for the NHS!
Jason’ s Help the NHS Challenge
“I throw down the gauntlet to anyone struggling to make a change with their health. Take any one of my juice or blend challenges and follow that with a minimum of one week of the follow-on plan that I recommend in all my apps and books. I guarantee you’ll not only feel lighter and sharper but you’ll also want to eat well, drink well, move well and think well. Please, please do whatever you can to genuinely help the NHS by improving your health.”
★★★★★ ‘Inspirational! Transformational! Definitely inspires action. Authentic and moving,’ Lucy Heavens ★★★★★ ‘After watching this documentary, I’m definitely inspired to try what these people have done,’ Belle Sanders ★★★★★ ‘Amazing documentary! It just goes to show what vegetables and fruit can do and cure!,’ Mrs J
SUPER JUICE ME! THE MOVIE
