Lies I Taught in Medical School

by Robert Lufkin
BenBella Books, 2024, 390 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

This book has overflowing praise not only on the back cover but on the first seven pages, which generally means that a book really sucks. Overall, though, it’s not bad, and it has some information that everyone who eats food, which is most people, should know.

But it’s not really about dishonesty and corruption in medical schools as the title suggests. (For that, you’d need an encyclopedia.) It’s about Robert Lufkin’s theory that virtually all diseases of aging, including cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s disease, and arthritis are metabolic disorders and the treatment is to eat “pre­agri­cult­ural whole foods.”

I tried that once. A few months ago I tried to eat one of those whole-grain cereals. It almost broke my teeth. And I’m not 100% convinced that a muffin contains 500 calories as Lufkin says. I’ll have to verify that one.*

As for the “lies,” each chapter begins with one, but they’re variations of three main lies:

• A calorie is just a calorie

• Fat and cholesterol cause heart disease

• Type 2 diabetes is best treated with insulin

Some of this is old news by now. Nina Teicholz’s book The Hydro­gen­ated Bomb: Science and the Cholesterol Scandal is a great source for why cholesterol and dietary fat are no longer considered to cause cardio­vasc­ular disease. Jason Fung’s The Obesity Code and many others have tried to pound the message in about fat and carbs. Yet grocery stores still religiously trim the fat off every­thing because customers still think eating fat makes them fat. That’s why this book is still badly needed.

Perhaps the biggest culprit for obesity, says Lufkin, is high fructose corn syrup. He’s right. Aside from its horrible taste, it’s worse for you than cane sugar. We used it in our animal experiments to make mice obese, and it worked very well. Lufkin says non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) never existed before 1984, when high fructose corn syrup was introduced. You can thank the US government for that as well as for the non­alco­holic steatohepatitis (NASH) and the fatty liver that now affects one in three Americans. The “lie” is that there is no cure. His cure: eat starch. Or go on a low carb diet and your liver will heal itself as long as it hasn’t turned to cirrhosis.

Another “lie” is that to lose weight, you should eat less and exercise more. Lufkin echoes Jason Fung, who says insulin causes obesity and obesity causes disease. The solution is not to eat less, but to avoid raising your insulin levels by narrowing your eating window and avoiding sugar and sugar substitutes, both of which Fung says raise insulin.

Salt is also bad for you, says Lufkin, not for its effect on blood pressure, but because it activates the polyol pathway that converts other carbohydrates (including sorbitol) into fructose.

Lufkin educates laymen in simple, easily understood terms about mTOR, which is a very complicated enzyme that Lufkin says induces insulin resistance when it’s chronically activated. There’s also LP(a) or lipoprotein A, and sd-LDL (small and dense lipoprotein particles), which he says is very bad, unlike ordinary LDL which everyone is terrified about but is harmless.

Unfortunately, like many health food advocates, Lufkin overstates his case. It is true that statins have many bad side effects (the “lie” being that they prevent heart disease), but he overlooks the recent findings that statins may be working by reducing inflammation, while lowering cholesterol is just an incidental side effect. Using acarbose to block digestion of carbohydrates and rapamycin as an anti-aging drug is questionable, and his attempt to resurrect the old idea that cancer is caused by the Warburg effect is unconvincing. His claim that mental illness, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease are all metabolic disorders is on thin ice, but when he says nobody dies of old age (“aging does not cause death”), while technically true, he seems to be suggesting that if the diseases of aging could be cured a person would live forever. That doesn’t necessarily follow.

Then on page 249 Lufkin demolishes his whole case with a bar chart purporting to show the benefits of cutting carbs. Cutting carbs is essential for health, but the graph shows that reducing carbs from 65% to 10% reduces HbA1c (a marker for type 2 diabetes) by a whopping 1.1 ± 0.35 percent. And I’m not convinced that putting food in a blender really has as much effect on insoluble fiber as he says, though I suppose it could shorten their fiber length.

Anyone who still believes in the US government’s infamous food pyramid needs to learn this stuff while you’re still alive. Because afterward you’ll be in a place where it’s too dark to read.

Other factors he recommends are buying (but not, I assume, eating) a dog, sleeping, and getting exercise. But where we’re on the same page is sugar substitutes. If you’re still eating anything that contains high fructose corn syrup, stop!

june 10, 2024

* update Lufkin is correct about one thing: according to my grocery store, blueberry muffins have 460 calories, chocolate chip muffins have 480.

Doing Great Harm?
How DEI and identity politics are infecting American healthcare—and how we are fighting back

by Stanley Goldfarb, MD
Post Hill, 2025, 240 pages
reviewed by T. Nelson

The back cover of this book says, in all caps, “THE DOCTOR WHO leads the movement to restore sanity to American medicine explains why we must rid it of identity politics.” Alas, it was not Doctor Who, but only Stanley Goldfarb, who warns us that medical schools are still practicing DEI and still denying biology.

Many conservatives are sitting fat and happy in the belief that woke is dying and DEI is now illegal. Detransitioners are starting to win malpractice suits in court, and medical schools are improving, so we can now move on to criticizing atheists and bringing back prayer in the schools. They are wrong. Ideologues never just quit. The UK has once again licensed puberty blockers for children, the first step in ‘transitioning,’ for children, in a new ‘trial.’ Even Hilary Cass is going along with it.

Calling it child abuse, Maya Forstater deems it necessary to repeat once again one of the most basic facts of biology:

There is no combination of pills, surgeries and laws that can enable a boy to grow up to be a woman or a girl to become a man.

