Orogogus wrote on Dec 29, 2016, 13:08:

jdreyer wrote on Dec 29, 2016, 03:23:

Orogogus wrote on Dec 29, 2016, 02:21:
I believe they don't have to do any encouraging, and if they did it would backfire almost immediately. How many times do they have to suggest to (real) doctors to encourage patients to eat more bacon before one of them outs it on the Internet?

You may have heard of this doctor before that encouraged people to eat as much bacon as they liked: Doctor Robert Atkins.

He wasn't the voice of the medical establishment, at all. Your family practitioner isn't going to tell you to go on the Atkins diet; that's by and large something people bring up on their own. And I don't think you're going to find any evidence that he was motivated by payouts from the drug industry.

This isn't the course which my friend went on, but it's was similar: http://www.auspen.org.au/events/auspen-advanced-clinical-nutrition-course-2016/
Look at the sponsors: Nestle...... and a Pharma company specializing in chronically ill patients (why are the patients chronically ill, if the diet is so healthy?).



The whole thing is very insidious.

If you go to the doctor, they will usually tell you to lose weight. Why? Because losing weight improves the numbers that predict disease rates. Lower cholesterol (or at least better LDL to HDL ratios), lower blood pressure, better resting heart rate, better insulin response and so on.

How will they get you to lose weight? Most will tell you to go on a low carb diet, whether it's called Paleo, Ketogenic, Isogenic, etc, but they are all more or less the Atkins diet.

Why do doctors choose these diets for their patients? Because they've been on a nutrition course/seminar sponsored by animal agriculture industries and pharma companies. The doctors are shown the results of various studies, and they pass on this information to the patients believing they are genuinely helping the patient.

And if the patient successfully applies these diets, they indeed do see better health markers.....at least in the short term. These diets are almost impossible to stick to, and the drug companies know this, which is why they sponsor the seminars. The drug companies know that it's very likely the person will yo-yo diet for a while, give up and start taking statins for the last 20 years of their life.
The other side of it is that even if people can stick to the diet and keep the weight off, they are still eating high saturated fats and cholesterol, which will end up needing statins(albeit a little later), regardless of how skinny they are.

If theses diets really worked, then nobody would need statins - so why would a statin company sponsor an event which would reduce demand for their product? They wouldn't.