Radio Food Programme says doctors not taught about food

MeSci

MeSci

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
BBC Radio 4 today at 1230 and on iplayer afterwards.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09wr9q9

Doctor's Orders: Getting Tomorrow's Medics Cooking

The Food Programme

The NHS is at crisis point. Despite the diet books, the fitness videos, the health bloggers, in 2016, Public Health England estimated that Illness associated with lifestyle costs the NHS £11 billion every year.

But are we missing something obvious? Could we bring down the cost to the taxpayer, reduce pressure on the health system, with simple advice on what we should eat and drink when we go to see our GP?

More at link.

More info here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-43504125

We learn nothing about nutrition, claim medical students

(There are some good, well-informed and well-known doctors featured.)

A leading GP estimated that up to 80% of his patients had conditions linked to lifestyle and diet.

These included obesity, type 2 diabetes and depression.
 
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How embarrassing that doctors need to be taught about the importance to health of diet and nutrition, however I hope this doesn't lead to a dumbing down of the subject and doctors making assumptions about patients and doling out one-size-fits-all advice.

Quadram Institute at Norwich Research Park has several groups studying nutrition in health and disease (as well as a biomedical research programme on ME/CFS).

Personalised Nutrition: https://quadram.ac.uk/targets/personalised-nutrition/

"There is a growing recognition that, whilst standard dietary advice benefits the clear majority of people, how individuals respond to different foods or bioactive compounds in foods may vary significantly." https://quadram.ac.uk/targets/personalised-nutrition/

Food Innovation and Health: https://quadram.ac.uk/research_areas/food-innovation-health/

"Understanding how individual foods and diets can help us to maintain and improve our health, and developing innovative foods that promote healthy ageing." https://quadram.ac.uk/research_areas/food-innovation-health/

Carding Group (leading on the ME/CFS research): https://quadram.ac.uk/research_groups/carding-lab/

"The overarching objective of our research is to understand how a healthy gut is established and maintained throughout life. We want to understand how this healthy state is altered in diseases of the gastrointestinal tract (e.g. IBD), as well as diseases elsewhere in the body (e.g. ME/CFS) including other organ systems such as the brain, where we are exploring the gut-brain axis and dementia." https://quadram.ac.uk/research_groups/carding-lab/

 
I would like doctors to learn a bit more about medicine and following guidelines to diagnose and treat medical conditions when they exist before messing about with food (speaking as a food scientist)

It’s quite trendy for self appointed experts to say that food is medicine ...it isn’t ...it’s food. I think given that 90% of what you read on the internet about food is BS I think that GPs would self destruct if they had to field and correct the garbage that patients would come in with. Only yesterday I had to explain how calories work to a colleague at work since someone ‘off the internet’ had claimed that cooked celery had more calories than raw...apparently cooking releases more calories from cellulose...sigh!...I mean surely doctors have enough to do ?
 
I agree that doctors have enough to do without becoming trained dieticians/nutrition scientist as well. But it would be good for them to have a basic understanding of what constitutes a healthy diet, and awareness of common misconceptions that they can easily spot and correct with patients, and of the particular conditions for which they need to send patients for specialist dietary advice.

For example, I've come across a medical person (Health visitor rather than doctor in this instance) who thought you could only get energy from sugar, and was advising exhausted mothers of young babies to eat a Mars Bar every day for energy.
 
Trish said:
I agree that doctors have enough to do without becoming trained dieticians/nutrition scientist as well. But it would be good for them to have a basic understanding of what constitutes a healthy diet, and awareness of common misconceptions that they can easily spot and correct with patients, and of the particular conditions for which they need to send patients for specialist dietary advice.

For example, I've come across a medical person (Health visitor rather than doctor in this instance) who thought you could only get energy from sugar, and was advising exhausted mothers of young babies to eat a Mars Bar every day for energy.
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I think doctors and medical professionals should avoid talking about stuff they don’t understand full stop. It’s not like they don’t have the correct information. The NHS has plenty of resources at its disposal on what constitutes a healthy diet. (Public health England etc.)

