PREVENTIVE MEDECINE: DISEASE AND THE WESTERN LIFESTYLE
To many, if not most, of us living in the West, the notion that some of the diseases we all take for granted as the major killers are preventable is indeed hard to accept. Strokes, heart disease and cancers between them kill most westerners yet they are relatively uncommon in the non-westernized world. Why should this be, and is it possible that by altering the way we live we could reduce or even abolish these conditions?
At first, the suggestion that it is our western lifestyle that causes many of our major diseases seems quite ridiculous, but the pioneering work of a group of doctors who spent decades in non-westernized parts of the world must make us think again. They noticed that certain non-infective diseases were very much less common in traditional societies than they were in the West. They wondered at first what to call these diseases. ‘Diseases of civilization’ (meaning modern, western civilization) is not quite right because evidence suggests that some of them were around but uncommon in the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, Rome, India and China. Given that the conditions they found to be so common were now mainly seen in communities that had adopted our western, technological way of life, they decided to call them ‘western diseases’.
The first two criticisms that are immediately thrown at such a suggestion are, first, that people in the Third World tend not to live to be old enough to get ‘our’ diseases, and second that their medical systems are so poor that they simply do not diagnose the conditions even when they are present. Neither of these criticisms stands up when examined in depth, and studies which show that migrant populations (originally without western diseases) adopt the diseases of their westernized brothers in their new country, prove without doubt that it is not simply that whole populations in the non-industrialized world are somehow immune to westernized diseases. It is also impressive (if depressing) to watch peoples with traditional lifestyles take on our disease pattern as they adopt our way of life.
So what could possibly be causing these western diseases? Obviously motor-car accidents can only occur where there are motor cars, and pollution from industrial effluent or cigarette smoke is only found where these two abound, but these are not the diseases I mean when I refer to western diseases. The conditions in question are such disorders as: high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, appendicitis, piles, varicose veins, gall-stones, kidney stones and cancer.
Of course, any of many changes in western lifestyle in recent years could account for the frequency of all these conditions today and their virtual absence until the last century in the West and in most of the world today, but because many of them seem to affect the digestive system it makes sense to start looking for clues in the food we eat. Modern technology has radically altered the production and preparation of food and it now seems that food changes are at the heart of many of these ‘new’ western diseases.
*56/72/5*
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