A third of Americans have metabolic syndrome and 88 percent have at least one of the markers. The majority of people are metabolically unhealthy.
We know how to reverse metabolic syndrome and it is backed by scientific studies.
Any compound you put in your body, be it a food supplement or a powerful drug, is just input into our biological operating system. There is only one that we have multiple times a day, and that we need to have, that really determines what we are composed of.
That is food.
The elements that are crushing modern society are:
· Diabetes, which costs now $1 billion per day and by midcentury one in three Americans will have diabetes.
· Alzheimer's, which is increasing at a similar rate. By 2050 I think it’s predicted to cost $3 billion per day and the prevalence could triple in America.
These diseases are climbing without any effective treatment or reversal. The treatment for Diabetes is symptom management, but they're still considered progressive, irreversible conditions.
And when you think about their nature as metabolic diseases, it makes sense that we would need to treat them with nutrition.
If you pose the question, ‘Does nutrition have a positive effect on health?’ to any health care practitioner they would say, ‘Of course. 100%!’
There is a consensus there. But it’s what constitutes good nutrition that is the stumbling block.
A lot of practitioners just follow the standard guidelines. There is the perception that they're based on good evidence and that they're being supported by an expert panel who are going through a proper systematic review of the literature.
I believed that too. And I continued to believe it as I progressed through multiple metabolic conditions, until I really got to the point where I was hopeless. And even at that point, I kind of still believed it because it’s much easier to believe in this paternalistic system.
It's actually hard, quite honestly, to believe that the nutrition information being given to us by these mysterious bodies, like the USDA, about nutrition and health wouldn't be spot on.
Then, you realize it's not. And you often have to realize that through trial and error in your own life and experience by trying something else and realizing, Wow! This works!
What I do know is, in the end science will win. That means that metabolic medicine, low carbohydrate diets, and ketogenic options will come to be a part of conventional medicine.
It’s just going to take time.
I have concluded, or at least my interpretation is, that the most probable way forward, and it may be the only way forward, is to go through this unfortunate pattern of people getting sick and growing the low-carbohydrate community until we reach an inflection point. I don't know where that is.
I kind of sense that we're heading to that inflection point, where more and more people are starting to listen. Some open-minded practitioners are actually being curious about this and saying, maybe there's something here.
I think the idea that you prevent and reverse metabolic diseases, like Diabetes and Alzheimer's, with the right nutrition will take off in the next 5-10 years.