Most doctors know very little about what food does to the body.
If you have a specific medical condition, a best practice is to start a folder of some sort and collect good information there and try to understand it yourself. Another good thing to do is keep a health journal where you track, to some degree or other, specific metrics pertinent to your specific condition.
What I have concluded is that a lot of advice of that sort is over-simplifying a complex biological process. Figuring out what makes sense in terms of diet involves fleshing out your own mental models for the pathology of the condition in question.
> Most doctors know very little about what food does to the body.
This is bullshit. "Most doctors" know very little about the electromechanical processes involved in a keystroke but they still know it results in a letter appearing on the screen.
A doctor's job is to keep you alive and to a lesser extent, healthy. They are not in the fitness businesses but they sure know that fit people have less health problems. Problems that they ultimately get stuck treating.
Do they know the chemical processes at work (in detail) in the brain when you eat something? Probably not... Not unless they're a gastroenterologist/neurologist. But do they know that eating loads of sugar every day can lead to Type II diabetes? They sure do! I'd even go so far as to say, "Doctors know quite a lot more than most people" about such things!
They also know loads of things about salt! Ask any psychiatrist about the effects of high salt intake on various mental conditions (and their respective treatments). Ask any pediatrician what would happen if you fed a tablespoon of salt to a baby. Ask a dermatologist about salt in general (wow, take a seat and be prepared for a lecture).
This comment is strangely defensive (are you a doctor?). I’ve had to deal with all kinds of issues over past decades and the “doctors know little about food” hypothesis is 100% true in my case. Without getting into too much detail looking back over past dozen doctors or so maybe 1 focused on factors related to nutritional effects for causes/cures of conditions i was dealing with. And knowing what i know now, nutrition was more effective in treatment/prevention than anything they prescribed. It almost seems to me like they follow a manual that treats symptoms and when-in-doubt-do-surgery type solutions.
Most doctors recommend changing diet to aleviate symptoms. Its just that most people don't do it.
When you say "nutrition was more effective in treatment/prevention than anything prescribed and stating 1 focused on that" I call bullshit. Its just a known fact that diet changes can alleviate issues so its pretty much a given but its not going to alleviate the issues right away (in most instances) which is the doctors primary concern. So they often prescribed medicine to do just this.
If you need a doctor to explicitly mention to you that good nutrition will improve your health, then I'd suggest being a little more perceptive. But case in point, every doctor I've met has recommended diet changes to alleviate my symptoms.
> If you need a doctor to explicitly mention to you that good nutrition will improve your health, then I'd suggest being a little more perceptive
huh? the point was made about their in depth understanding of impact of specific nutrition. not that "good diet is important" generality. and I am being "a little more perceptive" by doing a decade of my own research. not sure why that comment was necessary or what it has to do with my point
By good diet, I mean higher intake in fruits and vegetables, moderate intake in meats. Stay away from high processed foods with excessive sugar, fat, and sodium. It shouldn't take a decade of research to figure that out unless your diet is completely strict due to specific ailments.
By good diet, I mean higher intake in fruits and vegetables, moderate intake in meats.
this is a common truism that may or may not be beneficial to any one individual. it has nothing to do with understanding of nutrition as pertaining to treating specific health issues.
it's like saying, "exercise and sleep good". while this is true in most cases, has nothing to do with original point "Most doctors know very little about what food does to the body."
No, but what's good for the gander is usually good for the goose (I know its a rephrasing of the original). That's how we get effective medicine and built models of understanding. While individual factors are prevalent, they usually don't cause as much deviation from the overarching model. For example, higher intake in fruits and vegetables is a practical step, easily understood, and well studied to help reduce meat related illnesses like heart disease and CVD. While the mechanisms aren't well understood, that doesn't preclude the data.
> "A doctor's job is to keep you alive and to a lesser extent, healthy. They are not in the fitness businesses but they sure know that fit people have less health problems. Problems that they ultimately get stuck treating."
But doctors don't get "stuck" treating health issues! On the contrary, that's how they get paid! Doctors' jobs, unfortunately, have perverse compensation structures which disincentivize their helping patients reach maximum healthiness. They get paid to keep you alive, yes. But they get paid much more if you remain in a state of imperfect health -- and thus remain a patient, requiring paid treatment -- than if you happily stay fit and only visit for routine checkups.
Some cultures (eg the proverbial village doctor in some parts of Asia) resolved this conflict of interest by having members of the community pay the doctor only while they're healthy, but pay nothing when faced with illness. Interesting to think what such a model might look like in modern western civ.
I'm not going to get into the back and forth below this comment.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis. It is standard practice for CF clinics to have a dietitian on staff. Last I checked, they recommended a "high fat, high calorie, high salt" diet for CF. In line with that, they straight up recommend you eat junk food.
I'm currently drug free, which is supposed to be impossible. I achieved that in part by focusing on improving my nutritional status. Instead of eating a high calorie, junk food diet, I got very picky about food quality and nutritional value.
So that's where I'm coming from. I'm a former homemaker. If me reading up a bit on nutrition and food chemistry and applying it to my life can get such dramatically better results than conventional wisdom for my condition, it seems to me the bar for what doctors need to know about food and health is set pretty low.
My experience has been roughly in line but I usually find they're somewhat knowledgeable. Just remember they're stuck with recommending guidelines or else so they haven't got much room to move when the guidelines are a total farse.
If you have a specific medical condition, a best practice is to start a folder of some sort and collect good information there and try to understand it yourself. Another good thing to do is keep a health journal where you track, to some degree or other, specific metrics pertinent to your specific condition.
What I have concluded is that a lot of advice of that sort is over-simplifying a complex biological process. Figuring out what makes sense in terms of diet involves fleshing out your own mental models for the pathology of the condition in question.