stories in medical journals of doctors who shared my same frustration. The way
medicine is practiced today, it’s much easier to write a prescription for a specific
drug than to spend hours counseling and correcting the cause or root of the
underlying problem. “Next patient, please” was not the approach I wanted to
take.
My own health under this workload wasn’t any better. I was a little
overweight. I had a touch of high blood pressure and high cholesterol, even
though I was in my early thirties and hadn’t changed anything in my diet. I was
hungry all the time, and even though I exercised like a maniac after long days at
work, I saw no results.
Naturally, and in good faith, I relied on nutritional guidelines put forth by the
mainstream medical community and government guidelines (such as those by
the USDA) to help me treat my patients. I believed wholeheartedly in the low-fat
dogma because it was advocated by respectable organizations like the American
Heart Association. But I found that something curious and quite discouraging
was happening. Instead of losing weight or experiencing an improvement in their
disease state and overall health, my patients continued to gain weight, and they
became less healthy. It began to dawn on me that food is, in fact, medicine, and
that my patients, who were following one low-fat diet or another, were being
poisoned by their diets.
Here I was, a traditionally trained physician who was following the guidelines
of my profession, yet I was watching helplessly as patient after patient failed to
improve his or her health on low-fat diets. It was clear that the American Heart
Association’s low-fat guidelines were a failure for me and my patients, just like
they were for the rest of the country. But like most doctors, I was not particularly
knowledgeable in the field of nutrition. I wanted to learn what my patients were
doing, so I went and bought all the popular diet books. It was a waste of time
and money with lots of conflicting and inaccurate information.
I decided to go straight to the top, to the most well-respected institution in the
country: Harvard University. Harvard researchers had developed an eating plan
and designed a food pyramid that was in sharp contrast to the old USDA Food
Pyramid, with its low-fat message (an abundance of grains at the base, few fats
at the top). Fats were at the base of the Harvard food pyramid, or to be eaten in
abundance, and refined carbohydrates were at the apex, or to be eaten sparingly.
The Harvard Food Pyramid made perfect sense, because eating too many carbs
translates into more sugar in your bloodstream, which leads to weight gain. Fats
provide satiety. You are less likely to overeat when you include fats in your diet.
That’s why low-fat diets are so hard to stick to and fail you.
There is, however, a major problem with the Harvard food pyramid. At the
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