If you watch television at all, you’ve probably noticed the growing number of pharmaceutical advertisements.  I have counted as many as five (pharmaceuticals) out of six (total) advertisements in a given set.  (Ever notice that the news is largely sponsored by drug companies?  Maybe we shouldn’t trust their reports on things like vaccines!)  It seems that everything is now “a real medical condition,” allowing the pharmaceutical companies to market some drug treatment for everyone.

Is Your “Medical Condition” Caused by Diet?

The real problem, though, is not all of the individual “medical conditions.”  The real problem is that Americans are (as a group) overfed, but undernourished.  Nearly all, if not all, of the “real medical conditions” for which drugs are advertised, are caused — at least in part — by nutritional deficiencies.  For example, some research suggests that rheumatoid arthritis may be related to a deficiency of “vitamin” D* (not really a vitamin; it’s a hormone) or vitamin A.

Heart disease is probably linked to a vitamin D deficiency.  Clinical trials have demonstrated that heart disease, obesity, and diabetes decrease when sufficient fat is consumed.  Restless leg syndrome may be caused by deficiencies of magnesium, vitamin B12, and iron.  “Primary” restless leg syndrome is thought to be genetic (but the majority of supposedly genetic diseases aren’t really genetic; they’re caused by environmental factors that tend to be the same throughout families), but is frequently accompanied by one or more of a variety of conditions that are linked to insufficient fat or fat-soluble nutrient intake, suggesting that it may be, as well.

Fat is Essential

This is a key thing that has been continuously emphasized to me over the past several weeks, in my reading materials as well as “chance” encounters: the importance of dietary fats.  We have been repeatedly told that fat is “bad” for us, and discouraged, in particular, from eating saturated fat and/or cholesterol, but the truth is that our bodies need these substances, and the nutrients that typically accompany them.

Someone on an email list I’m on was recently talking about a radio program that discussed trying to figure out the “French paradox.”  Their puzzlement is over the fact that the French (as a society) eat plenty of butter, cream, cheese, etc. and yet they have less obesity and heart disease than we do.  They are trying to figure out how only one-third of the French can die of heart attacks, since they eat three times as much saturated fat as we do, because they assume the French are healthier in spite of their dietary habits.  No one in the mainstream seems to even consider the possibility that they may be healthier because of their dietary habits!

*Further emphasizing this point, when I read back over this post in March of 2025, I had to change this link over to an archived copy of the article, because the live link now redirects to an article about rheumatoid arthritis that emphasizes pharmaceuticals and surgery and doesn’t even mention vitamin D.