Metabolical by Robert H Lustig EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Robert H Lustig
- Language: English
- Genre: Nutrition
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“Treatment” Is Not “Cure”—It’s Not
Even Treatment
There’s a wasp buzzing around your attic. What do you do? Kill the wasp?
Or get rid of the wasp’s nest? You have to work upstream of the problem if
you’re going to fix the cause. Working downstream only fixes the result.
And that’s what we’ve been doing with healthcare for the past eight
decades. Well, the wasps have come home to roost.
We’re Number 1!—in Morbidity, Mortality, and Expense
The US has the best doctors, hospitals, and medical technologies, the most
innovative surgeries, the best and newest drugs, and spends the most per
capita on healthcare of all the countries on the globe.
Are Americans healthier? Do we enjoy better healthcare? Do we live
longer? The answer to each of these questions is an unequivocal and
emphatic no. In fact, it’s quite the opposite; Americans have the worst
health outcomes of any country in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD; the thirty-seven richest countries).
In several of the most lethal chronic diseases, Americans rank among the
worst of the developed countries in the world: #1 in diabetes, #2 in
Alzheimer’s disease, #5 in cancer, and #6 in cardiovascular disease (CVD).
No doubt, of all the OECD countries, the US is the sickest. We have the
most expensive drugs—double that of Europe—plus the most expensive
doctors. We spend the most on hospitals and inpatient care. And what do we
get for it? Just take a look at this graph (Fig. 1–1).
There are two main takeaways from this graph: 1) the more money we
throw at the problem, the worse it gets—which either means we haven’t
addressed the problem at all, or maybe we’re even making it worse; and 2)
it wasn’t always this way. Although the US has never been particularly
efficient with our healthcare dollars, we at least used to keep up with the
rest of the pack. We started going off the rails in 1970, and even now we
haven’t come close to identifying the problem, much less solving it. There’s
still no magic pill.
Figure 1–1: Comparison between healthcare expenditures versus life expectancy for Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over forty-five years, 1970– 2015. The
US spends the most but gets the least.
So what started in 1970? And why is it bankrupting healthcare? And
why is our problem now a problem everywhere, and for everyone?
Infections Are Passé—or Are They?
Metabolic syndrome started rearing its head in the 1980s to become the
scourge of the twenty-first century. Think about diseases that killed large
numbers quickly in ancient and modern societies—leprosy, bubonic plague,
syphilis, tuberculosis, influenza, malaria, HIV. All of them are infections.
You’d think the diseases of metabolic syndrome have nothing to do with
infection.
After all, anyone can die from infection, as rapidly demonstrated
by the coronavirus pandemic. But if you have metabolic syndrome, your
risk of death goes up twenty-fold—and it’s your fault—because you’re a
glutton and a sloth. Wrong on both counts. The simple fact is that, just like
coronavirus, anyone can get metabolic syndrome—even those who are
normal weight. Everyone is at risk—both ways.
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