Emily Josh Health Reporter, Dailymail.Com
Updated on June 26, 2024 at 21:13 and June 26, 2024 at 21:26
A California doctor has revealed the biggest lies doctors tell their patients that could leave them more vulnerable to serious chronic diseases.
Dr. Robert Lufkin, a physician and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, has been diagnosed with four chronic illnesses throughout his life.
These include gout, high blood pressure, pre-diabetes, and dyslipidemia, which causes abnormal levels of fats in the blood.
His book “Lies I was taught in medical schoolDr Lufkin explains that his own health journey was an “awakening moment” to flaws in the healthcare system, including doctors treating symptoms rather than exploring underlying causes.
He also called out the “lies” about obesity, diabetes and several other chronic diseases that afflict millions of Americans, some of which he himself has perpetuated.
Dr. Lufkin writes that he’s tried every fad diet out there, consumed loads of processed foods, been vegan, carnivore, low-fat and low-carb diet.
But now he tries to eat as few processed foods as possible and limits his intake of carbohydrates, sugars, processed fats, oils and grains.
Despite his personal success with lifestyle changes, he warns that the “lies” and alternatives he proposes are “all just hypotheses, incomplete models that attempt to explain clinical experience of improved health.”
But they are derived from dozens of expert studies and scientific literature.
In the first chapter of his book, Dr. Lufkin writes: Book“I was totally in the health care establishment. I was in favor of an organized system, and my record speaks for itself. I was an unofficial spokesman for the establishment.”
“I have since developed four diseases that I have been taught (and others have been taught) may have a genetic component.
“I did everything right and I nearly died. The shock of it all set off alarms in my head. Something was seriously wrong with the health care system. I had been fed lies and I needed to know the truth.”
Dr. Lufkin, who focuses on longevity and awareness, noted that the rise in chronic disease means “we’re in a much more serious healthcare crisis than COVID-19, and most people don’t even realize it.”
Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of middle-aged adults with two or more chronic conditions jumped from 16% to 21%. Just four years later, that percentage had risen to 32%.
By 2024, that figure will rise to 40 percent, Dr. Lufkin said.
The first lie Dr. Lufkin details is about obesity, which affects an all-time high of 42 percent of Americans.
“We are now in the midst of the worst obesity epidemic in the history of the world,” he writes.
“Our understanding of the causes of this epidemic and its treatment is based on a simple lie: a calorie is a calorie, which implies that obesity is caused by eating too many calories.”
Dr. Lufkin pointed out that this statement is untrue because obesity is not simply caused by excess calorie intake; he said that no amount of calories is “enough” to cause obesity, and different types of calories have different effects on obesity.
Calories can be stored in the body as fat or can be burned directly by the body.
The doctors write: “The key control point for weight gain is how many of the calories you eat are stored and how many are burned; this number is determined by biochemical signals in the body, not the total number of calories.”
That signal is a hormone called insulin, which “tells cells to store calories primarily as fat. If the calories aren’t stored as fat, they’re burned. You don’t gain weight,” he added.
“When insulin activates and fat is stored, fewer calories are burned,” which leads to weight gain.
But without the insulin signal, calories are burned instead, preventing weight gain. So people who are insulin resistant (such as those with type 2 diabetes) have excessive insulin levels, putting them at risk for weight gain.
Certain foods, such as carbohydrates, also stimulate insulin production, regardless of calorie content.
“Not all calories have the same impact on weight gain, so weight loss is not simply about cutting down on calories. Obesity is not just about calories, it’s about insulin,” Dr. Lufkin writes.
The “lies” about calories began in the 1970s, he explained, when obesity was on the rise and the first dietary guidelines for Americans were published.
The guidelines recommend increasing your carbohydrate intake and decreasing your fat intake.
This misconception was popularized in the 1990s when the food pyramid was released, emphasizing high intakes of insulin-stimulating carbohydrates, leading many Americans to switch to a high-carb, low-fat diet.
“By replacing fat calories with carbohydrate calories,” Dr. Lufkin writes, “you increased insulin, sending a message to store fat — and fat was stored.”
“Around the same time that we started replacing fat with carbohydrates in our diets, obesity rates skyrocketed and haven’t slowed down since.”
Insulin and carbohydrates not only influence obesity, they are also central to diabetes.
One in three Americans has diabetes or prediabetes, but the CDC estimates that 80 percent of them don’t know they have it.
According to the CDC, between 2001 and 2004, 10 percent of American adults had diabetes.
This figure increased to 13.2% from 2017 to 2020. It then fell slightly to about 12% in 2021, the most recent data available.
Dr. Lufkin called the upward trend in overall cases “the worst diabetes epidemic in the history of the world.”
“The Diabetes Lie claims that insulin is the best way to treat type 2 diabetes.”
Type 2 diabetes accounts for 90% of diabetes cases and is mainly caused by genetics, lifestyle habits such as a high-carbohydrate diet, and weight.
As Dr. Lufkin discusses in the section on obesity, carbohydrates stimulate insulin, and when levels of the hormone get too high, it can lead to insulin resistance.
This makes the cells less sensitive to the amount of insulin that type 2 diabetics are given to suppress the disease.
Insulin administration “This increases insulin levels throughout the body, worsening insulin resistance, which is the underlying cause of type 2 diabetes,” the doctors write.
Dr. Lufkin argued that dietary changes, such as eliminating refined carbohydrates like white bread, and exercise may be more effective than insulin itself in lowering A1C, or average blood sugar levels, over a period of two to three months.
“Unfortunately, our health care system is optimized to prescribe insulin and other medications to manage type 2 diabetes, rather than teaching people how to reverse diabetes through nutritional changes to avoid its causes,” he said.
“To be fair, many people would rather take pills or injections than make lifestyle changes. But most people don’t realize how powerful and effective lifestyle choices can be.”