Why drugs are bad medicine and which foods work better.

Thousands of people suffer adverse reactions to prescription drugs each year:

• Drugs for arthritis can cause heart problems
• Drugs for depression can cause suicide
• Drugs for insomnia can be addictive
• Drugs for cholesterol can cause heart failure

In Food is Better Medicine Than Drugs, nutrition expert Patrick Holford and award-winning medical journalist Jerome Burne expose the truth about prescription drugs, and why we swallow what the drug industry tells us. They explain why the right combination of foods, supplements and simple lifestyle changes offers long-term, drug-free solutions with immediate benefits to your health.

Find out about the harm these medicines can do:

• Statins
• Pain-killers
• Steroids
• Bronchodilators
• Drugs for diabetes
• HRT
• Blood pressure drugs

Discover which foods and supplements can help you to:

• Prevent and reverse diabetes
• Stop PMS and menopausal problems
• Solve your child's learning problems
• Beat depression
• Beat insomnia
• Reduce pain
• Alleviate asthma and eczema
• Avoid heart disease
• Prevent memory loss

'Patrick Holford is one of the world's leading authorities on new approaches to health and nutrition.' Daily Mail

Contents

Acknowledgements
Guide to Abbreviations, Measures and References
Introduction

Part 1: The Truth about Drugs

• The Prescription Addiction
Why we need to kick the habit
• The Dark Side of the Blockbusters
  What else aren't they telling us?
• Full Spectrum Dominance
  How the drug companies keep control
• On Guard
  How to tell good medicine from bad

• How to Regain Your Health
  Getting to the true causes of disease
• The Road to Health
  Six key steps to recapture well-being
• Your 100% Health Check-up
  Find out how healthy you are and how healthy you could be

Part 3: Drugs vs Food as Medicine

• Arresting Diabetes
  Diabetes drugs vs balancing your blood sugar
• Balancing Hormones in the Menopause
  The HRT scandal vs natural control
• Beating Depression
  'Let them eat Prozac' vs natural anti-depressants
• Preventing Memory Loss and Alzheimer's
  Memory drugs vs natural mind boosters
• Relieving Anxiety and Insomnia
  The sleeping pill scandal vs natural insomnia busters
• Reducing Your Pain
  Anti-inflammatories vs natural painkillers
• Eradicating Asthma and Eczema
  'Puffers' and cortisone creams vs new solutions
• Helping Your Heart
  Cardiovascular drugs vs alternative heart medicine
• Solving Attention and Learning Problems
  Ritalin vs making kids smarter

Part 4: Changing the System

• The Medicines Act: Catch-22
  How non-drug medicines that work are banned
• The Bad Science behind Attacks on Vitamins
  Why vitamins are a health essential
• Too Safe Can Mean Sorry
  Why the 'precautionary principle' may be damaging your health
• The Medicine of Tomorrow
  Our vision for the future — how it could be
• Bringing in the New Medicine
  How to encourage your doctor to practice food medicine

Final Parts

Appendix 1:100% Health - Creating Tomorrow's Medicine Today
Appendix 2: Breathing Exercise
Recommended Reading
Resources
References
Index

THESE DAYS IT'S practically impossible to turn on the TV or open a paper without seeing some kind of evidence that eating poor-quality food can make you ill or at least below par, while eating fresh, wholesome food gives you a much better chance of staying fit and healthy.

Morgan Spurlock's movie Super Size Me was a vivid and shocking illustration of just how bad a month's worth of hamburgers, cola and milkshakes can make you feel, while Jamie Oliver's British TV series chronicling his heroic attempts to provide decent food for school children made it clear not just how hard it is to turn round an institution, but also what a difference proper food can make in our children. Shortly before we finished this book, a report was published in the US showing that a teenager drinking one can of fizzy drink a day could put on 141b5 (6.4kg) a year1 — thus moving a step closer to developing diabetes or heart disease later in life.

Meanwhile, studies showing more specific benefits from the right sort of nutrition are proliferating, too. Last January, scientists on a very big UK project —14,000 women followed up over 15 years — reported that the amount of omega-3 essential fats in a pregnant woman's diet helps to determine her child's intelligence and fine motor skills as well as their 'propensity to anti-social behaviour'.2

So food is powerful stuff. Even so, it's well known that many of us don't eat that well and that we also have low levels of various essential vitamins and minerals. And this ties in with statistics showing that quite a few of us — like that teenager clutching a daily bottle of cola — are heading for various chronic diseases as we get older.

For example, one in six are set to develop diabetes, and one in six are expected to die prematurely, the most likely cause being heart disease, strokes or cancer. Obesity, linked to type 2 diabetes and a range of other health problems, is becoming more common too: by the age of 50, one in three of us will be officially obese. And it gets worse. A quarter of us will spend the last 30 years of our lives with the pain of arthritis, and a quarter of those who make it through to 80 will have Alzheimer's. Perhaps most depressing of all is the statistic that on any given day in the UK, three in ten people are sick or in pain. Precise figures may vary a bit in other Western countries, but the general picture is much the same.

