Why is the Science of Nutrition Ignored in Medicine?

A succinct Ted Talk by arguably the most important nutrition research scientist of our time, T. Colin Campbell. Of course that's an opinion, but many feel Campbell should have received the Nobel Prize for his discovery that animal protein is a key carcinogen. But Campbell is far ahead of his time, and the Nobel is not his goal, it is the elimination of the post-industrial disease epidemic.

Science is catching up however, recently the World Health Organization has taken a step in the right direction with a survey of thousands of studies that correlate processed and red meat to cancer. Small bites are better than no bites, this information is culturally difficult to swallow. It should be noted however, Campbell's work implicates animal proteins in general as carcinogenic. We are not at the end of this story yet.

Meanwhile the backlash from industry to Campbell's work has been massive, in large part because our calorically rich nutritionally deficient food delivery system is a big and growing part of our economy. And the great irony is good nutrition, which is the primary cause of health, is not complicated in practice.

There is one overarching point to the work of Campbell and all the many other doctors, health practitioners, nutritionists, and researchers who also advocate a diet comprised primarily of whole fruits and vegetables, and that is healthy life span. We typically see statistics for total life span, but for many of us these days that includes a few decades of pain and suffering due to degraded health and vitality from cardiovascular disease (stroke, dementia, heart attack), cancer, diabetes, and autoimmune conditions. We are led to think these are the unfortunate but normal consequences of aging, but that is simply not true. These conditions are primarily the consequence of our nutritionally deficient diet that we, unfortunately, have come to think of as "normal". And it is normal in the sense it's the prevailing condition, but it is most definitely not normal for health.

And unfortunately healthy life span is decreasing, we can see this in the obesity rates of children and young adults which is up dramatically. Obesity is the one condition highly correlated to all the post-industrial diseases mentioned above, and could be said to be a post-industrial disease itself.

Doctors would do better in leading us toward health, but their hands are tied by three conditions: nutrition is not taught by medical schools, so in many cases they are as clueless as to "the cause of health" as the rest of us, they are only compensated for treating diseases in such a way as to perpetuate the post industrial disease epidemic, and the current "economic food delivery system", the primary cause of post-industrial diseases, is completely beyond their control.

To their credit, some MDs are making an effort to influence the quality of our food, but to a person express frustration and exasperation with the intractability of the health degrading economics of food production.