I was at Kripalu, the yoga center in Lenox, MA, over this past weekend, a place I try to visit once or twice a year. I did a lot of yoga, but a major theme running through the weekend was health care.
On Saturday evening, physician Mark Hyman, the author of the new hot-selling weight-loss book, "Ultra Metabolism", spoke to about 150 people at Kripalu and made the remark I quoted in the heading above. It was just one of a number of comments and observations suggesting that so-called alternative, or complementary, medicine is moving more rapidly into the mainstream than anyone can imagine. "We are seeing a transformation of our whole way of thinking about health care and medicine," he stated.
The fact that his book is already on the NY Times bestseller list (#5 in the supercompetitive "Advice" segment) and is getting major media play begins to attest to the point. Especially since he makes a tough argument–that "the right foods (whole, real foods) turn on the genes for weight loss and health…and the wrong foods turn on the genes that promote weight gain and disease." The right foods are vegetables, beans, seeds, soy, and nuts, and the wrong foods are the foods most people consume in the largest amounts–sugar, pasta, diet drinks, and snacks. So Hyman is really advocating that people give these things up. It’s not something most people want to hear, so that’s why I find his emerging celebrity status intriguing.
Hyman sees a corporate stake in sickness and chronic conditions like diabetes and arthritis. He puts it quite strongly: "Our whole system is designed to make people sick and keep people sick."
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