Comment Highlight: Insights from Jeff Erno

[ Above: In case you missed it, (click) here is the link to my recent interview on OurBlook. Sandy Ordonez interviewed me; she did a fabulous job.]

The alternative insurance [model] has to happen in my mind. Food is really, really cheap, and we are used to it being that way. Little do people realize that they are transferring costs from food to health care. Due to the way we live and the way traditional health care plans [operate], we are subsidizing people's dimishing health. We can't go on like this since we pay essentially for both. If 80% of all health care costs are avoidable [through proper diet and lifestyle], then we are paying a lot for something only other people get.

My wife's company is starting down this path. You get a discount if you don't smoke and your BMI is less than 30 (my wife's is a bit shy of 20). A good start but a ways to go to make that close to reasonable.

Jeff's timely thoughts remind me of something that my thoughtful friend, Carlos Rizo ( @carlosrizo ) at the Innovation Cell ( @ShareMyIdea ), told me: "One of my patients told me she viewed her medicine cabinet as her refrigerator." She's absolutely correct: pharmacological modalities, like statins or ACE inhibitors, are nutrition as well--they are usually just more expensive, have far worse side-effects, and are ultimately less effective in the long-run than ancestral/paleo diets are. To be sure, drugs serve an important purpose in medicine: acute intervention. However, after this short-term application, the effectiveness of traditional pharmacological treatment wears thin, and the importance of ancestral/paleo nutrition rises to the surface as the real ( cooling inflammation ) cure for many of our modern-day chronic illnesses. Of course, there are many diseases that do require long-term drug therapy, but in the big picture, if folks fueled their physiologies more appropriately through ancestral/paleo diets, the number of cases requiring long-term pharmacology would decline rapidly.

The net result: Healthcare costs would plummet, rather than continue to climb through the roof.

Health reform is healthcare reform.

I advocate--via Physiological Economics --for transferring healthcare dollars from the United, Aetna, et al. (and Medicare) coffers back to patients because I, as a Patient of One, can think of lots of better ways to spend a few trillion dollars: Namely, I'd rather spend most of my healing resources in preventative ways on high-quality Ancestral Fitness foods and drinks and on my gym membership that serves as my healthy escape, among other things.

That's the cultural change needed for a healthier America.

Getting from here to there is the challenge: we need a healthcare bridge (hat tip to Keith Norris ).

In building this bridge, we must somehow address the following cognitively psychology problem in linguistic anthropology:

As I like to say, "Sugar doesn't make you Sugar." This line is used this way: Right now, in linguistic anthropology terms, since people associate excessive visceral body fat (obesity) with 'fat' (lipids) in foods, they make the cognitive association/conclusion that "Fat makes us Fat." Since the statement "Sugar makes you Fat" lacks this crisp symmetry/logic and since the statement "Sugar makes you Sugar" doesn't make any sense, we struggle with the cognitive dissonance of two important facts: "Sugar makes you Fat" and "(Good) Fat makes you Lean." We can't surmount the culturally engendered link between dietary lipids and obesity, despite it's falsity. We need to displace inappropriate uses of the word 'fat' from our terminology: folks must stop calling obese people fat--it's degrading--and stop referring to dietary lipids as fats--'good' lipids (saturated animal, Omega-3's, etc.) are our friends.

I don't know how best to attack this deeply entrenched psychological/cultural problem, but I'm going to do my best. It's imperative.