Do doctors know anything about nutrition?

They say "you are what you eat". Well, they used to say that. Most people nowadays have never heard it, or if they have, they don't realize how accurate it is.

We are, literally, a product of what we eat. Our bodies are constantly replacing every living cell, all tissue, all fluids, all atoms. No part of me today was part of me a few years ago. I'm always a brand new person. I am made of what I put in my mouth (plus the Oxygen my lungs bring in).

I did an article a few months ago on this topic, and writing it caused me to learn even more about it. I found the mainstream medical community doesn't seem to know 'we are what we eat'.

My illness taught me a lot

Over the past 3 years I've seen quite a few different specialists, related to my twitching, chronic pain, parasthesias, fatigue, and other symptoms that came on after my grandmother died. Even though my condition could very well be related to nutrition (since I was homeless and hungry for a time), they never bother to assess how I eat. I even lost 30 pounds unexpectedly and was at an unhealthy low weight, but they NEVER bothered to ask how much I was eating, or what I was eating. Even when my electrolytes were off, and when my thyroid was going crazy, and my guts weren't holding food to digest it, they never ever assessed diet.

Every lab test, probe, and scan was conducted. They passed me around from clinic to hospital to doctor to specialist to walk-in. They offered me opiates, benzodiazapenes, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and many other Big Pharma prescriptions that alter brain chemistry. But nobody cared about the chemistry of the foods and supplements I was taking in - not one wondered what I was literally made of.

When I finally volunteered the information "I need about 3500 calories per day just so I don't waste away" and "I went fully vegan at the same time the symptoms began", I thought it would help them with diagnosis. Instead, they just laughed it off, as if to say "why bring up your diet, when everybody knows that has nothing to do with anything?"

Scary fucking shit.

My wife @MediKatie has been a cancer patient all her life, and has mostly had the same experiences with health care - her diet and nutrition were almost never addressed. We now have decades of scientific studies and data about nutrition, and we know that some cancers can be caused (and treated) by a person's diet alone, but that doesn't seem to be taken into consideration by the system.

I worked in psychiatric nursing for 10 years before starting my own businesses and going into activism. I also did most of a Bachelor of Science specializing in biology at SFU. During all my education, and all my work experience, nutrition was almost never talked about. As far as the allopathic medicine model is concerned, our diet is just a matter of personal preference, and has little or no influence on our health. When I bring up my veganism, which comes with hundreds of hours of research on nutrition and health, most 'professionals' brush it aside. It seems they believe veganism is a moral or environmental issue only. I was truly shocked at how little diet matters in health care.

The patients at the hospital I worked at were fed TERRIBLE food. Oh, it was greasy and salty enough to get them to gobble it up, but other than that it was essentially empty calories. Fake potatoes covered in fake gravy next to soggy frozen veggies, a gray puck of meat, and a puddle of dessert pudding. No care or thought put into nutrition, even for patients with nutritional disorders! How can we get sick people healthy if we're putting crap into their system? It's disturbing that these people are supposedly the experts, the ones we can trust our health and lives to.

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How about you?

Do you put much focus on nutrition? If so, are you concerned with how little the mainstream seems to care about it, even health care professionals?

What could be done about it?

DRutter