(Updated)– Last summer British researchers provoked concern when they published a paper raising the possibility that by following an established guideline UK doctors may have caused as many as 10,000 deaths each year. Now they have gone a step further and published an estimate that the same guideline may have led to the deaths of as many as 800,00 people in Europe over the last five years. The finding, they write, “is so large that the only context in the last 50 years comes from the largest scale professional failures in the political sphere.” The 800,000 deaths are comparable in size to the worst cases of genocide and mass murder in recent history.
Professional failures in the political sphere. That's a nice euphemism for genocide, isn't it?
Let's look at what they're talking about here. The issue revolves around an alleged case of research misconduct that has led to liberal use of beta blockers during non-cardiac-related surgeries. Unfortunately beta blockers have a relatively low incidence of really nasty side effects, including death. This risk would be allegedly justified if the drugs saved more lives than they took, on balance, but the problem is that the alleged benefit appears to have been illusory -- and maybe it was represented to be true due to misconduct, not mere accident.
As a result all you have left is the harms, and all of the people who thus died shouldn't have.
This sort of crap is all too common in various professional fields but nowhere does it harm more people than in all stripes of medicine. We lobotomized people, either physically or chemically, for years in the outright false belief we were "helping" them. We have seen people push drugs and procedures that are of questionable benefit at best, but come with a whole litany of side effects that are unquestionably harmful. We indeed have an entire premise of modern drug-based medicine, the lipid hypothesis, that as you may note is a hypothesis and yet (a) it appears to have to been disproved and yet (b) forms the basis for billions of dollars of statin prescriptions written worldwide.
At the same time we have all manner of nonsense when it comes to diabetes and obesity, and yet the elephant in the room -- the fact that these patterns seem to have appeared out of thin air in the last 50 years -- is never correlated back to changes we know took place. Specifically, the USDA's insistence on low-fat, high-carbohydrate food intake and the manufacturing of foods that never existed in nature in any form such as margarine, other various hydrogenated creations, highly-refined sugars and refined grains.
Now note that I'm not claiming I have proof that the two are linked. But -- if you are smoking in bed, and then an hour later your bed is on fire, while that's not proof that you lit it on fire with the cigarette the odds are damn good that the two events are related.
What I do know is this -- there are a hell of a lot of fat people running around in America today and 30 or 40 years ago there was a lot fewer of them as a percentage of the population. 100 years ago there were even fewer. I also know that mathematically it is impossible to keep count of caloric intake to within 100 calories a day without being in a laboratory environment -- one decent little slice of cheese, one banana, a large orange or similar is enough to be off by at least that much. Yet that's 36,500 calories a year if you're off that much, which is about 12lbs of body mass.
It therefore is clear mathematically that counting calories on a long-term basis, outside of a laboratory, can never work and those who claim otherwise are lying. Yet it is also clear that some people manage to maintain their body mass across large periods of time without gaining or losing any material amount.
It therefore is obvious through basic logic that the body has a regulatory system within it that can accomplish this task with the necessary degree of precision, and absent a disorder in that pathway it will do so.
Ok, so since mathematically and logically all these things must be true what has happened to damage that pathway over the last 30 or 50 years?
Hmmm.... maybe we should look at what has changed and start by trying to eliminate some of those changes to see if any of them result in that pathway not being damaged.
But that takes work and honest research. It's easier to publish bullshit in support of a few billion dollar profit, when looking at environmental factors such as this would lead inexorably to someone's loss.
Yeah.
Well, guess what folks. My own personal experiment with this began in early 2011. My body mass was 210lbs and I was a fat bastard unable to perform one mile of running without stopping. Oh sure, I could "jog" -- sort of -- for a mile. Three? Forget it. A couple of dozen flights of stairs at a jogging clip? Forget it.
Eight months later, approximately Thanksgiving of 2011, I had lost 60 lbs. I have an accurate record of all of my workouts during that time. Only 20 of it, charitably, can be credited to exercise on a mathematical basis (3,000 calories, approximately, is one pound of body mass gained or lost), and this assumes that the exercise did not make me more hungry and thus make me desire to eat larger portions (it probably did, by the way.)
Add to that that I can and have run sub-22 minute 5ks -- a pace I couldn't achieve when I was 17. I know that for a fact because I did it when I was 17, although not competitively (I sucked at running but was compelled to a take a sport, competitive or not, every semester at my High School -- and the other option in the fall for boys was soccer at which I sucked even worse.)
This morning the scale read 152.2. It has read between 150 and 155lbs for the last two years. I do not count calories. I run when I feel like it and bike when I feel like it, which, in decent weather, is reasonably often -- 3-5x a week, on average. But over the last four weeks it has been awfully close to zero, simply because the weather has sucked donkey balls and the holidays have left me a bit lazy (Holiday merriment and its inevitable price the next morning might have something to do with that too.)
But during that time my weight has not changed.
How can this be? It's simply this folks -- I didn't go on a diet, I changed my lifestyle. I stopped listening to people with vested interests and started looking at historical fact, along with biological fact. And when those two things clashed with what I being told, I experimented -- on myself, which is entirely ethical since the consequences are mine.
The results? I'm in better shape now than I've been in since my teen years. I don't need an alarm clock to get up in the morning. My body mass hasn't gone back up, even when I slack off the exercise. I'm not hungry all the time. I eat when I want food.
What changed?
What goes in the pie hole.
Period.
You've read about it here, and I bring it up again because here is a case where nearly a million people may have been killed due to outright misconduct in so-called "medical science."
How many tens of millions are fat, sick and likely on their way to severe morbidity and an early grave due to much simpler and easier-to-correct causes, also as a consequence of similar misconduct along with your own refusal to perform the very same sort of experiment on yourself?
Are you in that group?
If you are ask yourself this: What, other than being fat, sick and likely dying early, do you have to lose by not attempting what I did? There are no drugs involved and not one thing goes down my pie hole that I cannot find in a common grocery store (other than plenty of good old-fashioned water which I don't bother paying for in a bottle.)