http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/ruminations/lifestyle-and-death-yoga-is-just-a-small-step-in-countering-big-auto-big-food-and-big-pharma/?utm_source=Popup&utm_medium=Old&utm_campaign=TOIHP
Lifestyle and death: Yoga is just a small step in countering Big Auto, Big Food and Big Pharma June 23, 2015, 12:05 AM IST Chidanand Rajghatta in Ruminations | Edit Page, India | TOI BOSTON: At a capacious convention centre in Boston, some 14,000 healthcare professionals — doctors, scientists, drug industry executives — gathered for the 75th scientific sessions of the American Diabetes Association earlier this month. Despite its professedly ‘American’ tag, hundreds of healthcare professionals from India and China attended the meeting. Here’s why: Give or take a few million, India (with 70 million patients) and China (90 million) are the top two diabetes-stricken countries in the world, followed by the US (30 million), whose free market ways, including its food, transport and healthcare ethos, both countries seek to copy. As the meeting draws to a close on a balmy Monday, the centre is boiling with excitement over the results of one of the biggest drug trials for a diabetes medication called Januvia, belonging to the sitagliptin class of drugs. Gliptins have been under a cloud for some years now, suspected of causing heart failures, and Merck, the company that owns sitagliptin, has subjected itself to a trial that other gliptins from its rivals have failed. If it is shown that sitagliptin-based Januvia does not cause heart attacks, then Merck will be the biggest player standing in a field where its Januvia is already the largest blockbuster in its portfolio, with some 10 million subscriptions and $4 billion in annual sales worldwide. India and China, with their burgeoning diabetes population, will be particularly lucrative markets. Which explains why Merck has flown in so many healthcare professionals and journalists, present company included, from across the world. That in itself, along with the fact that Merck has commissioned and paid for the study by researchers at Oxford and Duke Universities, should make it evident that the drug will get a thumbs-up. But there have been instances of company-sponsored trials failing, so executives from Merck and its India affiliate MSD say they are on pins and needles, although they have readied a press release (declaring victory!) as soon as results are announced. When Januvia expectedly gets the all-clear, there is much bonhomous backslapping, high-fives and hand-pumping between Merck execs, researchers and physicians. The drug, introduced in 2006, is now good for almost another decade and perhaps as much as $30 billion in revenues over the next decade, even as its rivals have fallen by the way side. More importantly, gliptins as a class of drugs cannot all be condemned as heart-attack causers, although numerous other lesser side effects are quietly glossed over, buried in fine print and fast talk. Such scenes are repeated at many healthcare conventions across the world, which are but fora for legitimising drug use. The culture of understating side effects and propounding medication as the first line of defence (and offence), to treat what Mumbai’s cardio-metabolic guru Dr Hemant Thacker calls ‘a lifestyle, not a disease’, is what should exercise our minds hours after the World Yoga Day. Drug companies jealously guard their turf, their patents and their profits, and they have no stake in keeping us healthy. Doctors, for the most part, are trained to dispense medication, not talk you into lifestyle changes that most people are not disciplined enough to make. The result: Blockbuster drugs from the family of statins (which treat high cholesterol, vilified as a heart disease provocateur) and gliptins (for diabetes), both prescribed enthusiastically by physicians, generate more than a trillion dollars in revenues for Big Pharma. The drug companies in turn plow in big money into the political system (particularly in the US) to get protection and profits. The other elephants in the room: Big Food and Big Auto, which have combined to subvert an active lifestyle based on traditional coarse grains and rough activity, and turned us into sedentary couch potatoes feasting on mass-produced, industrial grade carbs and refined foods. This includes an overdose of sugar in a society that calls for sweets on every happy occasion. Sweet are the uses of adversity, fluted the Bard, but it turns out that sweet is the new adversary. Sugar, says Dr Shashank Joshi, one of several leading endocrinologists from India who was at Boston, is the new tobacco. Indeed, in many parts of India, diabetes is colloquially called the sugar disease. India is particularly vulnerable to this assault. It appears we may also be genetically predisposed to these ailments because of a dodgy gene (dubbed the ‘thrifty gene’) that causes us to hoard calories. Perhaps, joked one endocrinologist, who calls it the ‘fuel storage gene’, in anticipation of another famine. But for the most part, we have only ourselves to blame — for succumbing to the blandishments of Big Food and Big Auto, underwritten by promises from Big Pharma of managing our lifestyle excesses. ***Indeed, recent studies show that India is undergoing an ‘epidemiological transition’ consistent with lifestyle changes. More people in India now die of non-communicable lifestyle ailments (like diabetes, heart attack, cirrhosis) than communicable diseases (like tuberculosis, measles, flu) that snuffed out lives in the last century. This is largely avoidable, if not downright preventable, with a public policy that encourages lifestyle changes. Yoga, or any other form of workout sans political motives and religious underpinnings, is but a small first step. Many more twists and turns are needed to avoid the clutches of the Big Three.*** [Emphasis added.] -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
