A California doctor has revealed the biggest ‘lies’ he says doctors tell their patients that could leave them vulnerable to serious chronic diseases.
Dr. Robert Lufkin, a physician and professor at both the University of California – Los Angeles and the University of Southern California, has been diagnosed with four chronic diseases throughout his life.
These include gout, high blood pressure, pre-diabetes and dyslipidemia, which causes abnormal levels of fat in the blood.
In his book ‘Lies I learned in medical school‘, explains Dr. Lufkin explains that his own health journey “awakened” him to flaws in the medical system, including doctors who treated symptoms rather than looking for an underlying cause.
And he pointed out “lies” — including some he taught himself — about several chronic diseases, including obesity and diabetes, that affect millions of Americans.
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Dr. Lufkin writes that he has tried every new diet and that he consumes a lot of processed foods, is a vegan, a carnivore, and follows a low-fat and/or low-carb diet.
Now, however, he eats as little processed foods as possible and limits carbohydrates, sugars, processed fats, oils and grains.
Despite the success he has personally seen in implementing lifestyle changes, he warns that the “lies” and alternatives he proposes “are all just hypotheses – imperfect models that attempt to explain the clinical experience of improving health.” ‘
But they come from dozens of studies and scientific literature from experts.
Dr. Lufkin wrote in the first chapter of his book book: ‘I was 100 percent a medical establishment person. I was all for organized systems, and my background shows that. I was an unofficial spokesperson for the establishment.
“Then I developed four diseases that I had learned (and others had learned) were related to aging and possibly had a genetic component.
‘I did everything right and I died. That shock set off alarm bells in my head. Something was seriously wrong in the medical system. I was told lies and I needed to know the truth.”
Dr. Lufkin, who focuses on longevity and consciousness, noted “we are in a medical crisis far worse than COVID-19, and most people aren’t even aware of it” due to rising rates of chronic disease.
Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of middle-aged adults with two or more chronic diseases increased from 16 to 21 percent. Just four years later, that percentage rose to 32 percent.
By 2024, that figure will now rise to 40 percent, Dr. Lufkin said.
Dr. Robert Lufkin is a physician focused on longevity and consciousness in California
The first lie Dr. Lufkin describes is about obesity, which affects 42 percent of Americans at some point in their lives.
“We are now in the worst global epidemic of obesity the world has ever known,” he wrote.
‘Our understanding of the causes of this epidemic and the approach to treating it is based on a simple lie: that “a calorie is a calorie”, implying that obesity is caused by eating too many calories.’
Dr. Lufkin noted that this claim is not true because obesity is not just caused by consuming too many calories. He says these are not ‘enough’ enough to cause obesity and that different types of calories have different effects on obesity.
Sometimes calories become fat and are stored in the body, while other times they are burned directly by the body.
The doctor wrote: ‘The most important control point for weight gain is how many of the calories we consume are stored and how many calories we burn. That number does not depend on the total number of calories, but on a biochemical signal in our body.’
That signal is the hormone insulin, which tells the cells to store calories mainly as fat. If calories are not stored as fat, they are burned. There will be no weight gain,” he added.
“When insulin is turned on and fat storage occurs, fewer calories are burned,” leading to pounds gaining weight.
However, without the insulin signal, calories are burned, preventing weight gain. Therefore, someone with insulin resistance – such as someone with type 2 diabetes – would have high insulin levels and an increased risk of weight gain.
Certain foods like carbohydrates also cause more insulin production, regardless of calories.
‘Not all calories have the same effect on weight gain. That’s why weight loss isn’t just about cutting calories… Obesity isn’t just a calorie problem; it is an insulin problem,” Dr. Lufkin wrote.
The “calorie lie,” he explained, began in the 1970s when obesity rates were on the rise and the first set of dietary guidelines for Americans were published.
Guidelines recommended increasing carbohydrate intake and decreasing fat intake.
The misconception grew in the 1990s when the food pyramid was launched, which emphasized high consumption of carbohydrates, which strongly stimulate insulin, causing many Americans to change their diets to high-carb, low-fat foods.
Dr. Lufkin wrote, “By replacing fat calories with carbohydrate calories, we raised insulin and sent the message to store fat. And store fat we did.
‘At about the same time we were replacing carbohydrates with fat in our diets, obesity rates skyrocketed – and they haven’t come down since.’
Insulin – and carbohydrates – not only play a role in obesity, but also form the core of diabetes.
One in three Americans has diabetes or pre-diabetes, and the CDC estimates that 80 percent of them don’t know they have the condition.
According to the CDC, between 2001 and 2004, 10 percent of American adults suffered from diabetes.
That number increased to 13.2 percent between 2017 and 2020. According to the latest available data, it has fallen slightly to around 12 percent in 2021.
Dr. Lufkin called the overall upward trend in cases “the worst diabetes epidemic the world has ever known.”
‘The diabetes lie states that the best way to treat type 2 diabetes is with insulin.’
Type 2 diabetes accounts for 90 percent of diabetes cases. It is mainly caused by genetics and lifestyle, including diet (for example, a diet high in carbohydrates) and weight.
As Dr. Lufkin discussed in his chapter on obesity, he writes that carbohydrates stimulate insulin. When levels of the hormone become too high, insulin resistance occurs.
This makes cells less sensitive to the dose of insulin that type 2 diabetics give themselves in an attempt to control their disease.
Give insulin will “increase the body’s overall insulin levels, which will worsen insulin resistance, the underlying cause of type 2 diabetes,” the doctor wrote.
Dr. Lufkin argued that dietary changes — such as cutting out refined carbohydrates such as white bread — and exercise could be more effective than insulin itself at lowering A1C, or average blood sugar levels over a two- to three-month period.
He said: ‘Our healthcare system is unfortunately much more optimized to provide prescriptions for insulin and other medications to treat type 2 diabetes than to provide instructions on how to reverse this by changing our diets to avoid the causes.
‘To be honest, many people would rather take a pill or an injection than change their lifestyle. But most people don’t know how powerful and effective lifestyle choices can be.”