Let Food be your medicine!

One of my favourite quotes is several thousand years old and comes to us from the "father" of modern medicine. It simply states "let food be your medicine." I think it is a great quote because it points to 2 things that are really important.

Firstly; is that we all require regular food, and what I understand from that is that we need to be constantly aware of what we are doing to ourselves and our bodies by what we put into them. In this way all food has a medicinal affect. If we eat something that leaves our bodies sour and acidic, that can affect our digestive systems which in turn may cause changes to our body chemistry, which may affect our mind. In this way eating fast food meals can eventually lead to a Zinc deficiency and depression.

There is a great book that I came across once called "The Kitchen Shrink" and it talks about some of the brain and mental issues that can be caused by poor nutritional choices. Now it only covers some introductory basics but it does that well. Have a read. The website for it is http://www.nataliesavona.com/kitchenshrink.htm. There are a great many issues that we face as a society including lifestyle diseases that can be traced directly to our eating habits. Many mental health issues originally stem from deficiencies or are added to by our diet. Some of these include anxiety, stress, inability to concentrate, poor recall, depression. There are hundreds of others and many of them have a food component.

There are also many physical issues that are affected by nutrition. Many health professionals, myself included, are coming to the conclusion that apart from infectious diseases almost all other illnesses can be seen as symptoms of a poor diet and lifestyle choices. There is much current disagreement over this, but I believe that there is a growing body of evidence to support this perspective. Many people find this hard to deal with, especially when we consider the deaths of friends and loved ones who have died of things like cancer, circulatory diseases, coronary heart disease, stroke, and alzheimer's.

There is also strong evidence to argue that most of the issues facing our children come form those same dietary choices. As parents we often give into the urge to feed our children what is quick and easy. Sandwiches, sweets, and soft drinks. All of these things are starting to be implicated in behavioural disorders form obesity to ADHD, from bullying to depression. Many dieticians and nutritionist do not consider these to be anything other than symptoms of poor diet and do not call them diseases or illnesses. We often make poor choices based on our time and stress, little realizing that we are the ones causing the problems that our children face, by our poor food choices.

In effect we are the sum of all of our food choices over the past several days, months or years.



The second thing that I get from this quote is that we are all doctors and medicate ourselves everyday. Wether we want to be responsible for that or not, we choose our own levels of health. We choose to eat poorly or to overeat. We choose the hamburger over the salad. We allow our children's tantrums to dictate our food choices.

If we go back over the last hundred thousand years of our development and look at the foods that where available to us. And then compare that with the rise and fall of the incidence of illnesses and diseases we start to see a remarkable coincidence between our diets and our health. In times of plenty there is a growth of circulatory diseases. As we eat more grain there is a growth in autoimmune disorders. When we eat more salted and smoked food cancers rates rise. In fact some cancers seemed to have belonged to specific parts of the world. Areas that eat salted foods have high rates of stomach cancer. In areas where smoked fish is popular they have higher rates of mouth cancer.

All around the world we see this continuing correlation between diet and disease. When we start to look at people who have good health levels, low rates of illness and disease and long life we see the same patterns over and over again. Simple diets, mainly plant food, low energy intake, no refined foods, few sugars or starches in the diet.

In truth we are all doctors and everyday we choose how to treat our main patient, ourselves.

We can choose to learn about food and nutrition and treat ourselves to a long and healthy life or we can choose a short and unhealthy one.

As we can see, it is always someone's choice, ours!