Why Food is Better Medicine than Drugs
26/09/2006

Why Food is Better Medicine than Drugs

More of us than ever are succumbing to chronic disease and the figures make grim reading. One in six of us is expected to die prematurely, the most likely cause being heart disease, strokes or cancer. By the age of 50, one in three of us will be officially obese and a quarter of us will spend the last 30 years of our lives with the pain of arthritis.

At the moment, what happens to all these people hit by chronic disease? In a word, drugs – perhaps two or three to start with, then a dozen or more towards the end.

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? Especially when the truth of what drugs are really doing for us makes such worrying reading.

In the UK, 10,000 people are killed every year by adverse drug reactions, which happen when the prescription drug that is supposed to be curing you kills or harms you instead. That is more than the number of people who die from cervical cancer, taking illegal drugs, mouth cancer and passive smoking combined. It is actually more dangerous to visit your doctor than it is to drive your car – in 2004, traffic accidents were responsible for a modest 3,221 deaths.

A further 40,000 people each year are made sick enough by the drugs they are taking to be admitted to hospital.

Yet while most things that could harm us are a focus of campaigns and charities who work tirelessly to limit the damage, nothing comparable is happening to cut our use of the drugs that harm us. So why is so little being done to warn us of the dangers?

A mass cover-up
We have both the pharmaceutical industry and the health authorities to blame. We are in the grip of an extensive and deliberate cover-up by pharmaceutical companies, who hide the negative side of their products and buy our loyalty through paying those we believe in, including our GPs. Even worse, the very organisations we put our trust in, such as the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), part of the Department of Health, seem far too intimate with the drug companies to regulate them effectively.

Many people reading this will be shocked or confounded by this information. After all, when you are ill or worried about being ill, you want to be able to trust your doctor, and indeed authorities such as the MHRA and the government, and believe that the treatment they recommend is designed only to make you better.

But there is plenty of evidence that many of today’s best-selling medicines are money-making devices rather than effective, safe, affordable and practical remedies.

In 2005, a UK Parliamentary Health Committee investigation produced a little publicised but very telling report, The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry. This concluded that the drug industry: ‘buys influence over doctors, charities, patient groups, journalists and politicians’.

Drug companies pay for everything: the trials that test the safety and effectiveness of their drugs, the medical journals who print favourable articles, and GPs further education.

Stated as baldly as that, these claims may sound wildly exaggerated to you. But that is the truth of the matter. Let’s look at some of the facts.

Buying favour
Around 60% of seminars, lectures and courses our GPs attend are funded by drug companies.

In the UK the pharmaceutical industry spends £3.3 billion a year on research, financing about 90% of all clinical drug trials. That could hardly be called independent research. A study in the 1990s found that out of all 56 of the studies conducted by drug companies themselves into painkilling drugs, not a single one was unfavourable to the company that sponsored the trial. A Parliamentary Health Committee hearing was told by one consultant cardiologist that he was offered bribes by a pharmaceutical company not to publish unfavourable research results.

Some drug companies can spend up to £10,000 a year targeting an individual doctor with drug reps or salespeople who provide information about the latest drug developments.

This is just the culture surrounding the drugs – what about the actual products themselves?

Are drugs really so effective?
To begin with, the drugs for chronic disease almost never do anything about the underlying cause. They’re designed to treat symptoms – raised blood pressure, the pain in your joints etc. So when you stop taking them, the problem just comes back again.

It's important to understand we're not talking about the medicines used in medical emergencies here – no-one would want to be without antibiotics when faced with meningitis for instance - but those used for the prevention and treatment of the chronic conditions such as arthritis, depression, diabetes and heart disease.

Another problem with instantly reaching for the prescription pad is that many of the most widely used drugs turn out to have dangerous and debilitating side effects. And these side effects are made even more damaging by drug companies’ practice of downplaying and concealing them.

The story of what happened to the painkiller Vioxx provides a valuable lens through which to look at just how the drug industry, governmental agencies and the medical profession actually behave in the real world. The drug, which was taken by 80 million people worldwide, was very high profile, and sold to us as a ‘super aspirin’ that gave better pain relief and none of the gut problems associated with the previous generation of painkillers.

It then emerged that Vioxx had potentially dangerous side effects, boosting the risk of blood clots and doubling the risk of heart attacks, and it was withdrawn in 2004. Yet behind the scenes, alarm bells had been ringing for years about the drug's dangerous side effects.

There are now an estimated 10,000 court cases outstanding against Merck, the makers of Vioxx. One expert estimates that 140,000 Americans were killed or now suffer from vascular problems as a result of taking the drug, and the cost of legal actions to Merck has been put at between $5 and $50 billion. There are 400 people from the UK who are also now trying to sue Merck in the American courts.

Turning a blind eye
Of course, it could just be that this was an unfortunate accident, the sort that happens in the best-run industries. Planes crash, buildings go up in smoke, but in general we are confident that systems are in place to keep such preventable disasters to an absolute minimum.

One of the reasons for our confidence is that in the wake of such disasters, there is an enquiry to find out what went wrong and what can be done to prevent it in the future. Unfortunately, however, this kind of enquiry never happens in the wake of drug disasters because regulators have all too often looked the other way – another problem with the industry.

After Vioxx was withdrawn, for instance, the MHRA took no apparent action.

The Influence of the Pharmaceutical Industry report concluded that the way drugs are monitored was ‘inadequate’, that medical institutions were ‘indifferent’, and that the MHRA knew very little about ‘the overall impact of drug-related illnesses in the community’.

It called for changes, one being that the MRHA should actively be on the lookout for problems with side effects and that there should be a public enquiry whenever a drug is withdrawn. But the government has chosen not to take action on any of these.

And why not? It is perhaps significant that not only is the MHRA almost entirely funded by the drug companies to the tune of £65 million, but it wasn’t until the beginning of 2005 that MHRA members were banned from having shares and financial links with drug companies.

Ignorance about nutrition
The fact that people are being damaged unnecessarily by drugs that are being prescribed to millions is bad enough. But the myth that these drugs are all firmly science-based has led to another, possibly even more harmful long-term effect on our health.

It has meant that any non-drug treatments that do tackle the underlying problem and don’t inevitably have side effects are not researched properly, and end up regarded by mainstream doctors as unscientific and ineffective.

That diet, nutrition and supplements can do much, much more – alleviate arthritis, as well as a range of other chronic conditions like depression, angina, high cholesterol or high blood pressure – is almost certainly never passed on, partly because the vast majority of doctors have no training in nutritional medicine.

Yet there is plenty of evidence that nutrition, especially when combined with other non-drug approaches such as exercise and stress reduction, has the potential to cure many chronic conditions rather than just calm symptoms, and also enhances overall health.

It’s clear that food and supplements directly affect many of the same biochemical pathways in the body that drugs target, but with far fewer side effects – and at far less cost.

Given the way the truth about drugs is often spun or concealed, handling chronic disease with various non-drug methods makes a lot of sense.

To find out more, read Food is Better Medicine Than Drugs, by Patrick Holford and Jerome Burne. The official publication date is 5 October, but you can order advance copies now  click here