Doctors Need More Nutrition Education
I hear this all the time. “Doctors need to know more about nutrition!” Every internet and fad diet guru likes to rip on doctors for knowing little about nutrition. It is time to call bullshit on this. Why? Because the information changes ALL THE TIME! No matter what side, or diet, you endorse there is evidence to the contrary. To be honest, the studies are really hard to do. There are just too many confounding variables. Some show meat is good and some show meat is bad. Genetics may play a part. Hell, geography may play a part. Personally, I think we eat too much, eat too late in the day and eat too many carbs. I will be the first to say this is my opinion. Others, not so much. I have seen cardiologists say all fat is bad. Then they say eat low but plenty of healthy fat. WTF is that? I recently saw a cardiologist office still putting margarine down as a recommended food substance instead of butter. Are you f$cking kidding me?
So, in summary, I believe perfect nutrition is complex and a moving target. There is no ONE perfect diet for everyone. So, why do I bring this up? Because a Harvard Group Recommends Increased Nutrition Education For Doctors. Of course, they do. Here is what they want:
The authors of the Harvard FLPC report identified several medical education stages in which to increase nutrition training and recommended policy mechanisms to address the lack of nutrition training:
– For undergraduate medical education, amending accreditation standards to require nutrition training and offering additional grant funding to create nutrition education programming.
– For graduate medical education and board certifications, requiring nutrition education in medical schools and incorporating nutrition-related questions in required examinations.
– After formal medical education, states should integrate nutrition education into continuing education and require—or strongly encourage—physicians to take nutrition education courses as part of maintaining their license.
Now, go back and see what I wrote at the beginning of this blog. The information on nutrition contradicts itself all the time. Who is right? Tough to say. It’s just nice when the ivory tower idiots want to make me put my license on the line for it. Unbelievable.
Not to mention that much of the science is suppressed or ignored due to lobby of big agriculture and big pharma. Watch “what the Health” and “Fed Up” both on Netflix.
To be perhaps unreasonably tangential, I offer a quote from a late and much admired columnist, Charley Reese. He was an anti-bulls**t crusader, one of the last of his kind.
Once it took attitudes and morals of this sort to be a good doctor. Now, these are seen as arrogant and intolerable, and licenses must be taken away when this sort of hubris is expressed. Until that changes, nothing will help doctors in the future. self-appointed secular priesthood of social workers, psychologists and propagandists for special-interest groups will shill for their self-interest, but in the guise of kindness and interest in the benefit of the people. When you hear someone talking about helping the people, improving the populace or serving the masses, run.
Our society is primed to tune in to the huckster – the assertive, opinionated blowhard who says that every other blowhard is wrong, and people are unable to decide upon intelligent solutions using reasonable common sense. Doctors are not trained enough to detect and avoid blowhards, that’s for sure.
Our correspondent who offers these pearls of wisdom? Tommy Tobin. “I’m an attorney writing about food law and policy.” Perhaps we need fewer lawyer/lobbyists to shill for whatever food corporation butters their bread.
Tommy offers:
The problem is the fork-to-face reflex. When the food policy lobbyists combine with the IT social monitors and manipulators, they will create a Brave New World of rice cakes and soybeans.
Nevertheless, humans managed somehow to evolve to where we are without being told what to eat. That is intolerable! Too much freedom. Let’s take it away – for the population’s own good.
Doctors should instruct their patients on diet and nutrition.
And nutritionists should do craniotomies.
And dieticians should do C-sections.
Everybody should do everything. Expertise and training are meaningless.
The actual science of nutrition is pretty well mapped out. Remember essential amino acids and the actual function of transaminases? Anyone who has written TPN orders realizes it becomes pretty routine after the first couple of times. The “science” of the behavior of American eating habits is as ethereal as any other social science and will always be subject to the claims of hucksters.
Man Dr Farrago you read my mind. As soon as I saw the headline I thought the information is always changing!
Most of the stuff I learned in medical school turned out not to be true, then every decade or so the government comes out with new recommendations that are major changes to the previous ones.
There’s so much stuff out now that is junk. I wonder what exactly Harvard thinks ought to be taught?
I think it’s all these ‘ivory tower groups’ do.
Come up with new ways to take medical licenses away!
Wonder how much the “Harvard HLPC” members got PAID to come up with this dreck?