Watch the CarbSmart Podcast Episode 26 on YouTube

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Show Notes for Podcast 26: If your nutritional program is so good, why do you still take drugs?

Welcome to the CarbSmart Podcast, where your decision to embrace low-carb nutrition becomes a fun and delicious lifestyle. I’m your host, Dana Carpender, here to guide you through the ins and outs of everything low-carb. There’s no question that good nutrition improves our health. Heck, many type 2 diabetics do away with all need for medication by eating low-carb. But can proper nutrition prevent all illness and do away with all need for drugs? Let’s talk about it.

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If your nutritional program is so good, why do you still need drugs?

I got this question years ago, back when I was blogging. The fellow who posed it clearly thought that if one’s nutrition was all it should be, there should never be a need for medication. In particular, the Wellbutrin I take for ADHD and seasonal affective disorder, and the sleep medication I take for a diagnosed sleep disorder.

Does ideal nutrition do away with the need for medicine?

I can only suppose that those who feel this way are ignorant of history. According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 1900, fully 30 percent of deaths in the US were of children five and under. Some of them would have been trauma victims, and of course, trauma medicine has improved dramatically.

But many of them were killed by infectious diseases, diphtheria, pertussis, tuberculosis, pneumonia and flu. Between vaccination and antibiotics, the rate of death from these diseases has plummeted. This is the main reason that average lifespan has increased so dramatically. But was the American diet ideal in 1900?

Not by our standards. The American rate of sugar consumption was 90 pounds per capita per year, about half of what it is today, but still higher than it had historically been. Certainly, people ate bread, potatoes, and other concentrated carbs. However, soda intake was 12 bottles per year, and the bottles were far smaller than the 20 ouncers common today.

How old am I? I’m so old I can remember 6 ounce bottles of Coca Cola in Coke machines. Processed food was far less common. Home cooking was the standard. Frozen food and fast food didn’t exist. Highly processed seed oils were not a thing. Home gardening was more common, especially during the Great War, when victory gardens were urged.

Yet, people were dying young. So, let’s go back further. Let’s go back to the Middle Ages. In 14th century Europe, sugar consumption was limited to the wealthy. Interestingly, grain consumption among the peasants, so the vast majority of people, was rarely wheat, but rather barley, oats, and rye. All of which are easier on blood sugar than wheat flour.

Food Pushing Bread — Photo by Kate Remmer on Unsplash

Two, bread eaten by the peasant class was made from more coarsely ground flour than that for the nobility since food was meant to accord with one’s social status. This would have blunted the blood sugar rush as well. Porridge was common and was made with cracked grain. Again, yielding a milder blood sugar increase than today’s rolled oats or, heaven forbid, flavored instant oatmeal, cream of wheat, or grits.

Cheese was a common source of protein and was all made from grass fed raw milk. Fish were staple foods, whether from the ocean, rivers, or streams. Beef was eaten when a cow became too old to milk. Mutton when a sheep was too old to milk or to be sheared. And chickens when they were too old to lay. Pigs being hardier and more able to scavenge and defend themselves, pork was popular.

Again, all of this would have been organically raised, mostly grass-fed meat. Vegetables included cabbage, beets, turnips, parsnips, cucumbers, and greens, all low-carb. Potatoes had not yet been imported from the New World. In Northern Europe, the most common fruit was the apple. Southern Europe had a wider variety.

Of course, all of these would be organically grown and pesticide-free, and would not have been bred for higher sugar content the way modern fruit has been. Though there were vendors of precooked foods, there was no processed food as we know it. There was quite a lot of fasting. Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays were declared fast days by the church.

Everyone fasted until 3 pm.

If intermittent fasting is as beneficial to health as many believe, and I knew it, that would have bolstered health as well. Add to this the dramatically higher level of exercise people got simply by living in a world where you got around on foot, and most work, from farming to housework, involved physical labor.

You’d think they’d be healthy, and no doubt, many were. Yet, when the plague came around, they died. They died in droves. Somewhere between one third to one half of the population of Europe. That population that was eating an organic diet, with mostly low glycemic, low carbohydrates, almost no separated sugars, no processed foods, and intermittently fasting on a regular basis, died.

Yet, being a bacterial disease, plague can now be cured with antibiotics. Smallpox killed millions, with records as far back as Egypt in 1570 BCE. Even more people were left scarred, some hideously. Smallpox is, of course, now extinct, thanks to centuries of vaccination. What about non-infectious diseases?

