I was reading a question about health and a comment was listed.  These
facts were part of the comment.  Are they true?


70% of all visits to the Dr are diet related
70% of Deaths are from heart attach, cancer and stroke.
50% could have been prevented through better nutrition.
#1 death in America is from the side effects of prescription drugs.  
The food that we have available to us today do not have the nutrition
that it did in the 70's (Produce is now grown for shelf appearance
rather than nutritional value)

Hi Just4fun2....

I don't agree with this one:

"#1 death in America is from the side effects of prescription drugs."

Sounds pretty far fetched to me  .
My two cents :)

Steph53

I agree with Steph. The claim that drug side-effects are the #1 cause
of death is ridiculous.

The claim that most diseases can be prevented through better nutrition
has been made for centuries. No one can prove this. It's undoubtedly
true that people would be healthier if they ate better diets, but the
number of deaths that could be prevented by proper nutrition is just
guesswork. My guess (20%) is probably as good as the guess of the
person who wrote the comment that you quote. And my guess uses better
spelling and grammar. ;-)

Regarding the matter of the nutritional content of the food we eat,
this answer to an earlier question may be of interest to you:

http://www.answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=335945

Just my 2 cents:

--very plausible, professional estimates have been made that medical
errors -- especially side effects and errors regarding medicines --
are indeed a very large killer, amounting to more than 100,000 deaths
per year in the US.  Depending on what one chooses to compare this
number with, it can certainly be said to be one of the major causes of
death.

--on a global basis, most deaths are probably diet-related, since so
many people around the world are malnourished due to poverty

--The '70's weren't all THAT long ago.  Food hasn't changed all that much.

OK ... I'm going to have 3 cents worth.

The claim was made in a comment by someone who was trying to promote a
well known MLM Health thing.

It's now been deleted.

Another thing to consider is if things were as grim as that post
stated then why is our lifespan longer than it has ever been.

Also if a prescription drug killed you it was probably only after it
kept you alive longer than you would have lived without it first

It sounds like someone trying to sell something like probonopublico-ga
said.  But it's all common BS.

> 70% of all visits to the Dr are diet related

You can ignore this because it is all but impossible to determine that
number, whatever it actually is (could be anything).  Most doctor
visits are probably from temporary ailments that go away on their own
and no thorough testing is done to determine a specific cause.  Ask
your local clinic how many people come in complaining of a headache,
cold, etc, then never come back.

This is especially ironic because the same people that make the claims
in this list also usually claim that "doctors" don't know anything, so
where did they get their data from?

> 70% of Deaths are from heart attach, cancer and stroke.

I don't know the correct number, but it sounds reasonable.  Take the
top 3 death causes and they add to get a big number.  So what?

> 50% could have been prevented through better nutrition.

Considering:
1. Almost everyone in the country could eat better than they do
2. The claim includes "could" (ie, possibly)

..this claim is both hard to disprove and meaningless.


> #1 death in America is from the side effects of prescription drugs.  

This one is completely stupid.  You don't need to study medicine to
realize that the highest death rates are in areas where people are too
poor to afford prescription drugs at all.

Of course, if 50% of deaths are preventable with diet changes, how can
we blame anything for those deaths than poor diet?  One or both
"facts" must be wrong.

> The food that we have available to us today do not have the nutrition
> that it did in the 70's (Produce is now grown for shelf appearance
> rather than nutritional value)

This one usually comes with some ridiculous claims.  If all of our
healthy foods (fruits and veggies) really had 1% of their proper
nutritional value, we would probably all be dead from scurvy,
malnutrition, etc.

The whole list is kind of stupid because people have been dying for
thousands of years, but we are living longer than ever with our
current food, medecine, and doctors.  You have to wonder about ancient
dietary and medicinal secrets practiced back when people couldn't plan
on living past 30.

Here's a summary of the doctor-caused-deaths studies that I mentioned earlier:


http://www.dorway.com/jama.html
Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US, Causing
250,000 Deaths Every Year


Draw your own conclusions, y'all...but be careful out there!


paf

Just4fun --

This report just came out from the State of Washington on the causes
of deaths within that state -- and it put heart-related deaths (stroke
and heart disease) as the LEADING cause of death, at 36% of those in
the state:
Washington Department of Health
"Heart disease and stroke kill more people than any other cause" (Feb. 24, 2005)
http://www.doh.wa.gov/Publicat/2005_news/05-016.htm

It's hard to get to 70%, even if you attribute half of all cancer
deaths to "nutrition," which would be difficult to prove.

Best regards,

Omnivorous-GA

two-bits' worth (that's only about two cents these days):
Semantics, and I hope Pinkfreud will agree:
Nothing can reduce death by any percentage, just delay it, but one
finds statements phrased like the one in the question all the time
("50% could have been prevented by better nutrition"), but that's not
just4fun's fault, just the sloppy use of the language one finds in the
media all the time  - and not just in the US or UK.
I'm glad Markinmass pointed out that despite these kinds of
statistics, on average we are all living longer now.

As well as asking for answers, you can also arrive at your own answers
about nutritional claims. Are they based on testimonial evidence,
arguments, correlations or experiments? For more about this see
http://www.we-q.net/nutritionists/nutrition_facts.htm

This link might be helpful:

http://www.newstarget.com/003068-03.html

Also, check out a book called "From Death by Medicine" by By Gary
Null, PhD; Carolyn Dean MD, ND; Martin Feldman, MD; Debora Rasio, MD;
and Dorothy Smith, PhD

Quote:  "This fully referenced report shows the number of people
having in-hospital, adverse reactions to prescribed drugs to be 2.2
million per year. The number of unnecessary antibiotics prescribed
annually for viral infections is 20 million per year. The number of
unnecessary medical and surgical procedures performed annually is 7.5
million per year. The number of people exposed to unnecessary
hospitalization annually is 8.9 million per year. The most stunning
statistic, however, is that the total number of deaths caused by
conventional medicine is an astounding 783,936 per year."

If those numbers are accurate, then more people are killed by medicine
than the Vietnam war several times over.

On a personal note, when I consider number of times that the FDA
approves a drug which is later pulled from the market for killing
people, these statements are not hard for me to believe.

Tony