Show This One to Your Doctor!

. . . study from a major medical center favors good diet over pills and surgery Will wonders never cease! Kaiser Permanente is the largest managed care company and hospital system in the US, and it looks like they may be getting serious about helping their patients get well! A report in their Spring 2013 journal advocates using a plant-based diet to treat disease. This report was written to educate physicians. Doctors receive very little education in and, as the authors point out, “too often . . . quickly prescribe medications instead of giving patients a chance to correct their disease through healthy eating and active living.” The authors advise physicians to “consider recommending a plant-based diet to all their patients.” To help make their case, they present a case study of a 63-year-old man who was able to normalize his high blood pressure and cholesterol, significantly improve type II diabetes, and discontinue or decrease five drugs he had been taking within 16 weeks of adopting a plant-based diet along with exercising for 15 minutes twice a day. Such progress, they note, is “rarely encountered in clinical practice.” They go on to summarize evidence from the medical literature supporting the use of plant-based diets for treating obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and high blood pressure, and for reducing all-cause mortality. The authors end by saying, “The future of health care will involve an evolution toward a paradigm where the prevention and treatment of disease is centered, not on a pill or surgical procedure, but on another serving of fruits and vegetables.” It is quite startling, and certainly most welcome, to get such good advice from a very establishment source.

Tuso PJ. Nutritional update for physicians: plant-based diets. The Permanente Journal. Spring 2013.  17 (2):61-66.