What about chronic conditions? A 1.7-million-year-old hominin bone, so not even a Homo sapiens, but one of our forerunners, one of our ancestors. A 1.7-million-year-old hominin bone with cancer has been found. We have records of epilepsy going back to 4000 BCE, diabetes is described in Egyptian documents dating to 1500 BCE, and the difference between type 1 and type 2 diabetes was described as far back as 400 to 500 BCE.

Mental illness? Psychosis has been with us always, being described in ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts. Melancholia, now called depression, too, was well known. Hippocrates wrote of fears and despondencies, if they last a long time, as being symptomatic of melancholia. Other symptoms mentioned by Hippocrates included poor appetite, abulia, uh, uh, which is a lack of will or motivation, sleeplessness, irritability, and agitation.

This echoes the DSM-5’s (The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses ) definition of depression. Insomnia has been a known misery, but it has dramatically increased with industrialization. It’s not the food, it’s the caffeine, lights, noise, shift work, screens, and all that. Does proper nutrition help? Of course it does. As I sit here typing this, I am a 66-year-old woman who has not been ill since a very mild case of COVID two years ago.

Not even a cold, just as well. I have no patience with feeling anything less than 100 percent well. helps my psychiatric issues too. I quit sugar and white flour at 19 because I recognized myself in a list of psychiatric symptoms of reactive hypoglycemia. Sure enough, my mood, mental clarity, and energy levels soared. I had a similar experience when I kicked my health food diet based on “good carbs” at 36.

I am experientially aware of the difference nutrition makes in mental state. But, Wellbutrin has been a helpful addition, making me a calmer, more patient, less impulsive, and just plain nicer person. Person. Why should I refuse to take it because it’s, oh my gosh, a drug. And after a lifetime of struggling to sleep, I cannot remember simply lying down and falling asleep even as a child, the fact that I now get between eight and ten hours every night is nothing short of miraculous.

What About Natural Sleep Aids?

Talk about making me a nicer person. Well, what about natural sleep aids? I cannot count the number of people who have said, Have you tried melatonin? 5 HTP, valerian root, whatever. My response is, I am a lifelong insomniac who spent a lot of her twenties working in health food stores. Do you really think I haven’t tried every damned thing that purports to be a natural sleep aid?

And I do take melatonin, along with L-glutamine, before bed every night. I still need the meds. They have made my life dramatically better. I could go on, and on, and on.
But the point is made. Illness has been mankind’s constant companion, even back to our hunter gatherer ancestors. The notion that there is some perfect diet that will do away with the need for medicine is simply untrue.

I reject the false dichotomy, the either or, the idea that one must choose between diet and natural treatments like herbs or supplements, or one can embrace modern medicine.

Once A Food Addict Always A Food Addict — Photo by Deva Williamson on Unsplash

I eat zero junk, and I have more than the common variety of herbs and supplements in my house. When my medical advisors recommend oral antibiotics, I ask if there is any reasonable alternative, so as not to kill my gut flora.

But when I had Lyme disease, I asked for half again the usual dose of doxycycline, and I took it for a month rather than ten days. I also used hot baths to raise my body temperature to 101, mimicking a fever every evening, and took what herbs were reported to enhance the action of the antibiotics.

Because Lyme is a damned monster. And I was doing everything I could to wipe it out. Thank you. You know the old saying about how if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail? I decline to keep only one tool in my toolbox.

So what do you think? What line do you walk regarding a healthy lifestyle and the use of modern medicine?

I ask this as a woman whose life was saved by an appendectomy a couple of years back.

Let us know how you feel. in the comments below.

Episode 26 Recipe

This episode we’re starting a new feature. With each podcast we’ll include a link to one of my recipes. To kick it off, go to https://www.carbsmart.com/podcast26recipe, that’s all lowercase, to find brussels sprouts with parmesan bacon cream sauce from 500 ketogenic recipes or look for a link in the show notes.

These brussels sprouts are so good. Now I Wish the weather weren’t lousy because I’d run out and buy Brussels sprouts and make them right now.

Share this podcast with everyone you think might like it. And don’t forget to like, subscribe, and hit that notification bell because you don’t want to miss a single episode.

Until next time, stay low-carb, happy, and healthy.