That's the bad news. The good news is that it doesn't have to be like this. We can prevent these disorders, and we can also change the way we treat them in people who do develop them. This book is all about what needs to be done and why.

At the moment, what happens to all these people hit by disease? In a word, drugs — perhaps two or three to start with, then a dozen or more towards the end to help deal with the symptoms of these diseases. Many more of us will be put on drugs for less serious conditions such as high blood pressure or raised cholesterol, with the promise that they will reduce our chances of joining the ranks of the chronically ill. But is this really the best way to deal with the rising tide of poor health?

So many of us view doctors as a kind of one-stop pill dispensary that we rarely consider how limited this way of thinking is. To begin with, the drugs almost never do anything about the underlying cause. They're designed to treat symptoms — raised blood pressure, the pain in your joints. And in the end, they don't do the job. Imagine that your health problem was a leaking roof and the symptom was water dripping into the bedroom. Putting buckets under the drips year after year would treat the symptom, but a more sane and satisfactory solution would be to replace the missing tile.

Suppose you've been to your doctor and have been told that your blood-sugar level is getting dangerously high — in fact, that you have type 2 diabetes. You will very likely be given a drug called metformin, which will bring your blood-sugar level down fast. Once it's done its job, however, metformin will obviously not get to the root of why you've got blood-sugar problems in the first place. It's the classic 'bucket' approach.

Getting to grips with your illness — replacing the tile — demands a solution that goes much deeper. A drugless, and painless, way to treat the specific condition while enhancing overall health. In essence, you need to avoid foods that raise blood sugar. But just handing out diet sheets, as many doctors now do, is worse than useless. We need to know how specific foods can fix specific conditions, and how we can put both the basics of good health together with those to make a nutritional blueprint that's best for us.

More and more of us realise that the chronic diseases of the West are caused by poor diet and an unhealthy lifestyle. As the evidence in this book will make crystal-clear, we are digging our own graves with a knife and fork. So for both prevention and cure, the logical route is to change what you put in your mouth. And, as we'll see, exercise more, and learn to handle stress better.

This is the approach that I (Patrick) have been championing for the last 20 years. For me it all began when I heard that a Canadian doctor was using nutritional therapy to treat schizophrenia, with extraordinary success. I went to meet Dr Abram Hoffer, the director of psychiatric research in Saskatchewan. Hoffer had treated over 5,000 schizophrenic patients. I asked him what his success rate was. He said, 'Eighty-five per cent cured.'

As I am also a psychologist specialising in mental illness, I knew that the drugs given for schizophrenia don't cure anything, but act as a kind of chemical straitjacket. This means they help the relatives more than the patient! Hoffer's definition of cure was 'free of symptoms, able to socialise with family and friends and paying income tax'. I was so impressed that I became his student and learned how the right combination of diet and supplements really can cure a wide range of serious health problems.

As you'll see the further you get into this book, most doctors know very little about this sort of detailed nutritional approach to preventing and treating chronic diseases. They rely almost exclusively on drugs. But the problem with instantly reaching for the prescription pad isn't just that pharmaceuticals generally only target symptoms. It's also that many of the most widely used drugs turn out to have dangerous and debilitating side effects. One of the revelations of this book is that not only are adverse drug reactions or ADRs more common than most people believe —but that the drug companies go to remarkable lengths to conceal them from both doctors and their patients for as long as possible.

This is one of the areas that I (Jerome) have been researching. I first realised just how extensive and determined a drug company's cover-up of a dangerous side effect could be about six years ago, when I spent an evening interviewing the psychiatrist David Healy in Wales. For several years he had been campaigning to have a possible link between the anti depressant SSRI drugs and suicide officially recognised and properly investigated by the drug regulatory agency. During the evening he regularly amazed me with the amount of data he had uncovered — internal company memos, clinical trials that had never been published. All pointed to the fact that in a small proportion of patients these drugs could increase the risk of suicide, and that the companies were going to alarming lengths to conceal it. It took about five years before the regulators acknowledged there was a problem.

As a journalist, I felt this was a shocking story that wasn't being told properly, and at a basic human level it just seemed wrong. The more I researched it, the more it became clear that the way the truth about SSRIs had been concealed was not an aberration but the norm. If people are going to make real choice about how to treat health problems and disease, they should be aware of just how much of the bad news about drugs is kept from them — and how much of the good news owes more to marketing than science.

