Wednesday, July 31st 2019, several coaches from Myriad CrossFit had the amazing opportunity to attend the 2019 CrossFit Health Conference in Madison, WI. This was the 3rd year of educating and exposing the health care industry from very well respected physicians that have worked deep in big organizations and Hospitals.
Founder of CrossFit, Greg Glassman has built an extensive network of Doctors worldwide that want to expose the health care system for what it is. As he and his team began digging deeper they’ve witnessed how screwed up the system really is and how far we’ve got to go. Greg has coined this “The Mess” (see next section for more information on “The Mess”).
Each year we’ve attended the Health Conference, it’s been overwhelming to see the growing number of Doctors that attend. Without actually counting the number of hands raised, I believe this was the first year that Doctors outnumbered non-doctors.
Due to ‘The Mess’ of our current state, there is no way that this Titantic cruise liner of a system will be able to turn around in a year or even 10 years. It’s way to big to even start at a high of a level, thus last year CrossFit started free MD Level-1 CrossFit Seminars, to educate and expose information to one doctor at a time. This was a true grassroots style approach and seems to be only picking up steam. Over the past two years there have been roughly 1000 physicians educated on “The Mess”. Some have even gone back and quit their job to open gyms, wanting to focus more on preventative treatments like proper fitness and nutrition.
I personally have learned so much from attending these conferences and encourage anyone that is able to attend in 2020, to make the effort. The education really spans from exposing flawed science, inflating data statistics, to what type of food and lifestyle is the best scientifically speaking.
This year, the conference started out with Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, via a hilarious skype video. Dr. Ravnskov, an 85 year old whistleblower, without the appearance of much IT experience kept having his headphones fall of his head and hair going in every direction. As funny and distracting as that was, his wealth of knowledge was amazing to sit back and absorb.
He founded The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics (THINCS) after serving as a whistleblower in the face of extreme pressure from the approved scientific consensus on Ancel Keys’ flawed diet-heart hypothesis. Because of this the scientific community put forth great efforts to silence him when he became critical of the popular anti-cholesterol literature.
To find out more about the speakers, I have listed the others at the bottom of this section.
After attending this conference for the second straight year, it has truly made us take a deeper dive into questioning what the “truth” really is and what has been fabricated to help the bottom line of big business. It scares me to learn how often misinformation can be passed along as “true” just because it keeps money flowing through “the system”.
A great example of this came from Dr. David Dimond on how statistical deception can create the appearance that statins (in this particular case) are safe and effective in prevention of cardiovascular disease. He shows a marketing campaign from Lipitor claiming it reduces the risk of heart-attacks by 36%. In reality they minimized the appearance of the absolute risk data, which was truly only 2%. Slightly different than the fabricated 36%. With all the side effect known of Lipitor, is it really worth taking? I would love to say, go ask your doctor, however they are being sold the lies as well from the company making billions from it, so if they have not done their research, it’s very likely it’s been missed.
“The Mess”
We want to share this information with you since we think it is so important for people to understand that CrossFit Health isn’t specifically about someone’s individual ‘health.’ CrossFit Health is about uncovering the corrupt science and untruths found in old research. It’s important for people to read the following from the CrossFit Health website. People need to know that we have and will continue to be fed lies by companies who are seeking profits in both the food, medical, and pharmaceutical industries. Sugar is bad; soda is primarily sugar; soda industry won’t admit it but instead funds studies saying sugar isn’t bad. Same goes for specific drugs, ie. statins and the belief that cholesterol is bad.
CrossFit Health (CFH) isn’t about your health. Taken from crossfit.com, “CrossFit Health is an investigation into the ills of modern medicine and the willful abuse of the public’s trust in science. What would motivate such an inquiry? And what are our qualifications to put forth on the subject?
Nearly 20 years ago, in an article titled “What Is Fitness?” CrossFit articulated the physiological reality that what we eat and how we exercise—fundamentally lifestyle choices—are the independent variables in control of the dependent variables measured by medicine as manifestation, predictor or cause of chronic disease. These dependent variables include triglycerides, high-density lipoprotein, A1C, blood pressure, body fat, bone density and muscle mass.
A business was seeded and a global fitness and health revolution sprouted from a prescription of constantly varied, high-intensity functional movement leveraged by meat and vegetables, nuts and seeds, some fruit, little starch, and no sugar.
The certainty and fidelity with which that prescription increased work capacity across broad time and modal domains while improving all health metrics have been the driving force for the success of CrossFit and CrossFitters. That revolution comprises 14,500 CrossFit Affiliate gyms around the world, 132,000 credentialed CrossFit trainers and millions of CrossFit devotees. Within that group are the CrossFit physicians, numbering over 20,000 in the U.S. alone.
The inexorable rise of chronic disease, which is taking 70 percent of lives needlessly and prematurely, has two root causes: excess carbohydrate consumption and sedentarism. From the onset of this epidemic, official response from our universities, our government institutes of health and our very own doctors was to promote a high-carb, low-fat, margarine-greased descent into ever-worsening disease and death. Little has changed in decades beyond worsening global health and CrossFit’s ascendancy.
The CrossFit physicians are by virtue of medical training and CrossFit participation uniquely poised to offer meaningful public discourse on what has gone so tragically wrong. They sit in possession of a view of health, metabolism and exercise that is neither mainstream nor traditional yet entirely correct and vitally important—perhaps essential. CrossFit has been right for a long time, and they know it.
That we were correct and stood in direct opposition to a powerful coalition of authority, credentials and money was tough for many to accept and profoundly uncomfortable for them to explain. But harder to believe and more difficult to accept was the decade-long crusade against CrossFit by organized and academic fitness “science” with legislation, litigation, lies, scientific misconduct in the form of falsification and fabrication of data, and, finally, felonies in the form of perjury and likely spoliation of evidence. These claims can be found in the words of jurists’ published rulings.
The lessons learned from the legal dismantling of fake science, a crooked journal and perjuring scientists have given us a forensic view as to how everything might have gone so wrong. We’re calling the combination of runaway medical costs and disease rates—which many profit from but none combat effectively—“The Mess.”
CrossFit Health is an ongoing exploration of The Mess.”
It’s time we all make sure we take control of our own health and know what we are capable of doing without a Doctor’s prescription. Dedicate your life with a goal of living to full functional capacity, in and through your 90’s, UnDoctored.
The speakers at the Health Conference
The second speaker was Dr. Zoë Harcombe whom spoke on a comparison of what we’re told to eat with what the body of actual scientific evidence suggests we should eat. Listening to Dr. Harcombe made several lightbulbs go off with how science explains a lot of the work we do with our clients. She also had some amazing visual charts that I though kept things as simple as possible.
Investigative journalist, Gary Taubes, one of my favorites because of his no nonsense personality and willingness to do years of research to get the right answers. He shared his evidence on how people gain fat.
Last week we posted a fun article from the another speaker at this years Health Conference,
Dr. David Diamond, on the demonization of fat and cholesterol by reviewing the research on cholesterol-lowering statins — a multibillion-dollar industry — and their numerous adverse effects.
“Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, a co-founder of the famous Cochrane Collaboration, then described his experiences with a scandal that rocked the scientific community. His story demonstrated how institutional corruption leads to the censorship of dissenting views and the end of free scientific debate.
Finally, Dr. Dominic D’Agostino presented on his discovery of the neuroprotective and anti-cancer effects of a ketogenic diet, which he observed while studying strategies to enhance the safety and performance of Navy SEAL divers breathing high-pressure oxygen.”