The Health Care-Sick Care Dilemma: Can you even imagine a low-carb healthy world?
What would a world of healthy people look like?
Perhaps the greatest myth of our time is that we actually have health care systems.
I’ve written many times here at The Naturalized Human about how our food system is being broken and manipulated by large corporations who put making profits ahead of supporting healthy people.
Some particularly relevant TNH posts for today’s conversation include:
The food we eat is the very foundation of our health and wellness, or the root cause of illness and dis-ease.
It should be easy to create a healthy diet. Except somehow even basic dietary advice has become cluttered by misinformation masquerading as science. It seems even organizations that are supposed to protect our health interests are mired in corporate-skewed agendas related to generating profits.
A recent post by Unsettled Science writer
dives into the idea that the benefits of low-carb diets are being actively suppressed by many organizations that should instead be focused on creating health for all.Her post really made me sit back and ask myself this fundamental question: What would the world even look like if we were focused on realizing health for everyone, instead of generating wealth for corporate shareholders?
Let’s take a brief look at where we are now and then try to imagine what would be different in a world where health care was actually the priority.
Here’s the scenario we are in
Perhaps the most lucrative market in the 21st Century is sick people.
Not dying people, per se. They leave the system too fast.
But people who live a long time with chronic illnesses. They are the virtual cash-cows of opportunity for generating corporate profits.
The more that companies can convince us that we need medical interventions and drugs to function, the richer they become. Our systems are sadly much more focused on treating sick people, than generating health. And the largest corporations are all working in harmony across the food, medical and pharmaceutical industries.
Pharmaceutical companies spent north of $8 billion on media advertising last year (up from $6 billion in 2020), and their goal, cynical as it sounds, is to maximize their sales, not make us healthy enough to quit their products.
As long as you continue to eat ultra processed foods, spend too much time indoors, and ignore what your body tries to tell you, the more you set yourself up to become a “healthcare” cash-cow. I’ll continue to call it “health” care, but it is in fact a conglomeration of sick care industries.
We have systems globally that are focused on promoting symptom-to-pill treatments. And offer more pills to counter act the side effects of the original treatments, side effects which are sometimes viewed as whole new illnesses instead of chain reactions.
Instead of promoting the foods and supplements that can help alleviate and even reverse some of these issues, nutrition is ignored. The state of our food systems is ignored. The death of healthy soil is ignored.
Diets and foods that could save people’s lives don’t generate profits the way drug treatments do, and thus their existence is now being actively muddled and confused.
If you cannot find straight forward answers to questions, then doubt keeps you coming back to the experts who want to sell you something else.
Low-carb diets, because they reverse disease, are also a threat to Big Food, whose ultra-processed foods are mostly derived from the very sugars and starches that low-carb diets avoid.
That’s why it’s so much better for you to take Ozempic to lose weight rather than modify your diet and lifestyle! Who’s going to profit if you eat mostly vegetables and local foods?
And this doesn’t stop with illness that affect our bodies and organ systems. There has been a steady push in recent years to make sure more and more people can be diagnosed with mental health disorders, thereby enabling drug therapies that are covered under health insurance plans.
In Sarah Fay’s 2022 Bestseller Pathological (Amazon affiliate link), she describes how the book: the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), has been repeatedly revised to include more symptoms and disorders, and thereby ensure more people can be diagnosed with mental health problems.
“Subtypes can be used to avoid ovediagnosis, but the inclusion of ADD and ADHD in the DSM-IV made it easier to diagnose, especially in girls who didn’t demonstrate hyperactivity, a key symptom in ADHD. . . . The result was a false ADHD epidemic, during which, as one study showed, the DSM-IV criteria increased prevalence rates by 64 percent. The DSM-5 broadened the diagnosis further.”
—Pathological pg 140-141
So are people really suffering from more mental health disorders? Or have the criteria for diagnosis simply been softened to the point where normal human behavior starts to look pathological? Sarah’s book is a must read for anyone navigating the mental health system personally, or with family and friends.
