The era of personalised medical advice is arriving at last. Australia's new sun guidelines vary the advice by 3 skin types. Well, it's a start.
Not that I always agree with his theories (such as that the benefit of sunshine is mostly about nitric oxide and that vitamin D is relatively unimportant). But I certainly admire him for taking on the medical establishment which needs shaking up. However we need to get past the current situation where experts shout contradictory views without proper consideration of each other's evidence, and where health advice is hard to change because some important person said something once and we mustn't contradict them.
Returning to the current topic: Dr Mason seems to share the desire of health advisors to give the same advice for everyone. In the second of those two videos he tells us about a plant chemical which is very similar to human cholesterol. He then tells us how most people handle this well and mostly get rid of that chemical without it causing too many problems. However some people incorporate significant amounts of the chemical in places where cholesterol is meant to be, leading to malfunction of the insulin receptors of cells. Yet we don't hear how much of the bad heart statistics from seed oil consumption is because of those people. Maybe he has an alternative diet that is better for everyone, but the advantage might not outweigh other factors for people without the specific problem. He is not slow to claim that other things he opposes have limited benefit.
Skin colour is an obvious case where your origins lead to differences which now affect the best health advice. Here's another.
Suppose your ancestors lived near the sea and ate a lot of seafood. They, and you, probably have a very good system for getting rid of excess salt. And they don't have a working system for retaining salt in case of a future shortage. Now if you wisely decide to stop eating processed food, then you need to get your salt in other ways, and if you don't then you could easily suffer health effects from that.
Now suppose your ancestors lived inland in a low salt area, buying salt when possible. Now their system for getting rid of salt may not work so well. Indeed they may be inclined to retain salt when they get it, despite the resultant health problems. And now you, with those genes, are not well suited for our modern high salt diet.
It is mind-blowing that advice on sun exposure took so long to take skin colour into account. And it still doesn't advise artificial UV for those who can't get enough sun, even though, as Dr Mason would be quick to say, vitamin D tablets don't do the same job. Of course artificial UV is illegal in Victoria, where it is most needed in mainland Australia.
We need to identify more hidden differences that should impact health advice, then develop and fund testing for those differences. In future we might be able to use genetic testing. For the moment we need to look for things that can be tested more cheaply. I expect that this should include the two cases mentioned here: handling salt and handling plant chemicals the imitate cholesterol.
