Food Over Medicine (28 page)

PP:
Health care costs are going to strangle our economy if we don’t put a limit on them. What the government seems to want to do is make it limitless.

GM:
Right. As a progressive, just as I don’t want my tax dollars wasted on a bloated defense budget, I don’t want my tax dollars paying for unnecessary angioplasties for bloated cheeseburger eaters. And I don’t want my tax dollars to continue subsidizing the animal agriculture interests that are producing those low-cost cheeseburgers that are killing Americans. Stop subsidizing animal agriculture and let’s see the real market cost of a cheeseburger, which may be fifteen dollars or more. Letting that cost rise to the market cost—something those free-market right-wingers should believe in—would do wonders for the state of American health.

PP:
Here’s my suggestion for Michael Moore, if he would ever listen to me. Michael, before you produce any more documentaries on health, I’m going to charge you with getting healthy. Your objective is to get thin and healthy. Once you go through the process of trying to do so—and you may well have already tried—and you find out how impossible it is to do by going through traditional medical channels, then do it like Bill Clinton did and try this whole food, plant-based diet. Go outside the system to find the answers to your health issues. Do that, and then you’re going to produce a different kind of documentary, which will be well worth watching because you’ll have some credibility on the subject.

GM:
Lawrence O’Donnell, who as I mentioned deserves kudos for highlighting the absurdity of the mandate, nonetheless appears to agree with Michael Moore that the best system of health care would be Medicare for all. I was fortunate to have the chance recently to have a little private informal exchange with O’Donnell on the subject of health. Now, let me preface this by saying that the last thing in the world that I would want to do would be to attack Lawrence O’Donnell, who is a national treasure and as eloquent a spokesman for progressive values as anyone alive. But, like Michael Moore and so many others on the left, he espouses ideas on public health policy that are reflexive expressions of an ideology that, despite its good intent, doesn’t question common assumptions that our society makes on human health, many of which are profoundly wrong.

So I was delighted to have the chance to express to O’Donnell my frustration with media coverage of Obamacare over the last three years. I thought I made my case effectively, and here is the gist of what I said:

The media keeps referring to Obamacare as health reform when it is merely health insurance reform that affects health barely at all. Its essential flaw is its focus on insurance payments instead of health. I asked, with rhetorical flourish, would you rather have good health insurance or good health? The real problem in this country isn’t the millions without health insurance; the real problems are obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. It’s the food, stupid! Studies have shown that access to medical care has minimal effect on health outcomes; indeed, I noted, the third-leading cause of death in America is medical care. (O’Donnell disputed that assertion but I would point him to an op-ed by Dr. Sanjay Gupta in the
New York Times
, in which he estimated two hundred thousand iatrogenic deaths annually, which puts death by medical care in third place, as I contended.
⁹
) The one thing that truly has demonstrable effect on health outcomes is the food we eat. If we were to stop subsidizing the meat and dairy industry with farm subsidies, allowing the price of a cheeseburger to skyrocket, that would do more to improve human health than Obamacare ever could. Somebody in the media needs to let another voice into the debate besides the usual detractors and supporters of Obamacare. We need a voice like Dr. McDougall’s that would make the case that we’ll never solve the problem unless we change the food.

And I rested my argument, rather proud of myself.

PP:
Was he left speechless?

GM:
Actually, no. There’s a reason Lawrence O’Donnell has risen as far as he has. He’s a very persuasive guy. He dismissed my arguments like he was swatting so many flies and then moved on to his next interlocutor. First, he said, give up on the fantasy that we’ll ever end farm subsidies. Second, he said, I simply was not allowing for human fallibility. Ice cream, he said, is delicious. He repeated that statement over and over, with increasing emphasis. “Ice cream is delicious. People will always eat ice cream because ice cream is DE-LIC-IOUS! That’s never going to change. Human beings are fallible and, being fallible, will always eat ice cream because ICE CREAM IS DE-LIC-IOUS!” I was wasting my breath with all my impossibly severe ideas about eating.

