This is, unbelievably, not a joke. This is how sick our world is. Recently a report came out on how the largest professional association of dietitians in the US has sold out to Coca Cola and Pepsico among other junk food companies, allowing them to buy enormous influence over the continuing education of dietitians. And here’s a shocking example of what the food industry gets in return.
A dietitian shared this example of a “shameful” webinar she was just invited to. Check it out. It’s The Coca Cola Company’s Beverage Institute For Health & Wellness that will teach dietitians about “Heart Healthy Lifestyle Counseling”!
It’s a bit of a mystery. What is The Coca Cola Company doing offering professional health education? Is that really what the company is about?
I’ll tell you what Coca Cola wants to teach the dietitians: It’s all about a balanced lifestyle. Sugar can be consumed as part of a balanced heart healthy diet. It’s all about calories anyway. And don’t believe anyone saying anything else! Oh yeah, and the most important thing is to exercise enough.
So when your dietitian uses those arguments, he or she might have been educated by Coca Cola.
The truth is that the more added sugar you get in your diet the more unbalanced it is. Sugar is consumed in vast excess by a large majority of the population today. And the more sugar you eat or drink the more calories you are likely to want. Consuming excess sugar makes you hungrier, then obese, then diabetic, then it gives you heart disease.
Unfortunately your dietitian might tell you a completely different story.
Unfortunately, at the end of the day money talks and people sell out.
Similar "savings" when it comes to industry funded research, where cash strapped research and education institutes often are converted to mere advertising instruments for everything from statin sales to GMOs.
My hope is that gradually, but positively, more and more people will stop relying so much on doctors to tell them how to live, and will instead only seek their counsel when infections and (actual) diseases are involved.
I think the modern western world is really obsessed with experts. We live such busy, compartmentalized lives that we have convinced ourselves that when anything goes awry in one area of life, we just need to find an "expert" to set us straight. We never consider the likelihood that these doctors (or other types of experts) are people and therefore subject to the same human flaws that the rest of us are.
I really do believe that you have a better chance right now of finding good nutrition and lifestyle advice by doing a Google search than by walking into a physician's office. And I'm afraid it will be decades (at least) before we see a change in that pattern.
But we have the same problems of corruption that our ancestors did, and typically our experts are not legitimized as exclusive. I think our generation is proving that a gullible general populace is the real source of the problem (or at least one significant source), being that they are the ones willing to defer so much decision-making opportunity to these people.
If people would rely on their communities (their villages, if you will) for wisdom instead of the media's latest flavor of the week, they would be much better off. But that does not seem to be the direction in which we are moving.
BUT much like the old Roman church was torn apart by the advent of the printing press and bibles in people's native tongue, so today we have the internet and less need for the "gatekeepers" to spoon feed us.
http://www.coca-colacompany.com/brands/all
I must have to disagree with your comment about google search. The vast amount of FALSE information on google and other websites can lead some people to some serious issues/complications. For example, a simple headache that a search engine can tell you is "tension headache" could be carbon monoxide poisoning which can be fatal if untreated or a simple "stomach flu" could be a blood clot to the blood vessels in your abdomen.
If people only go to doctors when they're sick, THAT can be disastrous. You would want people to only show up to their doctors when their legs are getting numb or when they end up with kidney failure because of undiagnosed hypertension or diabetes? or start going blind because of that? And those are diseases that are usually not diagnosed unless you are actually checked for them because they don't have symptoms until they cause organ damage.
Although it might seem like doctors would be biased, this is not the case in MOST situations. As an ER physician, I go by evidence-based medicine and so do most (if not all) of my colleagues. I will never use a medication because some pharmaceutical rep brought lunch to the department. I will eat the lunch but that will never influence what I prescribe. Do I find it ridiculous that coca cola and pepsico, or pharmaceutical companies are sponsoring this stuff, of course I do! But these things are so expensive and, sadly, until you can get other non-biased organizations to fund such events, it will continue to go on.
New world order Dietitians
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42IhUlS7Sls
If I wanted to play devil's advocate, big companies like coca-cola, pepsi, mars and nestle own many different products besides soda and candy; nestle makes baby food and formula and coke/pepsi own different lines of water, sports drinks and Fuze drinks which have a low-calorie line. I don't push any brands of any products and heavily advocate against the negative effects of the empty calories from soda.
Dietitians are beneficial in many situations and shouldn't be bunched into a group of health professionals funded by big corporations.