“Free man is by necessity insecure; thinking man is by necessity uncertain.”

Erich Fromm.



Eat one must, to live. Eating and oxygen in the breathed in air continuously run this dynamic human system. Eating is not the be all and end all of living, though. Science is change. What does not change does not qualify to be science by definition. The scientific truth of today could be the folly of tomorrow. This applies, in no small measure, to food sciences and the healthy eating advice given to the public, as also the diet advice given to patients suffering from various ailments in the modern medical system. One would be surprised to know that the foundation of modern medical science of nutrition is very shaky and was based on the Nazi secrets of the Second World War, as the Nazi soldiers were supposed to be the strongest at that time.



Things have changed a lot since then. On the other hand, the observational research of Indian wisdom, which goes back thousands of years, is based on more secure foundation. Ayurveda has a lot to offer to the modern nutritional scientist. Let us not probe that for this write up. Be that as it may, let us look into the basis of our nutritional advice and examine how it gets distorted when it goes through the market forces in a monetary economy, in modern medicine. The first ever Diet-Heart Study was started in the now famous village of Framingham in Massachusetts in the US in the year 1954, which gobbled up $110 million of the American tax payer’s money. The study was a prospective one and ended in the year 1959.



The hypothesis of the study was that fat in food is the be all and end all of all our health problems. This was based on the retrospective epidemiologic data from Europe after the Second World War, which showed that death rate due to coronary artery disease in Europe, after the war, went up directly proportionate to the per capita consumption of fat. I must hasten to add here that epidemiology, which has helped medical science a lot for the study of large epidemics of infectious diseases like small pox and cholera, has miserably failed when applied to chronic diseases like the coronary artery disease, stroke and cancer. One of the leading American epidemiologists, Dr. Steven Milloy, goes a step further to call epidemiology a Science without Sense, in a small, but, excellent book by the same title published by the Cato Institute, Washington DC.



Based on the hypothesis and the earlier European data, large number of companies, both in the US and Europe, had already come up with many new low fat, altered fat and what have you diet concoctions that were sold in the market to the gullible public, as also to the medical profession to endorse. This was a multibillion dollar thriving business. Just then, in the year 1959, the Diet-Heart Study, mentioned earlier, came to the conclusion that the diet that one eats, unless one is obese or has some other associated illness, has no connection to heart disease in healthy individuals if they ate sensibly.



This data took the industry by surprise and they got to work at it very effectively. The Diet-Heart study data has not seen the light of the day in print to date. The data were swept under the carpet. The $110 million American tax payers’ money went down the drain. This myth of the fat hypothesis continues to this day, of course, in various guises.

Now comes the “Rolls Royce” of a prospective study in this area published in the JAMA of the 8th February 2006 edition (JAMA 2006; 295: 629-642). This $415 million Federal grant money spent study of 49,000 women between the ages of 50-79 followed for a period of eight years showed that those who ate very little fat in their diets had the same rate of breast cancer, colon cancer, heart attack and stroke rates as those that ate whatever they wanted to eat!



Hailing this study as the revolutionary one, Dr. Jules Hirsh, emeritus professor at the Rockefeller University in New York, said that the study could be the last word in this field. He went on to add that “people in the medical field should stop this era of thinking that we have all the data to try and change the Nation’s eating habits.” Dr. Michel Thum of the American Cancer Society also felt that this study could never be bettered by any other in the foreseeable future. However, there were some who will not change their mind set. Dr. Libby of the cardiology department of Harvard Medical School felt that people should not reduce fat in diet but should change the fats. Dr. Dean Ornish, who lives off low fat diet advice to people, felt that the study is not accurate. Truth influences only very few people while falsehood and mystery will drag millions by the nose. That is our curse.



To cap it, we have a huge drug industry trying to lower human blood fats belonging to various castes like the caste system in India. Many drugs have come and gone in the last half a century, starting with the dangerous cholestyramine in the 50s, to the latest statins in 2000s. The truth is that all these drugs did effectively lower the recipient’s blood fats to give an excellent laboratory report to the patient. This reduction might have marginally reduced the deaths due to blood vessels diseases (could be due to life style changes also) but all of those drugs have, at the end of the day, sent more people to meet their maker in heaven prematurely…! The total deaths, at the end of the day, have always been higher in the drug treated group despite the cholesterol levels in the laboratory being normal with drugs. The numbers are not statistically significant, though, according to the epidemiologists. In the meantime, lots of water flowed down the London Bridge in the area of diet epidemiology.



While Frederickson was busy building his research empire on the fat hypothesis in the 60s, a noted London biochemist, John Yudkin, figured out from the same post World War European data that fat had very little to do with vessel disease and it was cane sugar which was the worst culprit. In his celebrated book Pure, White, and Deadly he goes to great lengths to convince all of us that our greatest enemy is white, refined cane sugar…! A decade later two young researchers in London ironically showed similar causality between the number of trousers sold in Europe and the deaths due to heart attacks…! Do not stop buying trousers!



These are all the aberrations of the science of epidemiology referred to above as the science without sense. When two things go up concurrently in any society there should, per force, be an association between the two of them. In Europe at that time it was due to economic prosperity that fat, sugar and trousers were all used up more by society. To directly extrapolate that association into to a cause-effect relationship would, of course, be good for the industry but, bad for mankind.



Do not lose heart. Science has now realized that reductionism that science swears by is fallible in a dynamic system like the human body. Quantum physics opened a new vista where scientists realized that the five senses that a reductionist scientist uses could deceive him/her in this dynamic universe when the scientist tries to unravel the mysteries of nature at the sub-atomic level. Two multiplied by three need not always be six-the famous Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle.



The human consciousness plays a vital role in what the scientist sees. It is very easy to see what one WANTS to see in reductionist science and research. That is precisely the reason why father JJ Thomson of the Cavendish Institute got the Nobel Prize in 1907 for showing that the electrons were waves and son JG Thomson of the same institute got the Nobel in 1937 for showing that the electrons were particles. Both were right and both could be wrong in the era of superstrings and membrane theory! Research data of this kind of science is in the eye of the beholder….!

New data has accumulated now to show that the human mind (consciousness) is the most important player in the drama of human health and disease. Diet and other environmental factors play a secondary role. As long as one eats only when hungry, in moderation, the food that pleases him/her and does not become a gormandizer, one need not lose sleep on the micronutrients and the molecules and atoms in the food.

The food must be wholesome and as close to nature as possible. Preserved, spoiled, and altered to suit the taste buds and heavily adulterated food could be dangerous to human health. Fresh food, basically vegetarian with plenty of fruits, and in moderation, is ideal. Fat is a very vital part of human food. Food without any fat could kill very effectively as every cell wall in the human body, of which there are one hundred thousand billion in all, is made up of cholesterol. Cell wall is the key to good health. Broken or weak cell wall that releases oxidants to the surroundings is the best invitation to all diseases.



Present research data, taking all aspects (holistic) into consideration, have thrown up negative thoughts like, hatred, greed, jealousy, anger, and depression due to frustration, as the major players in the game of health as well as chronic fatal diseases like heart attack, stroke and cancer. It is, therefore, not what you eat that kills you but that which eats you that kills you. Take heart and enjoy your good food in moderation. Live for others and enjoy good health till you die. Never attempt to live for ever. You can never succeed. Polypill and polymeal are the newer fads. Time only could tell us about their side effects.



“The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.”

Bertrand Russell