More carrots, less cake won’t solve the U.S.’s health problems
Dear Martha Rosenberg,
Your Epoch Times article, Curing Common Diseases Without Drugs and Surgery, prescribes aspirin for a headache when the real problem is a brain tumor.
From your article:
“. . . many, perhaps most, Americans are overweight, not exercising, and not in good health. So, it comes as no surprise that expensive surgeries, procedures, and pills are often suggested to patients for medical problems related to unfitness, when simple lifestyle changes could work just as well—and usually better.”
Let’s start with those simple, highly effective lifestyle changes.
Diet and exercise are less important to a person’s health status than how a person is treated at work. The Whitehall Studies of British civil servants showed that a person’s risk of heart disease goes up for every step down the job scale. Their analysis included the person’s control over his workday. They concluded that, “the largest contribution to the socioeconomic gradient in [Coronary Heart Disease] frequency was from low control at work.” Not what the person ate, drank, or did in his spare time. These studies have been replicated virtually worldwide and for a wide range of illnesses.
Why would a secretary who eats well have a higher risk of heart disease than his boss who eats just as well? There is something else going on. A person’s social circumstances – work environment, home and community life, economic status – get under his skin, so to speak.
For example, a 2019 study found that people who rent their housing tend to have higher (worse) levels of C-reactive protein in their blood than people who own their home. C-reactive protein is a marker not only for infection and stress, but also for heart disease. The stress of not having control over one’s home contributes to physical changes.
Maybe social circumstances follow from (rather than cause) the person’s health status. Renters had poorer health before they became renters, in this theory. If so, people in these less healthful social circumstances could improve their health by doing healthier behaviors.
Wrong again.
A randomized controlled trial of the Mediterranean diet found that low-income people did not have the heart health gains that the high-income people did. From the study: “the reduction in cardiovascular risk is observed only in people with higher educational level and/or greater household income. No actual benefits were observed for the less advantaged groups.” (emphasis added) Yet both groups followed the diet.
Implying that a more-carrots-less-cake self-discipline would solve the U.S.’s health problems is folly. There is so much more affecting the health of millions of people. These structures and systems that affect health should command our attention. Granted, people whose social circumstances are healthful – they own their homes, their work hours are steady, they have a college degree – can indeed further improve their health with diet, exercise, etc. For everyone else, improving health means changing larger issues such as work environments.
Treatment for a brain tumor takes a lot more than an aspirin.
Sincerely,
Linda K. Riddell, MS
Founder