Medicine is still corrupted by an ideology that denies scien­tif­ic truth. Unfortunately, our American news media are so hopelessly illiterate about scientific truth that one writer illustrated a story about rare earths with a picture of zinc. So we have no way of knowing whether this is still going on here in the USA.

But in the UK, it is. The only change is to invent a nicer term for what they’re doing. Instead of “chemical castration of children,” it’s “treatment for gender incongruence.” In this book, Goldfarb says that’s what our universities are doing to their DEI departments: changing the label on the can but keeping the same old soup.

Goldfarb is a kidney disease expert and former member of editorial boards of top medical journals. He admits to being at one time an Associate Dean—I guess nobody’s perfect—and he puts the blame where it really belongs: on medical school administrators.

These bureaucrats are, he says, not doctors but typically have only a master’s degree in education, and they are almost uniformly ‘woke.’ He writes:

The zeitgeist of sociology and social work have become the driving force in medical education, and it has suffered accordingly.

Instead of rigorous classroom instruction and reading of textbooks, grading is now pass/fail. Admission is based on the applicant’s DEI profile. He says 72% of top-ranked schools ask applicants questions like “What have you done to help identify, address, and correct an issue of systemic discrimination?” and “Do you identify as being part of a group that has been marginalized? . . . If so, describe how this inequity has impacted you our your community.” Goldfarb says this obvious ideological litmus test sends students a clear message about what the admissions committee really wants, and forces them to choose between starting their career with a lie or challenging the question, which would ensure their application is discarded.

He quotes four admissions committee members who said they “routinely give black and Latino applicants a pass for subpar metrics” while “whites and Asians need near perfect scores even to be considered.” One member added that the bar for “underrepresented minorities” was “as low as you could possibly imagine.”

This is obviously a form of racial discrimination, as there is zero evidence that minority applicants would be excluded if they possessed the ability to succeed. But what is the real goal here? Surely the bureaucrats must know that giving MD degrees to incompetent people will only ensure that the safest option for patients is to assume that all members of that specific group, whether they’re women, blacks, or whatever, are incompetent even when they might not be. In other words, the goal of DEI is not to eliminate racism, but to create it.

Most med schools, as everyone knows, still drop the MCAT test. They also drop science courses and replace them with courses on climate change and ‘structural racism’ disguised as people management seminars. Goldfarb says that one teacher even ordered med students to pray to Mama Earth and chant “Free, Free Palestine.” Many young people, he says, just shrug about things like this because they’re powerless.

It gets worse. Some medical schools are blatantly violating the 1964 Civil Rights act by segregating students by race.

I’ve seen the results. I’ve done research and taught in a medical school, though I mostly tried to avoid teaching. I’ve had some of their doctors in my lab, so I’ve seen firsthand the quality of doctors these schools turn out. I didn’t trust anyone from that school in the clinic and I would never let them try to do a calculation or get anywhere near a chemical, let alone do an experiment.

Goldfarb got cancelled by complaining about those discrim­ina­tory practices and started an organization called Do No Harm, which uses lawsuits to force medical schools to change. This is much more effective, he says, than just complaining.

It’s not just a political book. Goldfarb gives some specific examples of falsehoods being taught, including the myth that black women are three to four times more likely to die due to pregnancy-related causes than other races. The ideologues insist that race is a ‘social construct’ and therefore there can only be one possible explanation: ‘systemic racism.’ Goldfarb explains patiently why this is false. Black patients, he says, have a mutation in the gene APOL1, which encodes for a component of high-density lipoproteins. It provides protection against Trypanosoma but also conveys a two-fold greater risk for preeclampsia and gives a 4-fold higher rate of end-stage kidney disease (ESKD).

I would have liked to see more on how such genetic differen­ces among races affect health and maybe some discussion about why mentioning this is now taboo. In genetics class back in the pre-woke era we were taught how many group-specific genetic diseases like Tay-Sachs disease may have provided survival advantages during evolution. It’s fascin­ating stuff. For instance, sickle-cell anemia, which is believed to protect against malaria, occurs mainly in black people. This fact is critical for diagnosis, but oddly enough the CDC, Harvard, and WHO web pages don’t mention it, though NHLBI does. One online encyclopedia merely attributes it to racism. Even the 17th edition of Harrison’s gigantic Principles of Internal Medicine (2008) doesn’t mention it. It only says that genetic screening should not be done as it could cause racial discrimination. This particular disease is well known, of course, at least among older doctors, but pretending that genetic differences among groups of humans don’t exist can lead to embarrassingly bad diag­noses and inapprop­riate, even deadly treatments. Forcing the students to read the textbooks won’t solve the problem if the text­books don’t tell the truth.

Pretending that race doesn’t exist is a convenient ploy that lets them conclude that any differences in medical outcomes are the result of systemic racism. The unasked question is: do they really believe it, or are they just being cynical? The same question applies to the claim that sex is a mere social construct.

Goldfarb also dismantles the Implicit Bias test, which amazingly is still being used. People who refuse to take this fake test of political allegiance are often simply fired.

I tell any prospective patients they must know what disease they have and how it should be treated, including the name of any medication and the proper dose, before they ever visit a doctor. They must know whether their doctor is telling the truth and be prepared to walk out AMA if they suspect he or she is not. Disturbing reports have recently come out about nurses refusing to treat patients with whom they disagree politically.

The problem is not just medical schools and hospitals. It’s also true in many other professions, such as law. If the goal is to make people leery of women and people of other races in professional positions, they’re doing a great job. But once again, as Goldfarb says, it’s the administrators, not the doctors or the students and certainly not the patients, who are to blame.

No index, cheap paper, and watch out: Barnes & Noble sold me a used copy of this book falsely labeled as new. Shit, back to Azathoth.

feb 03 2026