Editorial - How to save your heart from your cardiologist

The government with  another big loan from China is to build a state-of-the-art Out Patients Department (OPD) at the National Hospital in Colombo. Despite all these ultra-modern buildings or renovations and the marvels of modern medical technology, more people are falling sick more often in Sri Lanka. So much so that public hospitals and the OPDs of private hospitals are crowded like market places while private hospitals have also become one of the biggest profiteering businesses in Sri Lanka  with some patients who are warded becoming paupers after the treatment or ill-treatment.

Independent and patient-friendly health analysts and patients rights groups believe that among the main reasons for this are the substandard or counterfeit drugs given to people regularly, the pollution or poisoning of the food we eat and nutrition models based on western concepts that have produced a massive 40 percent obesity rate among their people and brought about a grave crisis where, in 30 percent of deaths, the children are dying before their parents.

The United States Food and Drugs Administration on Wednesday said it had found substantial evidence that hydrogenated fats were not safe for the heart. This discovery comes about 40 years after the FDA and the American Heart Association—widely known to be sponsored heavily by transnational food companies—said that food items like butter were not safe for the heart. So thousands of millions of people were encouraged to stop eating items like butter which contains solid fats and turn to certain varieties of margarine and other items with hydrogenated fats. Now after so much damage has been done to the lives and health of millions of people all over the world. we are again told that hydrogenated fats are not safe. This kind of nutritional advice apparently based on the agendas or profiteering  motives of transnational companies prompted a patient friendly heart specialist to write a famous book titled “How to save your heart from your cardiologist”.

Heartfelt or heartbreaking jokes apart, the government of Sri Lanka needs to seriously reflect on and review its policy on food and nutrition. For centuries this country has thrived on a hallowed civilisation and produced healthy people with healthy attitudes not centred on any western models but on our time-tested concepts of food and nutrition.

Many child-friendly paediatricians, patient-friendly medical officers and nutritionists are leading a campaign for Sri Lanka to get back to the concepts of getting the food and nutrition we need from local items instead of promoting all sorts of burgers and other imported status-symbol food which often put us in a hell of a ‘sambol’. For this our country urgently needs an independent food authority including qualified people-friendly nutritionists who could educate and make our people aware of how and where to get good and nutritious local food at affordable prices. With this we also need a policy where the government encourages and gives incentives to cultivators and others who are prepared to go into organic farming, so that the water we drink and, the food we eat will not be polluted by imported agro-chemicals.