Golden Handcuffs - The GDP Problem

As Doug Graham is fond of saying, you can be fit without being healthy, but you can't be healthy without being fit.

A friend took me to task recently for not pointing out sugar is bad in my blog posts. OK, agreed, sugar is bad, but let's look at that a bit deeper.

People of the developed west consume more calories from vegetable oils than sugar. Both are empty calorie substances (can't call them food). But more calories than sugar? How is that possible?

Oils are in everything. It is not difficult for us to get 1/3 cup of oil in a day! Oils and other fats create the precondition for insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. True, any empty calorie is bad (displacing nutrition in the diet), but the precondition for insulin resistance and diabetes is the primary culprit, and sugar is not it.

People on an 80/10/10 diet can eat refined sugars (but it's not recommended) and will not develop insulin resistance or adult onset (type 2) diabetes. Most do not know this yet, but this is changing.

Then my friend (a good friend BTW) proposed the idea that most of the world eats more plants than we do but does not experience greater longevity.

Well, sure, but second and third world populations can suffer from impure water, poor sanitation, lack of calories, lack of nutrition, and lack of access to medical attention. However the evidence is clear, populations living in benign conditions (where basic needs are met) that also consume a whole foods plant based diet (low in fats and high in carbs) experience not only greater longevity (in many cases much longer), but perhaps more importantly, good health their entire lives. Peoples of the developed west typically experience a precipitous health decline well before death, for the last 20-30 years of life.

So if we add an additional condition to longevity studies - length of healthy life - a very different picture emerges.

Dr. Fuhrman, a whole food plant based medical doctor who has coined the term "Nutritarian Diet" proposes the idea if we integrate the benefits of technology and medicine intelligently with a plant based diet the healthy life expectancy in the developed world could extend to 120 years. Epidemiologic studies also show aggression tends to decrease in plant based populations...maybe we would be less inclined to blow ourselves up too.

So what's the hold up? Well, first of all the population would be healthy not sick (and getting sicker). What is the precondition for a healthy economy? Growth. Here's perhaps the most curious irony of our time (a time infested with curious ironies) - economic health depends on a sick population, and economic growth depends on a population getting continually sicker. Now there's a winning formula.

So if the entire developed world went to Dr. Fuhrman's Nutritarian Diet what would happen? Need (demand) for health care would fall off a cliff and force a massive reduction in scale of that industry. Most MDs would be forced out of practice. Big pharma would shrink precipitously. All the funds raised for "the search for cures" would no longer be needed. The processed and fast food industries would collapse. Big agriculture practices would be forced into major changes. We would only need 25% of current (and still growing) hospital bed capacity. Insurance costs would be much lower, forcing a big down size of the insurance industry. etc etc etc.

In other words, the collective impact on developed world GDP would be catastrophic. It's probably no stretch to propose that greater than half of developed world GDP has become dependent on the combinations of the "disease induction" and "disease management" industries.

Is it any coincidence the primary resistance to global warming solutions is also economic? Is it also coincidence the primary human contribution to global warming is animal agriculture? Did you know that? Most people still don't, that's changing too.