None of this is to say that drugs don't have a major part to play in medicine. If you had just been in a serious accident or needed a hip replacement or a coronary bypass, there is little doubt that you would get expert and possibly life-saving treatment at your local hospital. But what if, like millions of others, your problem wasn't acute? What if instead you were developing the early signs of one of those chronic diseases that have now been indisputably linked with poor nutrition?

Christine, for example, suffered from arthritis — nasty but not life- threatening — and was given a prescription for the anti-inflammatory drug Vioxx. Her doctor recommended it as a great improvement over aspirin. Shortly after starting on the drug, she suffered a stroke which left her blind and paralysed on one side and epileptic. She believes the drug, later withdrawn because it raised the risk of cardiovascular problems see Chapter 1), was responsible. Had she been treated nutritionally, her story would have been quite different.

A clinical nutrition centre like the one run by Patrick would have advised her to make sure she included good amounts of fish and fish oils in her diet and to cut back on meat. She might have been given an allergy test to see if there were any foods she should avoid, and she would also be advised to up her intake of both antioxidants and B vitamins, and to take glucosamine. Natural painkillers such as curcumin — an extract from the spice turmeric — and ginger might have been suggested.

Ed Smith, who had suffered from arthritis for years, gave up anti-inflammatory drugs and switched to a similar regime. 'I used to have constant pain in my knees and joints and I couldn't play golf or walk more than ten minutes without resting my legs,' he says. 'Since following your advice my discomfort has decreased 95 to 100 per cent.'

In this book we look at evidence, often hidden away in medical journals, suggesting that bestselling drugs for chronic diseases — such as anti-inflammatories for joint pain, cholesterol-lowering drugs and anti- depressants — may not be as safe and effective as we are led to believe. It's only when you know about this research that you can decide how taking the drugs compares to an approach involving diet, supplements and simple lifestyle changes. In essence, we're giving you the basics for making choices in how you look after your health.

We realise that making changes in the most fundamental aspects of life — eating, exercising, dealing with day-to-day challenges — might seem much more daunting than popping a pill. It's not the usual default path. Many people only make a move to change the way they've been living when they suddenly experience, say, severe pain. So they'll visit their doctor.

And rightly so. Doctors go through lengthy training to learn how to diagnose disease. You need to get yourself properly checked out so that you know what you are dealing with. If you've become ill, you need to understand its origins — why you've lost blood-sugar control or thyroid function, or why your arteries have deteriorated in such a way that you are now more vulnerable to heart attack or stroke.

But once you've got a diagnosis, we hope you'll use this book to make a more informed choice about what course to take. Your doctor may well tell you that this choice is between scientific, properly tested medicine (drugs, in short) and untested 'folk' medicine that depends on exaggerated claims and ignorance, and works — if at all — only through the placebo effect. We view that choice very differently.

One of the most striking findings of this book is that much of the supposed scientific basis for the top-selling drugs owes more to skilful marketing than a detached assessment of the evidence. We too believe in scientific medicine — in properly conducted controlled trials and accurate reporting of results. Unfortunately, many drugs never go through this process — as we will show. So the real distinction is actually between good medicine and profitable medicine.

We define good medicine very simply -

• It works — relieves the pain and removes the cause of the disease
• It's safe — has minimal side effects or risk of harm
• It's doable — doesn't cost too much and is practical.

Profitable medicine is just as easy to define, but completely different -

• It's hugely expensive
• It's synthetic because it must be to be patentable
• It's designed only to relieve symptoms, so patients have to keep taking it
• It's supported by multi-million dollar marketing campaigns.

We have plenty of evidence that many of today's bestselling medicines are money-making devices rather than effective, safe, affordable and practical remedies. A large number of drugs, as will become clear, are brought on to the market not because they represent a significant improvement over what is there already, but simply so that the company can continue charging high prices for a drug covered by a new patent.

What you need is some way of telling good medicine from profitable medicine, so in Chapter 4 we set out the ten questions you need to ask your doctor to find out which sort you are being offered.

We also believe in the Hippocratic principle — 'First do no harm' — so that if there is a nutritional treatment that works just as well as a drug but is safer, then we recommend it as a priority.

If you are fortunate enough to be fit and healthy, and plan to stay that way, this book will help you to define the diet and lifestyle most likely to keep you disease-free and drug-free.

In Part 1 you will find out how modern pharmaceutical medicine, and especially drugs aimed at the most common major diseases, has strayed away — for reasons largely to do with profit and power — from the true science of healing and keeping people healthy and free of pain. You will find out how, after the dazzling discoveries of valuable new drugs in the middle of the twentieth century, the relentless search for a new pill for every ill has given us a prescription-based approach to chronic disease that owes more to marketing than science. You'll see how the truth about many of these drugs has been kept from patients and doctors alike, making it impossible to practise a true science of healing. This part of the book is for the many people who would like to handle chronic conditions without the long-term use of drugs, but have up to now lacked the right information to question the value of the drugs they are offered.

