The Complete Patient

Some further thoughts related to health from my just-completed ten-day trip to Thailand.

I discovered after ten days of eating Thai food, and lots of it, that my weight hadn’t changed at all. How can that be? The only explanation I can come up with is this: Thai food includes almost none of the three most common components of the American diet: sugar, dairy, wheat. Thai meals commonly conclude with a few slices of pineapple and watermelon. No cookies, cakes, or pudding.

Sometimes, it’s difficult to even find sugar. We went to a Japanese restaurant in a Bangkok shopping mall, and it served green iced tea to everyone. Of course, we were looking for a sweetener. There was none to be found, and while the wait staff was very apologetic, I found it refreshing, as it were, to not have sugar even around to tempt us.

The main accompaniment to meals is rice, rather than bread or pasta. And the closest one comes to dairy in food preparation is coconut milk.

I spent some time walking through very poor neighborhoods in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, a northern city, and one of the things that is striking is that even the most poverty-stricken include lots of greens in their meals. Vegetables are inexpensive, and it’s just part of the lifestyle and diet.

Food for thought.

I have been traveling in Thailand this week and one of the things that has stood out to me is how few people are obese. It's easy to see why, since the diet, even when eating in restaurants a lot, doesn't include a lot of sugar or starch (beyond rice). The only place I've seen a hint of obesity was last evening while walking around in a former ancient capital, Ayutthaya, now a small city, and stumbling on the equivalent of a strip mall with a McDonald's, a fried chicken place, and a Thai version of Taco Bell. Inside, the people munching on fried chicken and burgers were the largest people I had seen. Not terribly obese, but headed that way.

I know the fast-food chains are major factors in America's economic influence abroad. But seeing their emerging  influence in an emerging country with a traditional healthy diet...well, it didn't give me goosebumps about being American.

Two things especially struck me about researching my latest BusinessWeek.com column, about Big Pharma's bullying of small pharmacies to control the market for women's hormones:

1. Maybe it's because I'm a man, but I never had any idea so many women benefit from so-called bioidentical hormone treatment. Sure, some of the testimonials from women to the FDA were orchestrated by Wyeth opponents, but too many are just too authentic to be canned responses; if you want to get a sense of the relief many women receive from this alternative treatment approach, click on this link and take a look through the letters for yourself.

2. Related to the previous, I'm always amazed when I do this kind of research and discover many thousands of people improving their health outside the parameters of our conventional healthcare system. I've seen it happen often enough that I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Maybe I'm just too much of a media junkie, getting roped in to the establishment media's narrow view of the the healthcare world. A case in point is yesterday's front-page Wall Street Journal article about hormone therapy for women. Not even a hint of a suggestion in this major piece that there might be another kind of hormone therapy out there.

It's encouraging to know there is another approach to medical care available. It's up to us to be open to the alternatives and prepared to search them out, even if we decide in the end not to use them. We owe it to ourselves.

When reporters try to be philosophical  about lifestyle, the result is usually something like what was contained in last Sunday's New York Times (Critic's Notebook: Be Merry, Not Ancient), to wit: "If living to 99 means forever cutting the porterhouse into eighths, swearing off the baked potato and putting the martini shaker into storage, then 85 sounds a whole lot better, and I'd ratchet that down to 79 to hold onto the Haagen-Dazs..." (snicker, snicker). Diet and lifestyle are nearly always presented as a choice between living a monastic or indulgent life, overlooking the possibility that eating lots of vegetables and doing away with sugar can actually make you feel better than you used to feel, to the extent you decide you're better off without the sugar...

Speaking of sugar, the New York Times yesterday published one of the most amazing columns I've ever seen in the establishment media--a no-holds-barred trashing of corn syrup. One sample from Nicholas Kristof's column: "It makes no sense to enforce restrictions on lead paints while allowing children to ingest other debilitating substances, particularly sugary drinks like Coke, Snapple and Gatorade (parents often think that sports drinks are healthy, but their added sugars and calories are the last thing many kids need — kids need sports, not sports drinks). " I strongly recommend you read this column, since you won't often see the establishment media take on America's corporate food interests. This piece more than makes up for the foolishness of Sunday's Critic's Notebook.

I've posted an update to my account of March 20, 2006, about the death of Veronica Glaubach a few hours after she gave birth to a daughter. (Scroll to the March 20 posting, using "Next Page" at the bottom of this page, to view the update.) Roberto Glaubach has been on a crusade to obtain justice for his daughter, in the face of stonewalling by the medical profession overseers. He's begun opening doors that were previously shut tight and reports that the posting on this site has been very helpful in his efforts. "Your blog was so important to show these people that this case will continue until they give a little justice."