The AHA doubles down on bad diet advice — again

Well, here’s a shocker for you.

It looks like the American Heart Association (AHA) wants to train doctors on nutrition so they may advise patients on ways to combat heart disease. And as you might have guessed, there are a few reasons why this news sent my jaw to the floor…

1. The AHA has never mentioned anything about
2. The AHA has never listed nutrition as a factor of health.

And let’s not forget — these are the same folks that praised diets revolving around “low fat,” “low sodium,” and “lots of whole grains”… on their best day. And those are just a few examples of their major flubs.

So let’s have a look at what they’re up to nowadays. Because let’s face it: This latest move is wildly out of character for a group that has doled out bad advice for decades, shamelessly ostracized detractors, and all but led us down the path to chronic disease in the first place.

The real reason mainstream docs don’t discuss your diet

Do you want to know what this new advisory initiative is called?

“Medical Nutrition Education, Training, and Competencies to Advance Guideline-Based Diet Counseling by Physicians.” (And in case you were wondering, I wasn’t asked to be a part of it. Imagine that!)

Now, get this: Evidence points to a willingness among doctors to teach their patients about nutrition. But as I’ve mentioned before, most of them don’t. They like to say it’s because they don’t have the knowledge or training.

But do you want to know the real reason physicians aren’t doing their due diligence where diet is concerned?

Because a lot of them are fat themselves. And because they simply don’t have time to sit down and have a real conversation with their patients… nor do many insurance companies bother to pay for visits to nutritionists.

And unfortunately, there’s very little diet education available to doctors who do care. But access is only one part of the problem. The fact is that nutrition has never been deemed particularly important or credibly. And secondly, nothing even remotely resembles a consensus amongst the medical community as to what’s healthy and what isn’t.

The sad state of modern “nutrition education”

So what do the statistics tell us, anyway? Well, they’re not great, let’s just say that: A recent survey showed that a mere 14 percent of internal medicine trainees claimed confidence in their diet counseling abilities.

A different survey of cardiology fellowship directors showed that fewer than half provided any kind of lecture on nutrition — and what’s worse, fewer than a third of their fellows even recalled any topics on nutrition being a focal point of discussion.

Meanwhile, the National Academy of Sciences recommends at least 25 nutrition-focused classroom hours for undergraduate medical students. But as of 2013, nearly three quarters of medical schools weren’t meeting that mark. And well over one third were delivering less than half of the nutrition education they should have been providing.

A couple of years later in 2015, The American College of Cardiology (ACC) stated that trainees in preventive cardiology should “know the principles of nutrition and obesity assessment and management, including the roles of pharmacotherapy and bariatric surgery.”

The emphasis is 100 percent mine. And I doubt I need to say much more about what’s wrong with that sentence. So I’ll simply leave it at this: If this is the kind of “nutrition education” the AHA is proposing, we’d all be much better off without it.

So if you want to be more proactive about in educating yourself about proper nutrition or making changes in your own diet, I’ve developed a weight loss innovation called The A-List Diet. This strategy makes it much easier to lose weight, improve your overall health, and prevent chronic disease. Click here to order your copy today!

P.S. You’re the first to know that I’ve been busy at work developing my very own expansive online learning course all about heart health. And unlike the AHA, this protocol will give a holistic guide on how to keep your heart healthy — with herbal, supplemental, lifestyle and dietary recommendations. I’ll plan to release it in the early fall, so stay tuned right here to my Reality Health Check e-letter or Facebook page for all the latest updates!.

Source:

medscape.com/viewarticle/897798