But as with our physical health, our mental health is vastly impacted by the food we eat and our lifestyle decisions. Dueling diets and conflicting food information ensures that we will remain confused, inconsistent, and reaching for the double-fudge ice cream instead of the broccoli.
If health care were truly the priority
Let’s stop for a moment now and imagine a world in which everyone ate healthy diets, exercised, practiced self care, had health-supporting physical and mental medical care, and were generally happy.
What would our world look like? How different is this world from the one we live in today?
For starters, those 228 million acres planted to monocultures of corn, soybean and wheat in 2023 wouldn’t be necessary. Or at least not all of them. Because they would not be being used to generate millions of tons of ultra-processed garbage foods like white bread and high-fructose corn syrup.
That means millions of acres could be reclaimed through regenerative agriculture to start rebuilding healthy soils again. Healthy soils help reverse micro-nutrient deficiencies, sequester more carbon, and slow down desertification.
Our grocery stores would not be clogged with aisle after aisle of ultra-processed foods. They could in theory be 1/3 to 2/3 smaller and still serve their purpose.
Our food landscapes and restaurants would not be dominated by fast food chains peddling fat, salt and sugar laden foods.
Our health care systems would not be clogged with preventable diseases, like Type II diabetes.
Fewer preventable diseases means fewer scans, diagnostic tests, surgeries, and specialists and a lot fewer drugs. Our hospitals and medical care facilities would look very different than they do today. Imagine sitting with a doctor to be treated as a whole person instead of a 15 min appointment to assign a drug to your symptoms.
The resources freed up could then focus on generating real “cures” for the money invested in health research, instead of the bizarre situation we seem to be in where endless medical research hasn’t generated a “cure” no matter how much money feeds the cause.
Better food, better lifestyles means fewer mental health disorders. A world with less anxiety, depression and stress. A world in which prescriptions include exercise, gardening, time in nature, and social engagements. Where drug treatments are not seen as the primary result of every health care interaction.
Did your brain hit PAUSE?
So right about now in my attempt to re-imagine a healthy world is when my brain screamed - PAUSE - because look at the number of jobs that just got wiped off the map or radically altered because we’ve made health the priority. We’d need to create major changes in:
agriculture,
grocery stores,
restaurants and fast-food chains,
doctors, nurses, surgeons, specialists,
drug companies,
pharmacies,
hospitals,
psychologists and psychiatrists,
and I am sure this is just the start!
Staggering, isn’t it.
It’s not that we don’t need drugs, doctors and hospitals and so on. It’s just that so much money is being spent to affect so little change. And garbage science (e.g. people trying to remember what they ate days or weeks ago) is being used to confound what appears to be strong evidence from clinical trials of how people could live better without so many drugs and treatments.
Our current economy is deeply entrenched in sustaining disease, instead of sustaining healthy people. [Roughly $24.5 billion was spent on cancer research between 2016 and 2020]. Without a business case that can ensure big profits from healthy people, we are unlikely to see any “cures” in the 21st century. But there will be plenty of treatments.
I’m not sure how we get off this hamster wheel. But what I do know is that making better food and health decisions has me stronger at 56 than I was decades ago. Not because I am a radical fitness junkie or vegan, but because I started to eat more whole foods, cut out ultra-processed junk, stopped drinking juice and pop, dealt with my PTSD and spend more time outside.
Healthy choice build one upon another. No step is too small to get started.
It’s a truly fascinating exercise to imagine a healthy world with healthy people. I will admit at first I didn’t even know where to begin. For me it was easier to ask myself which systems would no longer be needed. But then figuring out what would fill in the gaps created? That’s a lot harder.
Try it yourself. What would the world look like to you if healthy people were the priority in society? Share your thoughts in the comments.
This post was inspired by Unsettled Science. Here is the link so you can go and read it in full for yourself: