A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine

Metabolic dysfunction could be the death of us

Every school playground supervisor knows—or thinks they know—that there are two sides to every argument. That of the party who allegedly struck out; and that of the party that was allegedly struck. It’s a philosophy that I’ve long since adhered to: that, even though one might be persuaded by hearing just one side to a story, one should never be resistant to hearing the other. However, what if there are not two sides to a story, but three?

Here’s a story.

A long, long time ago, there was an honest, hardworking pharmacologist who founded a pharmaceutical company. The pharmacologist saw that, around the world were many diseases that troubled mankind, and he decided that he would do his utmost to find cures for all these diseases. He and his fellow pharmacologists worked unstintingly to find cures and, every time a disease was discovered for which there was no cure, he set to in his laboratory, to find the cure.

He patented his cures, of course, and his company grew wealthy. So wealthy that he was able to donate large sums of money to universities so that they could also engage in research to find new cures for all the diseases that kept getting discovered. He asked the government what diseases needed curing and the government told him, and he pursued cures for those diseases as well. The clever professors at the universities to which he donated funds for research became so wise that they were able to advise the government on matters involving disease and healthcare, and the government was very glad for this help, because they were mostly lawyers and landowners and knew very little about medicine.

Today, there are many pharmaceutical companies, without which many of the diseases that have plagued mankind would not have been cured. It is the devotion and acumen of these pharmacologists that have led to such great advances in curing a lot of diseases, and mankind is very grateful to them and thinks that their annual stockholder dividends are cheap at half the price. Or twice the price. Whatever.

There’s a second way to tell that story.

A long, long time ago, there was an honest, hardworking pharmacologist who founded a pharmaceutical company. After curing a lot of diseases and ensuring his company’s success, he died. Of a disease, maybe. His company merged with another pharmaceutical company, and the new company eventually merged with a few other companies to make a big pharmaceutical company. The big pharmaceutical company saw that, the more diseases there are, the more cures there need to be, and that finding cures for diseases was ultimately a bad idea, because, if they cured them all, then there would be nothing left to cure. So they decided to create some diseases, but they were keen not to be caught creating disease, because people and their governments might have found that a bad thing. So, the pharmaceutical companies decided to create diseases that they could blame on somebody else. They created things like heart disease, diabetes and obesity. These were good diseases to fit their blame requirements, because they could always blame the patients themselves, for eating too much this, or that, or whatever. Salt, sugar, fat, yellow 5, and so on.

There were some small problems that needed to be circumvented, and they were the medical profession, the government and people themselves. So, they had a wheeze. They would spend lots of money in donations to a university, and then shower the university’s professor with lots of money and gifts and, because the government was always asking for advice on what to tell people to eat, they would get their university professor appointed to advisory bodies to the government, and they could then tell the government what to tell people to eat; and what people ate would make them ill and give them heart disease, diabetes and make them obese.

If anyone came along and told them this was wrong, the company had an easy argument to shut them up: they would say that the objection was racist or sexist. And the objector would shut up. If doctors wanted to know why there was so much diabetes, or obesity or heart disease, the pharmaceutical company would show them research that proved that this was all due to the patient eating the wrong food, and it would then send the doctors on an expenses-paid trip to a conference on Maui, or wherever, where the pharmaceutical company would feed them lots of tasty food, and some more of this crap.

Eventually, people would tumble to this evil plan and blow whistles, calling the pharmaceutical company evil. And the pharmaceutical company would accuse people who did that of being conspiracy theorists, and needing to have a cold bath, or whatever. And, because the general public like hamburgers, ice cream and pizzas, the pubic would all agree—with the pharmaceutical company.

Here is the third version. There may be even more, but three will do.

A long, long time ago, there was an honest, hardworking pharmacologist who founded a pharmaceutical company. Pharmaceutical companies thrive when they have a great deal of research to do and when this research is successful in developing cures for diseases. It’s what they’re there for.

They don’t all cure all diseases, so there is enough work to go around. It can happen that certain financial decisions get made in pharmaceutical company board rooms that, contrary to the mission  statement laid down by the founder, are unduly influenced by a tendency to want to secure one’s financial position for the future. Opportunities arise and the board ask themselves, when presented with them and having to decide whether or not to take advantage of them, whether they should or shouldn’t grasp them. There will be decisions that they decide against, because their founder would have disapproved. And there will be some that are decided in favour of regardless of whether their founder would have approved or disapproved.

Someone may note that a donation was given to promote research by university students and to help educate the next generation of pharmacologists, and they may ask, “Do we get any return on that investment?” and that could set minds thinking that it would be nice if the university could also help the donor. The more the donor would be helped, the more it could help the university. Because universities are hotbeds of creative investigation and thinking, they are not only a good place to do research, but they educate the best of the scientists that the pharmaceutical company needs in its ranks. If there is ever a conflict of interests in this constellation, then university professors and scientists are mature and responsible enough to resolve them on their own.

It does the pharmaceutical company no harm if, say, a university professor who sits on an advisory body says, after realistic cogitation, that it would be unreasonable to expunge sugar from everyone’s diet, given how much sugar is produced in the world and how many workers and sugar companies depend on sugar for their livelihoods, and that it is consequently reasonable for two-year-old children to have a diet that comprises 10% sugar, and that this sugar should be fairly freely available to all classes of society, regardless of wealth, including to those who receive food stamps. What better source of sugar than food additives in processed food and fizzy drinks? If fizzy-drink makers could persuade government to allow purchases of their drinks on food stamps, this would ensure that the small children all got their 10% sugar intake, and would therefore fulfil the government’s own recommendations, based on the advice of their expert advisers.

That way, the government gets sound advice, the sugared-produce industries are assured their sales, doctors are ensured research opportunities, and, if people eat too much sugar, then they should themselves adhere more to the government’s sage guidelines. If they get too much cholesterol, the pharmaceutical companies have statins for them; if they get diabetes, they have insulin for them; and, if they get obese, that’s their own fault. In fact, all these diseases are people’s own fault: can they not read the ingredients on the goods they buy?

So, three sides, to a single story, in fact. They all contain a single common element, which is the statement that a long, long time ago, there was an honest, hardworking pharmacologist who founded a pharmaceutical company. I don’t honestly think that anyone would dispute that, regardless of which pharma company one is talking of. A long, long time ago, pharmacologists founded pharmaceutical companies because they were driven by a desire to make the world better by eradicating disease. That is true of every last pharma company. And there are elements of truth in all three sides to the rest of the story. The three conclusions that can be drawn from these three sides to the story are:

(i) that pharma is evil and corrupt; or

(ii) that pharma is as honest as the day is long and devotes itself selflessly to its avowed task of betterment for mankind; or

(iii) that pharma is grounded in a valid and laudable mission statement, but takes advantage of dynamics and symbioses that proffer themselves because it makes good business sense to them for them to do so, but they never do so to an extent that is nefarious.

If you are someone who works for a pharmaceutical company, or for a university, or for a food company, or for a nutritional advisory board to the government, or for a government, or for anyone else, you may by now be asking yourself which of the three sides to the story is the most accurate.

I believe that all three of the above conclusions apply passim across the industry. Which applies to which company, and when, all depends on the case. But they are, all three, true to some extent. However, you may perhaps be asking whether you yourself have any role to play in the dynamics described in the three sides to the story and, indeed, whether, if you felt anything was wrong with any aspect that you perceived to be true, there was anything that you or anyone else could actually do about it.

If you are in any of the categories of working for a pharmaceutical company, or for a university, or for a food company, or for a nutritional advisory board to the government, or for a government, you yourself will know best where your ethical, financial, corporate and contractual duties lie. But, if you are in the category anyone else, there is indeed something that you can do about all of this. And you can do it tomorrow. Here it is:

(i) break sweat for 150 minutes a week. That means running, fast walking, cycling, running up and down the stairs. Break sweat for a total of 150 minutes a week, or about 22 minutes a day. Every day. For the rest of your life;

(ii) remove sugar from your diet. Just remove it. Don’t eat it. Wherever it is, don’t eat that. That pretty much excludes any processed food, by the way. Glucose, fructose, sucrose. Lactose is hard to avoid if you like milk, but try to get as much sugar out of your life as possible. Sugar has a very unhappy track record, all the way from Sierra Leone slave forts to the disgraceful story of La Amistad to tooth decay. And big bellies. If you have children, get it out of their diets as well. You would probably do your children less harm by feeding them hard drugs than feeding them sugar. Whatever you do yourself in terms of addictive habits, feeding children sugar is tantamount to child abuse;

(iii) remove highly processed grains from your diet. That’s corn flakes. Your intestines will thank you for the roughage;

(iv) remove seed oils from your diet: canola, sunflower, that sort of thing. I would also include olive, but won’t, for two reasons:

(a) olive has some beneficial properties; and

(b) most of the olive oil you will buy today isn’t olive oil anyway, so if you simply cut out anything that is sold as olive oil, you’ll safely remove all other seed oils from your diet.

That’s it. If you’re diabetic, this will probably be enough to cure your diabetes. If you’re overweight, this will be enough to bring your weight down and start you dating again. And, if you have heart disease, or fatty liver disease, your body will rejoice. And, if you have children, they will also rejoice, after they’ve complained they’re not getting enough junk in their diet. Thirty per cent of American children are prediabetic; and 50% of adults and 20% of teens have fatty liver disease. Eighty per cent of Americans are either overweight or obese.

If that state of affairs is all their own fault, for their having made injudicious nutritional decisions, then that is a high degree of injudiciousness among the general population of the US. But such high levels of injudiciousness tend not to a conclusion that Americans are lemmings, and all act injudiciously just because other people act injudiciously, or all act injudiciously independently of each other.

No, on the contrary, it tends to a conclusion that the injudiciousness of the American population is systemic, and that means that they have little to no choice in the matter, and that means conditions exist in which, either people are forcibly made to be injudicious (which is unlikely), or people are persuaded that their injudiciousness is not injudiciousness at all, but is wisdom, if only received wisdom. And that is even harder to swallow than canola oil.

However, there are those who contend that, especially, low-income and low-educated persons live in a vicious circle of processed food that makes them fat and liable to early death (eleven years early), whilst creating medical conditions for them that require long-term servicing with pharmaceuticals. Many such people are within racial-minority groups, and that’s where accusations of racism can in fact be used to reinforce the poor dietary habits of that particular social grouping, and act as a barrier to remedying them.

Whatever the truth is, your health is never in the hands of a confectionery company or a pizza outlet; it is in your hands and, whatever injudiciousness you may have displayed in the past, there is no better time to resolve to do things differently in the future than the start of a new year. You have the power in your own hands: the power of judiciousness, and the power to put sugar, seed oils and processed grains where they belong: out of your diet.

It is not wrong to disagree with a doctor, a pharmacologist, a government or a nutritionist. Especially one that is being paid to tell you what they’re telling you, and if what they’re telling you is siloed rather than holistic and, what’s more, is bad for you.

Grain silos