The Ties Between Big Food, Big Pharma & Official Dietary Guidelines
Posted by Josh Gape onWhy you can't trust the food recommendations made by your Doctor...
Despite not teaching it in medical school (on average medical students receive 11 hours of nutrition training throughout their entire medical education), Big Pharma knows how drastic of an impact food can have on a persons health.
That’s why all the major pharmaceutical companies spend a huge amount of time, money and effort to make sure their people are on the boards of ultra-processed food companies and governmental agencies that are tasked with creating national food guidelines.
For obvious reasons, they muddy the water and try to hide these links, and as a result, I’d confidently guess that I’m only going to cover a small portion of the corruption today. However, despite their best efforts, the connections are still very blatant.
Stating The Obvious
I highly doubt anyone who reads our blog regularly will need to read this section. However, I know a lot of you like to send these articles to others and for that reason, I’m going to state the obvious…
The more people that are sick and the sicker people are, the more pharmaceutical sales there will be.
If a business wants to grow its revenue, it needs more customers and / or needs its existing customers to need more of the product it provides. Therefore if the pharmaceutical system wants to thrive, it needs a sicker population.
There’s countless case studies of individuals who’ve addressed the root cause of their illness naturally using; real food, clean water, fresh air, sleep, etc and completely recovered as a result. However, go to your average doctor's office and you won’t be asked what you’re eating or how you’re sleeping. Instead, you’ll be prescribed a pill and one that you often have to take indefinitely becoming a lifelong customer.
Please don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. This isn’t me having a go at doctors. In fact, I know some doctors personally and they are genuinely incredible people. However, there’s a common thread amongst all the doctors I admire and that’s that they’ve continued learning and as a result, stepped outside of the framework of medicine.
When I used to think about medicine, I thought of a field of science with the purpose of helping people cure illness. However, the more I learn, the more I realise that this isn’t the reality - well of modern medicine at least. Today, first and foremost it is a business and its goal is to make profit because it’s been corrupted and is controlled by the pharmaceutical industry.
This is why medical school doesn’t teach doctors to address the root cause of problems. It’s not good business to find a cure, but it’s very good business to find a lifelong treatment.
The Ties
In 2022 using documents obtained via a freedom of information request, a government transparency group called US Right to Know looked into the links between Big Food, Big Pharma and the US Nutrition Panel.
They concluded that the federal government panel that helps develop US nutritional guidelines has a “symbiotic” relationship with the food and pharmaceutical industries. Of the twenty-member panel of "food and nutrition experts", nine members had “high-risk conflict of interest” ties to major companies like Nestle, Pfizer and Coca-Cola. An additional four members had “possible conflicts of interest”. As an example, one panel member had received around $240,000 in grant funding from Eli Lilly - an American pharmaceutical giant with 39,000 employees. Surely that won't have any influence on them, right?
These individuals are responsible for making recommendations to the Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services. The guidelines they publish are considered the gold standard for dietary advice in the US and around the world, and influence which foods are served in institutional facilities such as; schools, hospitals and old people’s homes. Not only this, but they inform how doctors and registered nutritionists advise people.
So when you’re watching the news or listening to your doctor / classically trained nutritionist thinking you’re hearing unbiased advice, you’re actually often listening to a sales pitch from Big Pharma or Big Food.
This is a blatant conflict of interest and it’s obvious, to me at least, that these individuals are influencing these guidelines with corporate profits as opposed to the health of people in mind.
I say this with confidence because I've witnessed the slew of bad information the US government and other similar agencies have put out since their inception…
- From the US you had the Food Pyramid (now MyPlate), which still recommends eating 7-10 ounces of grains per day for a man of my age. According to them this equates to 7-10 slices of bread and it says it’s fine to get half of these from refined sources. On top of this it encourages consuming low fat (aka high sugar) dairy and makes no mention of the importance of organic fruit / vegetables and grass-fed / free range meat.
- Then you’ve got the NHS Food Guidelines in the UK… these recommend swapping saturated fat (butter, tallow, coconut oil) for unsaturated fat (rapeseed, corn, sunflower oil). This couldn’t be more backwards and I literally recommend the opposite as one of the easiest and cheapest ways to improve your health. Vegetable oils like the ones recommend by the NHS are linked to basically all of the chronic diseases we’re seeing a huge rise in today; cancer, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and Alzheimer’s. This is actually such an import topic, I made a video on it: https://www.instagram.com/p/CchyQ44LQ9v/.
- Last one, just to hammer the point even more, you had Dr Fatima Cody Stanford, an American obesity medicine physician and an associate professor of medicine and paediatrics at Harvard Medical School state that the number one cause of obesity is genetics and diet and lifestyle factors have little to no impact when it comes to people losing weight.
What’s The Solution?
Take sovereignty over your own health. From the above, I hope it’s obvious (if it wasn’t already) that we can’t trust mainstream health guidelines.
When taking control of your own health, a great place to start is looking at nutrition through the lens of evolutionary biology; how have humans evolved eating for the vast majority of our existence on this planet? Meat, dairy, fruit, vegetables and maybe some honey. Everything free-range, grass-fed, organic and raw because we hadn’t invented unnatural ways of farming and processing foods yet.
Start with this as a base and experiment, listen to the feedback from your body and see what works for you.
Link to full article from US Right to Know:
I hope you're all still enjoying these opinion piece articles and it's great to get your feedback so please feel free to comment below!
As always thanks for being on this journey with us, it's so cool to see this community of like minded, health conscious people growing as quickly as it is!
Here's To More Life,
Josh
