My
contrarian impulse is having a something of a knee-jerk reaction over a plate of pasta and my homemade spaghetti sauce after recently watching some of Dr. Mark Hyman, director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and Dr. William Davis, a Milwaukee-based American cardiologist, sounding ominous warnings about sugar, including sugar-laded soft drinks, bread, breakfast cereals, pastries, pasta and other carbohydrates in separate alternate medicine infomercial-like fundraisers on Detroit Public TV, WTVS Channel 56, which my cable provider thoughtfully includes in its basic package up here in nearby Thompson, Manitoba. Sugar, of course, is de rigueur the bad boy of food staples these days, and is to the 2010s what eggs were to the 1980s (eggs, thankfully have been rehabilitated reputationally and are no longer a cholesterol cautionary tale for medical practitioners and nutritionists everywhere).
Whatever-happened to the good old days on American Public Television when a typical Saturday evening included what seemed like at least four-hour telethon pledge fundraisers, interspersed with occasional obscure Moody Blues concert footage featuring Nights in White Satin and Tuesday Afternoon for those of us in a certain age demographic? We got five years older, I suppose, is what happened and we spend more time before bedtime these Saturday nights thinking about being circa 60 then the Sixties. Public television programmers at PBS seem to be betting that we’re ready to hear less symphonic rock and a bit more about our glycemic index, belly fat, joint inflammation – inflammation seemingly everywhere actually – soaring blood sugars, insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and our long-abused and vastly overworked pancreas and liver.
To his credit, Dr. Hyman now likes butter and eggs. He’s the author of Eat Fat and Get Thin, The Blood Sugar Solution and The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet: Activate Your Body’s Natural Ability to Burn Fat and Lose Weight Fast.
Dr. Davis is the author of Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health and Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox. In fairness to the good doctors, since I only watched about 45 minutes or so of both their shows (and Davis was actually on late-night mid-week, not on a Saturday night), so I didn’t hear their entire arguments. But I seemed to hear a lot more from both in terms of specifics about what was bad for you then what was good for you, which was deal with in generalities. I suppose it’s a bit hard to hawk you latest book if you give the good stuff all away on TV. Still, while I know Dr. Hyman has traded in his bagels for eggs, and gives a thumbs-up to fat (of some kinds, presumably found in specific foods beside eggs and butter, which he also likes) I’m at a loss to what Dr. Davis likes to eat, although if had tuned in longer, I might have found out.
I confess when I got to that area of the program, I was hearing the audio only as I was multi-tasking, putting away my freshly-laundered clothes in another room, listening to the TV in another, but I think I heard him talking about withdrawal symptoms coming off bread and pasta, produced by opioid peptides when some grains are digested, in the same language addictions experts talk about the relative merits of tapering versus cold turkey off narcotics like heroin. It didn’t really entice me much to give up Jeanette’s homemade Red River bread, fresh and warm out of the oven.
Now, CBC’s the fifth estate, just over a year ago, dug into Dr. Davis’ anti-wheat claims, and said some of them were hard to digest, as they were based on shaky science. A Feb. 27, 2015 online version of the investigation, “Wheat Belly arguments are based on shaky science, critics say: Scientists dispute claims in best-selling book, fifth estate finds” can be read here at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/wheat-belly-arguments-are-based-on-shaky-science-critics-say-1.2974214
Its’ fine journalism, as we’ve long come to expect from the fifth estate, with some good old debunking by Canadian scientists, including “Joe Schwarcz, a chemist at McGill University dedicated to demystifying science and debunking big claims” but it perhaps takes itself a bit too seriously.
Methinks this is rather the wrong approach: “The Battle of the Experts,” as it were.
Because to be clear, both Dr. Hyman and Dr. Davis, appear to be well qualified as medical practitioners with substantive knowledge in this area of ever-evolving medicine. They’re not quacks or scientific frauds. But they are charismatic and zealous marketers who are onto a good thing in terms of books sales, but I have no doubt they believe in what they are saying and that belief does have some foundation in promoting public health, not just sales of their books. Mind you, they believed the exact opposite in the 1980s and ate and promoted grain and carbohydrate-based diets. But, hey, didn’t we all think that was what was good for us back then? I still recall being a bit than less than overly excited about oat bran in everything, but whatever works, right?
Let’s face it; if you don’t think we have epidemic-like numbers in terms of caseloads of type 2 diabetes and obesity, just for starters, here in Northern Manitoba and across much of Canada and America, indeed whole swaths of the developed world (but not everywhere) you haven’t been paying attention to reality and the anecdotal evidence of your own eyes since at least the 1980s. While we can argue about the causes or triggers of these public health scourges, and just maybe grains and carbohydrates aren’t joint Public Food Enemy Number 1, but instead medicine’s flavour-of-the-month, you’d still have to have your head in the muskeg of the ever melting permafrost up here to say insulin resistance should be ignored and it’s OK to gratuitously continue to insult our pancreas and liver, without as much as second thought. I’d like to think there is something to be said for a very old cardinal virtue known as temperance and sometimes called moderation also. Not that I by any means practice what I preach in all areas of health or anything else when it comes to it. I’m not claiming personal perfection, simply my turn at the soapbox here.
As for PBS, I remain a big fan of public television, including Detroit PBS.
True, there was a time not so long ago, of course, when alternative medicine or medical views – anything pretty much that derivated from mainstream allopathic, often ultra-pharmacologically friendly medicine, were considered heretical views and had a very tough time getting airtime or ink if you were more homeopathic or naturopathic in what you were proposing. I am not naïve enough to think Big Pharma has packed their doctor’s bag and stopped making house calls. Of course they haven’t. But Detroit PBS, seemed by inference with Dr. Hyman and Dr. Davis, to be implying they were a free speech platform of last resort, providing a noble public service.
Sorry, public television broadcasting folks. This was closer along the continuum , at least in my view, to flaking for an infomercial.
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