research has shown that people on diets who keep food journals lose twice as much weight as those who don’t. - Casey Means

But the medicalization of chronic disease in the past fifty years has been an abject failure. Today, we’ve siloed diseases and have a treatment for everything: High cholesterol? See a cardiologist for a statin. High fasting glucose? See an endocrinologist for metformin. ADHD? See a neurologist for Adderall. Depressed? See a psychiatrist for a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI). Can’t sleep? See a sleep specialist for Ambien. Pain? See a pain specialist for an opioid. PCOS? See an OB-GYN for clomiphene. Erectile dysfunction? See a urologist for Viagra. Overweight? See an obesity specialist for Wegovy. Sinus infections? See an ENT for an antibiotic or surgery. But what nobody talks about — what I think many doctors don’t even realize — is that the rates of all these conditions are going up at the exact time we are spending trillions of dollars to “treat them.

If a medication could slash Alzheimer’s risk by 50 percent, it would be front-page news and prescribed to every patient. But this “drug” does exist — it’s walking! Yet less than 16 percent of doctors prescribe movement to their patients, and 85 percent of practitioners report zero training in prescribing exercise.

The pounds of molecular information we put into our bodies daily impact our health. Every thought you have and feeling you feel comes from food. Inside your mother’s body, you were 3D printed out of food, and every item you ingest continues to print the next iteration of yourself. Bodies, neurotransmitters, hormones, nerves, and mitochondria are all made, exclusively and necessarily, from what you (or your mom) put in your (or their) mouth; we don’t arise from thin air, we arise from food.