As a life long USian, I agree with you. My doctor told me to take a multivitamin, and an
omega-3 supplement, so I follow her advice. That’s all of the pills I take.
Doctors get maybe a 1 hour lecture in nutrition during med school. They tend to be woefully ignorant of nutrition alternatives to meds.
I had a problem with my big toe cramping endlessly, to the point where it caused joint damage and left me with arthritis. Not great for someone as active as I am, but I was resigned to having inherited Dad’s cramping and arthritis. 4 years ago I went to a highly recommended orthopedic surgeon at a very respected hospital, who told me no surgery at this time but the only thing I could do about it is to minimize use and put a metal plate in my shoe. Again, not great for an active person. So being a research chemist with an interest in nutrition, (food/supplements are chemicals after all,) I hit google. End result is that I take 4 200mg pills of Mg Citrate, split up over 4 times a day, and the cramping has disappeared. (The Magnesium Miracle is a great book to pick up if anyone is interested in well done research. About $13 on Amazon.)
I think it was Hippocrates who said "let food be thy medicine ". Words to live by.
I had inherited something from Dad, but I suspect it is difficulty in absorbing Mg, not the resulting arthritis from not treating the Mg deficiency. With our low carb diet, we eat a ton of high Mg foods. I should not have been deficient based on the foods we consume. However, our soils are not mineral rich as they were in Hippocrates time and the foods that are supposedly high in these minerals are often without.
My brother in law recently told me that he got off of 5 different medications, by losing
35 pounds and exercising daily. He looks like a different person, in a better way.
I am a HUGE believer in fixing the root cause of a problem instead of just medicating the symptoms. One does that by healing the body, not by assuming that the pharma sales reps are pushing gospel truth and treating symptoms of meds with more meds. Because of the way we eat, I take no meds besides supplements. DH, a type 1 diabetic since a teen has lowered his insulin requirements hugely, cut back his blood pressure meds a good deal, and no longer takes statins since I debated with his cardiologist about the need to look at more than total cholesterol when prescribing statins. Yeah, was way more complicated than that, involving a series of tests, including blood lipids panel with and without differentiation as well as a calcium score and other physical tests, but worth the effort. When you have an Triglyceride/HDL ratio of 0.6, it really doesn’t matter if your total cholesterol is 212. Same goes for his HDL/tot ratio of 0.34, which is well over the low risk ratio of 0.24 or the danger ratio of 0.1
A couple of links for your perusal on lipids if curious: https://www.cooperinstitute.org/2017/11/28/cardiorespiratory…
https://www.journal-advocate.com/2012/02/27/the-importance-o….
It is precisely to minimize/eliminate pharma from our lives that we supplement and eat correctly, not because we “take to pharma-produced medication too enthusiastically.”
The Great Cholesterol Myth is another decent, relatively easy to read book on this subject.
To bring this back to a macro subject, we could greatly lower our expenses on doctors and medication, even after including the cost of supplements, by paying more attention to the foods/supplements/exercise we do. DH has been told by his endocrinologist that he is the healthiest long term diabetic he has ever seen. His body can simply no longer make insulin, but the rest of him works exceptionally well.
IP