Lol Big Ag.
Don't go putting on your tin foil hat and eating all your organic/gluten free foods all at once.
To the Op, as a pure CDE, I would echo the above and that's going to be quite a pay cut. Then again, I don't think it bodes well for most ambulatory care pharmacists because the FACHE thought is coming around to nursing education and disease state management being in a position to deliver comparable outcomes at a fraction of the pharmacist price (anticoagulation excepted, but that's highly dependent on warfarin's future).
Well, the tricky part is that there really isn't a strong base good evidence-based anything on nutrition. Almost all of what we know about malnutrition was done on somewhat unwilling volunteers in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. But it's not like even our near ancestors ate any better, they just died early enough where it really didn't matter what they ate, drank, smoked, etc. Most of the real work that needs to be done has to be done on humans now, but most of the experiments that would be conclusive are on the very edge of what an IRB would consider. Unless we are willing to risk subjects in real difficult circumstances, animal models only get us so far, and we find too often that they don't extrapolate to our biochemistry.
US Life Expectancy adjusted for neonatal mortality:
http://u.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/1918/figure2.html
and methodology commentary:
http://u.demog.berkeley.edu/~andrew/mean-age-2009.pdf
I'm pretty ok with a patient dying of heart failure in their late 70s onward, I actually consider that "healthy" but that may be my own sense of seeing geriatrics all the time. I suppose you could eat the Seventh Day Adventist diet, it does really work, but I enjoy my red meat and wine a bit much for that and willing to take the life expectancy hit. If you think Asian food or lifestyles are any better, there's something else going on:
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/35/4/903.short
From the actuarial perspective, even the Asian immigrant populations life expectancy converge to the natives where they live.
And yeah, I agree with Old Timer on this one. While there isn't good evidence on any particular diet working (in fact, there's actually good evidence that none of them really work due to the way your body compensates), we are getting plenty of evidence back on food additives such that FDA is having to really retackle GRAS definitions. I'm not organic, but I am fairly anti-additive to the point that we mostly cook ourselves from the basic ingredients (and that our meat kind of sucks).
The sad part is that I've come to the conclusion that with lifestyle diseases, most patients (including myself) only hope is to not be at all. Most people can't lose weight consistently and permanently (in the same way that I don't believe that most people can quit smoking permanently). It does happen, but they are exceptional people and not the norm. For most normal people, the only way it can work is to not gain weight (as in always try to stay at normal weight), don't try smoking in the same way that I shouldn't try cocaine, because I'd probably like it too much...But it's hard to avoid based on a possibility, but I think the reality is too hard to deal with.
