"Don't Wait Until Your Doctor Kicks the Habit"
When famed surgeon Michael DeBakey was asked why his studies
published back in the '30s
linking smoking and lung cancer were simply ignored,
he had to remind people what it was like back then.
We were a smoking society.
It was in the movies. It was everywhere.
Medical meetings were one heavy haze of smoke.
Smoking was, in a word, normal.
It's like the debates over cigarettes and lung cancer in Congress
taking place in smoke filled rooms.
Makes me wonder what's served at the breakfast buffets
of the Dietary Guidelines Committee meetings these days.
I previously talked about a famous statistician
by the name of Ronald Fisher,
who railed against what he called propaganda
to convince the public that cigarette smoking was dangerous.
Fisher made invaluable contributions to the fields of statistics,
but his analysis of lung cancer and smoking were flawed
by an unwillingness to examine the entire body of data available.
His smokescreen may have been because he was a paid a consultant
to the tobacco industry, but also because he was himself a smoker.
Part of his resistance to seeing the association
may have been rooted in his own fondness for smoking,
which makes me wonder about some of the foods
nutrition researchers may be fond of to this day.
It always strikes me as ironic when vegetarian researchers come forward
and list their diet as a potential conflict of interest,
whereas not once in the 70,000 articles on meat in the medical literature
have I ever seen a researcher disclose their non-vegetarian habits,
because it's normal. Just like smoking was normal.
How could something that's so normal be bad for you?
And it's not like you smoke one cigarette and fall over dead.
Cancer takes decades to develop.
Since at that time most physicians smoked themselves
and could not observe any immediate deleterious effects,
they were reluctant to accept even the possibility of such a relation
despite the mountain of evidence.
It may have taken 25 years for the Surgeon General's report to come out,
and longer still for mainstream medicine to get on board,
but now there are no longer ads encouraging people
to "Inhale to your heart's content!"
Now, there are ads from the CDC fighting back.
For food ads, you don't have to go all the way back to
"Meat...for Health Defense" or 'Nourishing Bacon"
or doctors prescribing meat, or soda for that matter.
"Thank heavens Trix are habit forming!"
You know things are bad when the sanest dietary advice
came from cigarette ads.
In modern times, you can see hot dogs certified by
the American Heart Association, or sirloin tips for that matter.
And of all foods, which was the first to get
the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics "Kids Eat Right" on their label?
Was it an apple? Broccoli perhaps?
Nope, Kraft prepared cheese product.
Now, just like there were those in the 30s, 40s, and 50s on the vanguard
trying to save lives, today there are those turning ads
about what you can do with pork butt to what the pork can do to your butt—
the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine's
"Meat Is the New Tobacco" campaign.
As Dr. Barnard tried to get across in an editorial published
in the American Medical Association's Journal of Ethics,
"plant-based diets [can now be considered] the nutritional equivalent
of quitting smoking."
How many more people have to die, though,
before the CDC encourages people not to wait for open heart surgery
to start eating healthy as well?
But just like we don't have to wait until our doctor
stops smoking to quit ourselves,
we don't have to wait until our doctor takes a nutrition class
or cleans up their own diet before choosing to eat healthier.
No longer do doctors hold a professional monopoly on health information.
There's been a democratization of knowledge,
and so until the system changes, we have to take personal responsibility
for our own health, for our family's health.
We can't wait until society catches up with the science again,
because it's a matter of life and death.
Dr. Kim Allan Williams became President of the American College of Cardiology.
He was asked why he follows his own advice to eat a plant-based diet?
"I don't mind dying," Dr. Williams replied.
"I just don't want it to be my own fault."