Obesity and the Salt Connection: I watched Blood and Guts: a History of Surgery, last night on BBC2.

Sunday, August 02, 2009

I watched Blood and Guts: a History of Surgery, last night on BBC2.

I watched Blood and Guts: a History of Surgery, last night on BBC2. It was the last part of a 5 part series and was very interesting. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00d4b70

Of particular interest to me was the historical information about Galen and Vesalius. Galen was a Greek doctor who lived in the 2nd century, and whose notes and drawings about human anatomy were for over a thousand years regarded by doctors as accurate and faultless. So for all those many hundreds of years no-one bothered to check out his (flawed) work! - Wikipedia has a couple of fascinating pages on the History of Anatomy - see http://www.historyworld.net/wrldhis/PlainTextHistories.asp?historyid=aa05 and includes the following:

Vesalius and the science of anatomy: AD 1533-1543

A young medical student, born in Brussels and known to history as Vesalius, attends anatomy lectures in the university of Paris. The lecturer explains human anatomy, as revealed by Galen more than 1000 years earlier, while an assistant points to the equivalent details in a dissected corpse. Often the assistant cannot find the organ as described, but invariably the corpse rather than Galen is held to be in error.

My compliments to the writer of that last sentence...(o:

Well, it's a jolly good job Vesalius came along!

Basically, then, in medicine and surgery, there are two sorts of truth/evidence:

beliefs assumed, and asserted to be facts by a medical or surgical authority, like Galen, i.e. not evidence-based
beliefs for which there is empirical evidence and scientific research that can be replicated, i.e. evidence-based

Unfortunately for people the world over, the medical profession still overwhelmingly favours authority over scientific research and evidence.

Thus we still have overweight/obese/fat people routinely insulted and told that they are obese because they are greedy and/or lazy, and they are exhorted to eat less and take more exercise. - This is the damaging advice of the 'authorities' on obesity. There's no evidence to support these theories and indeed no tests have ever been done to test their validity.

Eating less and exercising more does NOT reduce obesity and millions of overweight people know from experience that it doesn't. Sadly it's the only advice they get, usually, and if they take this advice they are further harmed. There doesn't seem to be a modern counterpart of Vesalius in the present medical profession, no-one to revolutionise that ignoble profession's thinking and practice on the subject of obesity that is damaging untold millions of people and steadily destroying national economies.

People who are overweight/fat/obese are sensitive to salt, which for them can result in sodium and water retention and therefore, obviously, weight gain. This in turn can result in calcium deficiency, which causes fat retention. Reducing salt intake reduces both the fluid retention and the fat retention. - Reducing calories does not address the fluid retention problem at all and that is the explanation for the fact that diets don't work.

Prescription drugs including many steroids, many antidepressants, anti-psychotics and epilepsy drugs as well as other pharmaceuticals, are a major cause of fluid retention/obesity/salt sensitivity and especially of morbid obesity. - Avoid taking prescription drugs unless they are absolutely necessary.

Lose weight, reduce your risk of most cancers, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, heart attack, vascular dementia, stroke, osteopenia, osteoporosis, hypercholesterolaemia, depression, liver damage and kidney problems, and improve your health in many other ways without drugs, hunger or expense by eating less salt! - Try it! - You will feel so much better! See my website www.wildeaboutsteroids.co.uk
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