Beige Food Nine
The Infection of Panic
And this brings me to the final part of this Beige Food series.
Healthcare systems are not good spaces for anxious minds. They are also not designed for those with chronic conditions even absent an anxious mind, as I mentioned in the No Before Times to Be Had series.
I talk a lot on this site about how avoidance reinforces that threat identification loop in the brain. When you have a threat identification system that has misidentified food as a threat, each time you avoid food you reinforce the threat. The only way you can break the cycle is exposure to the threat and the constant practice of approaching and eating, in this case, the threat.
We’ve developed a culture that vilifies fear and equates it with weakness and failure. Fear is a powerful survival setting in the brain. It’s a call to action. When someone is in recovery from an eating disorder, they cannot deny their fear or pretend it doesn’t exist if they want to get to the other side of resetting their threat identification system to stop misidentifying food as a threat.
While denial of fear is an existentially a dangerous place to be, avoidance of a real threat is an active response to the call to action that fear generates. In other words, avoiding a real threat is life affirming.
One of the challenges of being a patient in the healthcare system, particularly if you have a twitchy threat identification system that has a tendency to identify things that aren’t threats as real threats, is that healthcare is a twitchy false-threat swamp. It will flood you with false threats.
The system is designed for its optimization. The organization’s existential threat is that a patient will sue for damages. Standards of care are designed to limit the liability (that exposure to having to pay out for damages) and not necessarily to maximize the potential return to health for a patient who is being cared for within that system.
Are you being asked to undergo regular blood glucose monitoring for your benefit or to limit the risk that you would sue the practitioner and/or their backing organization should you have negative health outcomes from the condition they are ostensibly saying is being treated by monitoring those levels? The answer is probably a bit of both in most cases, but the fact that any part of the care equation is there to try to limit the possibility you have a valid path for compensation if things go wrong, is the reality of care in any setting today.
Everything is positioned as an existential threat to the patient, yet woven into that is always the reality that compliance with the treatment plan provides a pathway to ensure the organization has its existential needs fully met.
Not adhering to any screenings, treatments, protocols, will always be positioned as a morbidity and mortality risk to the patient, leveraging their natural fear of illness and death. It’s insidious because in many cases, the protocols are designed exclusively for the benefit of limiting the organization’s liability and that fact is entirely hidden from the patient.
With all of that swirling around you, it’s hard to assess what’s a real threat and what’s a limited liability disguised as a threat. When you hit this kind of saturation of information and the knock on cognitive load and decision-making paralysis, the first thing you do has to be the easiest thing to accomplish and that’s to delay any decision or action.
I’ve said it many times in many places on this site, very few healthcare decisions have to be made immediately in an emergent situation. When they do, it’s actually not confusing and the threat is blatant for everyone including you. You are doubled over with a burst appendix, it’s an easy call.
What I’m talking about is the 95-98% of healthcare interactions you’ll face in your life where you have some time to reflect. Walk away and give it time to make your decision. Being removed from everything being presented as a threat will help you parse what is really a threat to you and what the call to action is based on that.
Re-Cap
As this was a long, multi-week series, it’s probably a good idea to re-hash the key points:
The majority of practitioners out there do not read peer-reviewed published research. If they do read at all, it’s the abstract and the conclusions only.[1]
Using diabetes mellitus type 1 as an example, I showed that abstract and conclusion-only reading would lead the reader to believe that carbohydrate-restricted diets offer improved morbidity and mortality outcomes. The actual data within those systematic reviews and meta-analyses of numerous trials do not support that assumption.
Ultra-processed food is food. It is not addictive, nor do food companies add components that would create withdrawal symptoms should someone stop consuming the food. Even if it were so, withdrawal symptoms would not be sufficient to keep people eating those foods.
The one benefit of ultra-processed foods is that they offer the living system easier access to the energy. The body has to expend less energy to extract the energy from ultra-processed foods when compared to processed and raw foods.
Mitochondria in our cells convert food into energy. Countless chronic conditions generate secondary mitochondrial dysfunction making it harder for the body to extract energy from food. Conditions such as heart disease, diabetes, ME/CFS, Ehlers-Danlos, lupus, MS, long Covid, arthritis…all include secondary mitochondrial dysfunction.
The research landscape for chronic disease management is awash in the mistaken belief that weight management is warranted and achievable through dietary restriction. Of the papers that do look at ultra-processed food intake and chronic disease outcomes, correlations are weak to non-existent.
Ultra-processed foods are food, however they do have a large carbon footprint in their manufacturing processes and they have toxic constituents on their packaging that transfer to the foods contained therein. However, processed and raw foods have similar problems. Be leery of grasping onto the downsides of ultra-processed foods as a way to reinforce the avoidance of food that is inherent to the sustainment of an active eating disorder.
Preferentially eating ultra-processed foods during an eating disorder recovery process tends to have an end date, because mitochondria are not usually permanently malfunctioning once the eating disorder is in remission. For those with other chronic conditions, ultra-processed foods might continue to have value in supporting ongoing secondary mitochondrial dysfunction.
Unsubstantiated personal opinion: avoid talking about diet and food choices with a treatment team.
Parasocial relationships dominate any circumstance where an organization underpins the relationship. Relationships with healthcare practitioners are parasocial for this reason, even when the practitioner might be independent (as licensing and regulatory bodies determine the standards of care the practitioner might enact).
Just as with parasocial relationships online, developing rules by which you will protect yourself for parasocial dealings in healthcare helps you to avoid having the relationship leveraged for the benefit of the third entity (the organization) to your detriment.
Know your health goals and medical mind before any healthcare appointment or interaction.
Inpatient care is rife with underfeeding. See the article: Inpatient Underfeeding. Extract the value of inpatient care: medical stabilization and concern yourself with remission, or improvement of symptoms, upon your release. Medical stabilization is not a step to bypass —when it’s needed, it’s very needed.
Outpatient care gives you more agency to support your diet and food choices.
Healthcare is a false threat quagmire. It’s a very difficult space to be in if you happen to deal with a twitchy threat identification system. Many things are identified as a threat to the patient’s health outcomes when the actual threat is an inadequate limitation of liability for the practitioner and the overarching organization.
Very few healthcare decisions must be made in an emergent fashion. By giving yourself a bit of time to sift through everything, you will have a better chance of clearing away false threats to look at the real threats to you as a patient.
Matar M, Massaad C, Itani A, Kreidly S, Chedid G, Salameh P, Nakib H. Attitudes and practices toward medical literature: a cross-sectional study at LAU Medical Center-Rizk. Future Science OA. 2025 Dec 31;11(1):2526314.
