|
Tempest in a tea cup, Wisdom in a sake cup
By: Will Clower, Ph.D.
What an oxymoron the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has turned out to be. This vegan organization has one colossal ax to grind with their archrival, Darth Atkins. This is an old score that they’ve unfairly flung in front of the public before, all in the effort to squash the low carb idea and its adherents.
The first time was when Robert Atkins suffered his fatal accident, a cranial blow that caused edema – when water accumulates within the tissues. This tragic condition, obviously, caused his body to fill with fluid and thus, his overall weight to rise.
The so-called “Responsible Physicians” seized on this dying man’s condition by calling Atkins obese – which he was not – and telling everyone who would listen that his diet killed him – which it did not.
In the end, all they accomplished is to add bitterness and confusion to nutrition science by their shrill, unfair attacks on those who happen to disagree with them.
So, after maligning a dead man, they’ve now put up Florida businessman Jody Gorran to sue the Atkins Corporation. Gorran – channeling those Responsible Physicians – made the following claims. First, Atkins was a doctor and Gorran was on his diet. Second, he had to have heart angioplasty to clear his arteries after 2 years on the diet. And third, he reasoned, of the 40,000 factors that affect weight and health … the Atkins approach must have been the very one to have done it to him.
Of course, I’m no low carb acolyte, and do anxiously encourage the lemmings to rebound back from the intoxication with this high protein approach. But you still have to be fair, or you lose integrity, credibility, and confuse everyone in the process. That’s why the Responsible vegans need to go sit in time out, before heading off to their anger management therapy.
But from our perspective, their messy food fight is about more than one group flinging their high carb carob at Atkins’ sausage-n-cheese omelet. It’s about hearing an off-key chorus of competing messages from different camps of experts. In the midst of all this confusion, dietary decisions get left in the hands of you and me. We could pick the Krispy Kreme diet if we wanted, or low fat, or low carb, and find some scientific validation for any of it.
So what’s the sane middle ground? What lies between low fat and low carb? And most importantly, what rational guidance are we supposed to draw upon when planning dinner or a grocery store trip?
The best solution is to step back out of the niggling experts and think more intuitively about a healthy lifestyle approach.
For example, browsing through the import store this past week, on the hunt for a Sake set for a birthday present, one particular set bore a list of ten rules for living. I would love to see these simple maxims advised as basic common sense strategies.
- Eat less sugar, more fruit
- Use little salt, more vinegar
- Put less food in the mouth, chew more
- Eat less meat, more vegetables
- It is better to give than to receive
- Control your temper, laugh more often
- Speak fewer words, take more action
- Worry less, get plenty of sleep
- Sit less, walk more
- Wear only as much clothes as you need, bathe often
Rules like these work, have as much to do with your lifestyle as anything else, and ultimately improve your weight and health. The various diet experts may gnash their teeth at some pet idea mislaid, but you and I will find it hard to disagree with such basic common sense.
|
About The Author
Will Clower, Ph.D.
Dr. Will Clower is the award-winning author of The Fat Fallacy and founder of The PATH Curriculum, The PATH Online, and Newsletter.
The PATH: America’s weight solution.
Dr. Clower can be reached on his website www.fatfallacy.com.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
You have permission to publish this article electronically or in print, free of charge, as long as the bylines are included and no content is changed. A courtesy copy of your publication would be appreciated.
willclower@fatfallacy.com
|
This article was posted on September 22, 2004
Return to Index
email this
page
Still haven't found what you are
looking for?
Try this search:
Free Email
List Reveals health,
fitness and wellness
tips - secrets and information - delivered directly to
your inbox
How to Benefit from the Mind-Body Connection
(excerpt)
You are about to gain insight into the
mind-body connection. The number of
people who truly understand these principles on our
planet are relatively few.
There is an undeniable connection between our minds and
bodies, you can learn
to use this fact to your benefit.
Dr. Bernie Siegel, author of "Love, Medicine and
Miracles" was once a
distraught cancer surgeon until he
began to understand the greater principles
of the mind-
body connection. He felt dragged down by the artificial
barriers
that existed between patient and doctor, and the
helplessness he often felt as
a result of his inability
to effectively serve those patients. Eventually, those
barriers
were disintegrated by Dr. Siegel's recognition
and growing understanding of the
mind-body connection and
how it could serve his patients and himself.
Dr. Siegel, or Bernie as he began to have his patients
refer to him, had some
startling realizations as a cancer surgeon. He found that
there were actually
quite a few people in the world that successfully beat
the statistics on cancer
survival. He began to recognize that a patient's ability
to defeat something as
serious as cancer had to do with the patient's mind and
attitude about their
disease.
If you would like to see the rest of
this article, please go here:
http://www.tobeinformed.com/repository/mind-body.html
copyright 2004 - David Snape
|
|