So I think unless a condition requires a special diet for medical reasons then they should just keep their opinions to themselves refer to this and not get sucked in to correcting all the misinformation ... I suspect that whatever they say to correct some of the more idiotic opinions would be a waste of time anyway. They could spend all day doing this and most of the time it would be a fruitless task...people don’t like to hear uncomfortable truths about what they eat and it’s not like the doctor can prescribe the food for the patient in any case...the patient is free to have a diet of wagon wheels and custard on toast if they’ve decided in their mind that starch helps their microbiome...seems like a waste of taxpayers money to me to try and put another role on to the GP. I guess there could be an unqualified food therapist at a MUS clinic to help cure people of their false eating beliefs?

I suspect that if you did a poll on what is a healthy diet everyone would say a different thing ..there is nothing wrong with pasta or any of the foods that are often vilified ..it’s just balance ...this is a no win discussion though...as the next few posts will probably demonstrate.
 
arewenearlythereyet said:
I would like doctors to learn a bit more about medicine and following guidelines to diagnose and treat medical conditions when they exist before messing about with food (speaking as a food scientist)
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I don't agree with this at all. I think that nutrition should be taught at medical school and there should be refresher courses every so many years. I believe that a lot of health conditions today are the result of eating poor diets and lack of physical activity. You can't fix that with the current medicine and guidelines.
 
TigerLilea said:
I don't agree with this at all. I think that nutrition should be taught at medical school and there should be refresher courses every so many years. I believe that a lot of health conditions today are the result of eating poor diets and lack of physical activity. You can't fix that with the current medicine and guidelines.
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Nutrition is taught in medical school and it is pretty easy.

Keep to near ideal weight by controlling total intake. Doesn't matter what.

Eat plenty of fruit and veg, not just meat and dry buns.

Regulate carbohydrate intake if you are diabetic or borderline.

Get your vitamins and minerals and sunlight but hard not to.

Avoid highly processed foods with carcinogens and probably barbecues.

Avoid certain foods if you have rare genetic conditions like Wilson's disease or are in kidney or liver failure.

Is there much more to it?
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
Nutrition is taught in medical school and it is pretty easy.
Is there much more to it?
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The first message in this thread claims "We learn nothing about nutrition, claim medical students". I've read many times that when nutrition is taught in medical schools it is very basic and pretty much worthless.
 
TigerLilea said:
The first message in this thread claims "We learn nothing about nutrition, claim medical students". I've read many times that when nutrition is taught in medical schools it is very basic and pretty much worthless.
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That sounds like a hot air quote to me. There may be bad medical schools, who knows? And I suspect that a lot of medical students do not realise that when they are being taught biochemistry and physiology they are being taught nutrition. I have no complaints about the nutrition I was taught and I doubt it needs to go much further than the points I made above.
 
TigerLilea said:
I don't agree with this at all. I think that nutrition should be taught at medical school and there should be refresher courses every so many years. I believe that a lot of health conditions today are the result of eating poor diets and lack of physical activity. You can't fix that with the current medicine and guidelines.
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It is definitely not a doctors job to teach people to eat a healthy diet. This is a personal lifestyle choice and the responsibility sits elsewhere with regards to public health education. It’s the same as getting enough sleep and not drinking too much. The only thing a doctor can do is repeat the same message over and over about calories in calories out and eating a healthy balanced diet. What level of education is there more than this?
 
Jonathan Edwards said:
That sounds like a hot air quote to me. There may be bad medical schools, who knows? And I suspect that a lot of medical students do not realise that when they are being taught biochemistry and physiology they are being taught nutrition. I have no complaints about the nutrition I was taught and I doubt it needs to go much further than the points I made above.
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Did you read the text at the link? I think it makes some good points.

With ME diet is especially important, especially for those who are intolerant of gluten and sometimes a lot of other things. Sometimes they can't prepare meals easily either.
 
MeSci said:
Did you read the text at the link? I think it makes some good points.
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I did now. I am afraid I think it is drivel. I agree with arewenearlythereyet. It is not a doctor's job to educate people in what ordinary people in the past knew as part of common sense. And the specialised diet issues are better dealt with by a departmental dietetian because they have time to focus on detail for people with kidney failure and suchlike. Unless you have a specific condition of the sort on my list 95% of the problem is that people eat too much. It is this sort of drivel about everything being complicated and doctors not knowing the details that is half the problem. It isn't complicated.

As far as i know the solution to intolerance in ME is just to avoid what upsets you. We have no evidence that any foods cause actual enteropathy in ME. It is not as if you have to stop something systematically for six months like in coeliac disease.
 
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