Medical Ghostwriting, Selective Publications,
and the death of the Evidence Base

The video below is an interesting lecture by Dr. Fung, who is a medical expert that I respect.
It provides some clear and convincing explanations; answering questions I've had due to personal experiences with specific medications previously prescribed for me, for my ageing mother (now deceased), and for other members of my family.

Body of Truth: How Science, History, and Culture Drive Our Obsession with Weight — and What We Can Do about it, by Harriet Brown (2015)

Body of Truth is an inspired and inspiring well-researched book about our cultural obsession with weight, our fetishization of thinness, and our demonization of fat. It is a compelling read which will make us think more deeply about the attitudes we have about our bodies and our health.

Over the past twenty-five years, our quest for thinness has morphed into a relentless obsession with weight and body image. In our culture, "fat" has become a four-letter word. Or, as Lance Armstrong said to the wife of a former teammate, "I called you crazy. I called you a bitch. But I never called you fat."

How did we get to this place where the worst insult you can hurl at someone is "fat"? Where women and girls (and increasingly men and boys) will diet, purge, overeat, undereat, and berate themselves and others, all in the name of being thin?

As a science journalist, Harriet Brown has explored this collective longing and fixation from an objective perspective; as a mother, wife, and woman with "weight issues," she has struggled to understand it on a personal level. Now, in Body of Truth, Brown systematically unpacks what's been offered as "truth" about weight and health.

Starting with the four biggest lies, Brown shows how research has been manipulated; how the medical profession is complicit in keeping us in the dark; how big pharma and big, empty promises equal big, big dollars; how much of what we know (or think we know) about health and weight is wrong. And how all of those affect all of us every day, whether we know it or not.

The quest for health and wellness has never been more urgent, yet most of us continue to buy into fad diets and unattainable body ideals, unaware of the damage we're doing to ourselves. Through interviews, research, and her own experience, Brown not only gives us the real story on weight, health, and beauty, but also offers concrete suggestions for how each of us can sort through the lies and misconceptions and make peace with and for ourselves.

The video below is an example of determination in dealing with a desire for food.

See Article Below:

 

Why being 'overweight' means you live longer: The way scientists twist the facts.
             by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, M.D.

I have been studying medical research for many years, and the single most outstanding thing I have learned is that many medical "facts" are simply not true. Let's take as an example the health risks of drinking alcohol. If you are a man, it has virtually become gospel that drinking more than 21 units of alcohol a week is damaging to your health. But where did the evidence to support this well-known "fact" come from?

The answer may surprise you. According to Richard Smith, a former editor of the British Medical Journal, the level for safe drinking was "plucked out of the air". He was on a Royal College of Physicians team that helped produce the guidelines in 1987. He told The Times newspaper that the committee's epidemiologist had conceded that there was no data about safe limits available and that "it's impossible to say what's safe and what isn't". Smith said the drinking limits were "not based on any firm evidence at all", but were an "intelligent guess".

In time, the intelligent guess becomes an undisputed fact. On much the same lines, we have the inarguable "fact" that being overweight is bad for your health. I should say that, by definition, being "overweight" must be bad for your health – or we wouldn't call it overweight. But we do not define overweight as being the weight above which you are damaging your health; it has an exact definition.

To be overweight means having a BMI of between 25 and 30. Not as bad for you as obesity, but still damaging. Why else would all hospitals and doctors surgeries have BMI charts plastered on the wall with little green squares, orange squares and red squares? Green is normal weight, orange is overweight and red is obese. Even Wikipedia confirms this: "The generally accepted view is that being overweight causes similar health problems to obesity, but to a lesser degree. Adams et al estimated that the risk of death increases by 20 to 40 per cent among overweight people, and the Framingham heart study found that being overweight at age 40 reduced life expectancy by three years."

You can also find papers in prestigious medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association (Jama) with the following headline: "Excess deaths associated with underweight, overweight and obesity." That certainly suggests that overweight is bad for you. However, if you look more closely at the paper in Jama, we can find these words: "Overweight was not associated with excess mortality." (My italics). Perhaps more extraordinarily, wha...

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At this moment I feel like I’ve arrived at the end of the line. 

As a 5’0” tall, “reduced obese” sedentary 70 year old female, my weight continues to creep upward, no matter what macronutrients I eat or don’t eat; no matter how small I keep my portions; or how hard I work to keep my calories low.

This last calendar year I continued with my best efforts at recording every bite taken in a computer food journal, every single day.  Sometimes I ate large amounts of food, and sometimes I ate tiny amounts of food.  Sometimes I ate a “balanced diet” and sometimes I ate “low-carb; sometimes I ate “high-fat, moderate protein, low-carb”;  sometimes I worked to keep my calories around 1000 calories per day; sometimes I worked to have only two 5-bite meals of whatever.  My computer eating records show that my overall 365 day calorie average was about 780 calories per day.  That number was the total of all my big eating days combined with my small eating days, divided by 365 days. 

At this point in my life, I am elderly, and although I am in excellent health overall, I have developed a problem with my right hip which restricts my activities, and I lack the ability to do physical “exercise” except for brief periods of slow walking.  However, over the past ten years I’ve run many extensive personal experiments on how various exercise affects my own bodyweight, and the results have proven to me that however much or however little I exercise has almost no effect.  Apparently my metabolism adjusts down to keep me from dropping weight during periods when I engage in heavy exercise… however it does NOT adjust up to keep me from gaining weight when my food intake goes up whether with or without exercise.

During most of this past year, I’ve weighed in my mid-130s - which gives me a BMI in the “overweight” range.  During the past 9 years I’ve worked and worked on maintaining my large weight-loss, and tried to drop as low as possible inside the “normal” BMI range.  The middle of a “normal” BMI range is, for me, 115 pounds.  I struggled to drop and stay below that number for the first couple of my maintenance years, without success, then … while continuing consistently with my ongoing struggle at a food intake averaging around 1050 calories daily … my weight began climbing.  Instead of bouncing within a 5 pound range between 110 and 115, it bounced between 115 and 120.   Then despite a few more years of working hard to drop back to those lower numbers, my weight climbed to bounce between 120 and 125; then over more time, while eating even fewer calories, and additional exercise, my weight climbed to bounce between 125 and 130; then between 130 and 135.  This past several months, my weight has been bouncing between 135 and 140. 

There appears to be no end in sight.  This has been happening over a 9 year period. Since my activity cannot...