The book is a synopsis of 200 years of scientific study. I can’t summarise a summary. I would urge everyone to just read it, I’d respect you if you read it and disagreed rather than just decided it must be wrong. Remember, you are in danger of making the same mistake as all those who thought smoking was safe, I say that as a doctor who understands health more than most.
I will post a neat little story from the diabetes chapter. However, I stress you can’t take this out of context, it’s a whole essay, and the big picture needs to be understood...
Bhutan
Sandwiched between the mountainous borders of India and China, the isolated Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan may be the last country in the world to be electrified. Until the 1960s, Bhutan had no banking system, no national currency, and no roads. In the late 1980s, I learned something about this Buddhist country, thought by some to be the model for James Hilton’s Shangri-La, when I made the acquaintance of a Canadian woman who worked for CUSO International, the Canadian version of the United States Peace Corps. She had just returned from a four-year stint in a small Bhutanese village, where she taught English to the local children. Bhutan is somewhat larger, in area, than the Netherlands, and has a population just over 750,000. The road system at the time was still extremely limited, and most travel outside the immediate vicinity of the small capital, Thimphu, including travel to my friend’s village, was by foot or horseback. She felt privileged to be able to live in that country at all, because outside visitors to Bhutan were limited to 1,000 per year. The woven baskets and other handcrafts that she brought back were intricate and beautiful. Technology was unknown, as there was no electricity at all in most of the country. Diabetes was extremely rare, and completely unknown outside the capital.
As recently as 2002, fuel wood provided virtually one hundred percent of all non-commercial energy consumption. Fuel wood consumption, at 1.22 tons per capita, was one of the highest, if not the highest, in the world. Bhutan was an ideal laboratory in which to monitor the effects of electricity, because that country was about to be transformed from near zero percent electrification to one hundred percent electrification in a little over a decade.
In 1998, King Jigme Singye Wangchuk ceded some of his powers to a democratic assembly, which wanted to modernize the country. The Department of Energy and the Bhutan Electricity Authority were created on July 1, 2002. That same day the Bhutan Power Corporation was launched. With 1,193 employees, it immediately became the largest corporation in the kingdom. Its mandate was to generate and distribute electricity throughout the kingdom, with a target of full electrification of the country within ten years. By 2012 the proportion of rural households actually reached by electricity was about 84 percent.
In 2004, 634 new cases of diabetes were reported in Bhutan. The next year, 944. The year after that, 1,470. The following year, 1,732. The next year, 2,541, with 15 deaths.10 In 2010, there were 91 deaths and diabetes mellitus was already the eighth most common cause of mortality in the kingdom. Coronary heart disease was number one. Only 66.5 percent of the population had normal blood sugar.11 This sudden change in the health of the population, especially the rural population, was being blamed, incredibly, on the traditional Bhutanese diet which, however, had not changed. “Bhutanese have a penchant for fat-rich foods,” reported Jigme Wangchuk in the Bhutan Observer. “All Bhutanese delicacies are fat-rich. Salty and fatty foods cause hypertension. Today, one of the main causes of ill-health in Bhutan is hypertension caused by oil-rich and salty traditional Bhutanese diet.” Rice, the article continued, which is the staple food of the Bhutanese, is rich in carbohydrates, which turns into fat unless there is physical activity; perhaps the Bhutanese are not getting enough exercise. Two-thirds of the population, the author complained, are not eating enough fruits and vegetables.
But the Bhutanese diet has not altered. The Bhutanese people are poor. Their country is mountainous with few roads. They have not all gone out and suddenly bought automobiles, refrigerators, washing machines, televisions, and computers, and become a lazy, inactive people. Yet rates of diabetes quadruple in four years. Bhutan now ranks eighteenth in the world in its mortality rate from heart disease.
Only one other thing has changed so dramatically in Bhutan in the last decade: electrification, and the resulting exposure of the population to electromagnetic fields.
