Our obesity epidemic is rooted in medicine’s inability to take a broader view, Elizabeth Tracey reports

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The food pyramid was supposed to visually demonstrate how best to nourish our bodies, but instead it vilified many fats and precipitated a wholesale shift to carbohydrates, many of them refined. And then the obesity epidemic began. That’s the reconstruction of Marty Makary, a surgeon and public health researcher at Johns Hopkins, who holds organized medicine responsible.

Makary: We don't do a good job in medicine of showing humility, recognizing when we were wrong, like the food pyramid and the demonization of natural fats. Turns out that recommendation was so wrong it actually contributed to the obesity and diabetes epidemic because it moved the food industry to refine carbohydrates and added sugar, but you didn't hear the establishment come out and apologize or correct the record with the same vigor by which we put out that recommendation to avoid fat.    :30

Makary says such embrace of dogma by medicine needs to change, in his new book called ‘Blind Spots.’ At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.