In Part 2, we explain why food really is better medicine than drugs, and how to build your own perfect nutrition plan. You will discover a different way of looking at your body and your health. Prescription drugs are often said to be 'scientific' because they contain one purified substance and target a single pathway in the body. This is essentially a nineteenth-century view of the body as machine: pull a lever here, shut off a valve there. But the body doesn't work like that at all.

Cutting-edge science now sees it more as an ecosystem, like a forest or a coral reef, where all parts eventually affect all the others. A food such as an omega-3 fat affects many parts of this system in a healing way: the walls of your cells, your brain tissue, the stickiness of your blood, even the rhythm of your heart. Most drugs actually affect more than one pathway, but the effect on most of the unintended ones can cause harm — in other words, side effects. In this part you'll also find out how to give yourself a health check-up, and what needs to change for you to pass the test.

In Part 3 we look in detail at the top nine chronic disorders, including diabetes, depression, heart disease, joint pain and asthma and eczema. (We have not addressed the many types of cancer because of its complexity, both in prevention and treatment — a subject that warrants a book in its own right.) We describe the main drugs you would normally be prescribed for them, and tell you honestly just how good the evidence is that they are safe and effective. We then go through the evidence for a range of non-drug treatments, concentrating on nutrition and supplements. You will learn, for instance, how and why chromium can be very effective in treating diabetes, why niacin is more effective in normalising your cholesterol than statins, and just how poor the evidence is, in comparison to safer nutritional alternatives, for anti-depressants, sleeping pills and the Ritalin-type drugs often prescribed for ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).

Finally, in Part 4, we look to the future and how we might all benefit from a better system of medicine — one that is primarily committed to improving people's health rather than solely concerned with profits. We suggest some of the changes that need to happen to make this a reality, such as significantly increasing the tiny amount currently spent on researching the alternatives to drug therapies. We expose the shoddy science behind the various vitamin scares — for instance, the ones proclaiming that vitamin E is no good for protecting against heart disease or that vitamin C can be damaging in large doses. We also describe the work of a number of doctors who are already practising a form of medicine that integrates nutrition, exercise and drugs. In these medical practices, serious attention is paid to helping people change rather than just giving them offhand lifestyle advice and then resorting to drugs when that, unsurprisingly, fails.

We all want to keep ourselves and our family and friends free of pain and illness. And very few people want to keep taking drugs on a daily basis. Yet many continue to swallow them, because they believe they're safe and effective and that other treatments can't possibly pack the same scientific punch.

We wrote this book, however, to put the evidence that this isn't the case into your hands. We hope the advice in this book will restore your health if you are unwell, and keep you healthy if you are free from disease. We invite you to show this book to your doctor, your family and anyone you care about who is currently suffering from any of the health problems or taking any of the medications we cover. In this way, you will be playing your part in creating a better future.

Mark Twain once said, 'Everybody complains about the weather but no one does anything about it.' Here's your chance. You don't have to swallow what the drug companies tell you and you don't have to suffer. Food really is better medicine.

Wishing you the best of health, Patrick Holford and Jerome Burne.

Patrick Holford is one of Britain's leading nutrition experts. In 1984 he founded The Institute for Optimum Nutrition (ION) in London, with his mentor, twice Nobel Prize winner Dr Linus Pauling, as patron. ION is an independent educational charity that has been researching and defining exactly what it means to be optimally nourished for the past 20 years. Now the largest and most respected educational establishment for training degree-accredited nutritional therapists in Europe, the ION method for assessing a person's optimal nutrition needs has been tried and tested on over 100,000 people.

In the UK Patrick is frequently involved in government campaigns and debates and is invited to the House of Commons, the Food Standards Agency and Oxford University as an expert in nutrition. In October 2004 he co-authored Britain's largest ever health and diet survey (ONUK), comparing the health and diet of 37,000 people. Patrick's landmark book, The Optimum Nutrition Bible, the result of 20 years of intensive research, is a worldwide bestseller, with over one million copies sold.

Jerome Burne is a leading medical and science journalist. For the past 15 years he has been writing regularly for the Independent, the Guardian, the Financial Times, the Observer, the Sunday Telegraph and, more recently, The Times. For three years he edited the award-winning newsletter Medicine Today, which provided accurate and vivid accounts of cutting- edge science.

His desire to write this book was inspired by the way the Internet has transformed the reporting of health and medicine. The web means that the medical profession no longer has exclusive access to the latest research. While writing about the latest breakthroughs in science and medicine, he realised that something had gone badly wrong with an exclusively drug-based approach to health. In the past, studies and reports detailing the failures would have remained largely confined within medical journals, a matter for private professional concern. By bringing this research to a wider audience and showing that 'science based' doesn't just mean drug-based, he hopes to provide an impetus for change.