I walked away deflated. Here I thought I had made several powerful arguments for why we needed to change the debate about health in this country, and yet I had made a rookie error, failing to factor in the extraordinary deliciousness of ice cream. I didn’t know whether to keep fighting for the plant-based cause, or just chuck it all and head to Baskin-Robbins.

PP:
Here’s what O’Donnell is not taking into account. The American public is not given the opportunity to make an informed decision. Your cholesterol is 220, so your doctor says, “You know, your cholesterol is getting up there. We’re going to need to put you on a statin drug.” So he puts you on Lipitor and your cholesterol comes down. You get this false sense of security that things are better because you were never really told the whole story about your cholesterol. That sense of security ends with a heart attack. Now let’s replay this conversation the way it should happen. You go to your doctor and your cholesterol is 220 and your doctor says, “Here are our choices. We can use Lipitor, and it’ll reduce your risk of dying of a heart attack by about 1.8 percent. I want to read to you the list of side effects of the drug very briefly; it’s just six or seven pages long. So you can take this drug, or I can show you how to eat a diet that will work faster than the drug and will reduce your risk of dying of a heart attack almost entirely. You’ll also reduce your risk of dying from cancer, diabetes, and other diseases. And there are no side effects. Now, which would you like to do? I can either write the prescription right now, or I can teach you how to eat this diet.”

I believe that most people, when presented with those alternatives, would at least take a look at this diet. I’ve worked with all kinds of people: blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, people who make $400,000 a year, people who make $20,000 a year. They don’t all jump at the chance to change their diet, but a heck of a lot of them want to do it when presented with that kind of information. I think the public should be insulted by the mind-set that presumes that it does not have the will or the intelligence to make a change for its own good. What Lawrence O’Donnell is basically saying is that people are so stupid and weak that we might as well not even tell them about the ideal human diet because they’d rather eat ice cream and lose their limbs to diabetes than make the effort to clean up their diet.

GM:
I think he’s saying that people know that ice cream isn’t a health food, but they eat it anyway because they are fallible creatures.

PP:
No, they don’t know. They’re misled a hundred different ways. They’re eating fat-free ice cream. They’re told that dairy products provide calcium to strengthen their bones. They’re told that chocolate is a superfood and that nuts are indispensable for brain function. And they’re taught that they can’t affect their health or their weight very much in any case because it’s all in the genes. They look to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics for dietary advice and they’re told that there’s room for everything, including ice cream, in a healthy diet. They think that because they buy extra virgin olive oil, fat-free dairy products, and imported organic cheese, they’re doing great. Lawrence O’Donnell was basically implying that 160 million Americans with degenerative disease are well aware that their current treatments don’t work and that they can instead eat themselves out of disease, but they’ve just chosen not to do so because they love ice cream. Well, that’s not been my experience. I find it unfathomable that people would care so little about themselves that, in spite of being well aware of how to regain their health, they just wouldn’t want to make the effort. I don’t believe that’s the case at all.

I’ll tell you what my experience has been, not with one or two people but with many thousands of people. When they understand the truth about what is making them sick, many act on it. They are willing to change their diets not just a little bit, but entirely. And the diet they adopt is full of foods that, to the palates they cultivate, are every bit as delicious as ice cream once was to them, when their palates responded only to sugar and fat. And, incidentally, once in a while on special occasions, they may still indulge in some delicious non-dairy ice cream. But they know that there’s no reason to ever again touch dairy or the foods that have made them fat and sick.

This is the way our public health crisis ends. The government isn’t going to do it. People have to do it. They have to take their health into their own hands. The job of the medical community is to give people the knowledge upon which they can act. If the medical community continues to fail in that responsibility, we in the plant-based foods movement will pick up the slack. We will get the word out in books, in films like
Forks Over Knives
, on the Internet, through educational ventures like The Wellness Forum, person-to-person, and in any other way we can. We will treat people with respect by giving them the knowledge upon which they will act to save their own lives and to save the country from a fiscal nightmare. I firmly believe that people can do this, and that’s not blind optimism on my part. I see it happen every day.

GM:
Pam, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you, but I’ve got to go home and stay up late and type all of this up.

PP:
Have a cup of coffee.

....................................

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