Current Posts – 20 July 2016

When newspapers report on research suggesting that some product is more dangerous than we had been told – diesel engines, bottled water, cars with a faulty braking system – sales usually decline rapidly and action is taken by manufacturers. When media covers research suggesting that statin risks have been underestimated and some discontinue them, the official response has been to accuse the researchers of killing people. Is this really right?

Doctors are famously uninterested in tales about the healing benefits of diet or lifestyle change. Comments like: ‘That’s good if it works for you,’ or ‘placebos are very powerful’ are commonly reported. But doctors also famously only have a few hours of nutritional training in medical school. Is this a good way to deal with increasing levels of chronic disease? Absolutely not, concluded a conference last week.

Five hundred years ago this year Martin Luther, a German monk and theology professor, took the mighty Catholic Church to task for not playing by its own rules. Last week a small band of GPs laid the same charge against the medical establishment for ignoring growing scientific evidence that demonising fat in the diet had been a bad move. The result could be a major shake-up in medical orthodoxy.