Found myself in a friend's kitchen the other day and checking out her bookshelf. My eye wandered to a "heart healthy" cookbook recently published by the Cleveland Clinic, which is in the (very lucrative) business of plumbing and re-plumbing people with cardiovascular disease.
Per usual, there was the expected demonization of red meat and saturated fat. Went home and decided to order a side of grass-fed beef from my local farmer.
There's a world of difference between grass-fed, pastured beef and the stuff you buy in the supermarket. The former is, in fact, heart-healthy; the latter is not.
So why doesn't an outfit with the clout and resources of the Cleveland Clinic make any effort to make this distinction? Especially when putting people on a low fat diet will still give them heart trouble.
I guess this is the problem with healthcare in America. It's just business - as usual.
The dirty little secret about our healthcare system is how heavily subsidized it is. You know darn well that most of those people going to the Cleveland Clinic for their fancy and expensive heart work are having some third party (ultimately that's us) pay for it.
So why bother to delve into the science of the matter at the risk of seeing such a profitable gig come to a possible stop? What amounts to good economics for the Cleveland Clinic is, sadly, founded on bad science.
No comments:
Post a Comment