Thursday, February 23, 2012

Food; The Miracle Medicine

"If someone is depressed the first thing you can do is say that it's okay to be depressed, if you're malnourished you should be depressed. So don't do that any more. Go eat good food."

~Professor Ian Brighthope, M.D., M.B.B.S Professor of Nutritional and Environmental Medicine



There are thousands of chemical reactions that occur in the body every day in order to keep a person alive. These chemical reactions are fueled by macro-nutrients such as proteins, fats, carbohydrates as well as micro-nutrients such as vitamins and minerals, all of which come from the food that we eat.

A deficiency in any one of these components, will result in deficient chemical reactions associated with said component, which over time results in disease. It is easy to incorporate the macro-nutrients into our diets especially fats! But it is not so easy to get the micro-nutrients.

Even if you think you are eating healthily, by avoiding the processed junk in the middle isles of the grocery store and spending most of your time and money on the produce section, here's a very unpleasant wake-up call.

Not only are those shinny apples and vibrant green spinach leaves traveling thousands of miles to your grocery store (especially when they are out of season) they are also being preserved in the process. Then by the time they reach your  shopping bag, they may have been sitting in the store for several days. More importantly, if the produce is not organic it has been exposed to pesticides. Pesticides that cause the two headed toad in our local streams and other mutant critters. And we are eating this stuff!Now on top of this, we bring it home and store it in our fridge for possibly another couple of days. Then when are ready to eat it we throw it in a pan and cook it. The minute a fruit or vegetable is picked the vitamins, minerals and enzymes start loosing their potency. Light destroys vitamin A and heat denatures proteins. 50% of protein in meat is lost during the cooking process. In other words, by the time produce reaches your plate, it is nutritionally deficient.

Organic produce, on the other hand is pesticide free and is grown in good soil. The only draw back is that it is  basically twice as much as non organic produce. But think of it as preventative healthcare. Think of it this way, if you want your car to run the best you put high octane fuel in it and high efficiency oil, otherwise it breaks down quicker.

Conventional medicine is great when it comes to the emergency room, plastic surgery, bionic limbs, but when it comes to disease it has failed miserably. It believes that there is a "pill for every ill." The problem with prescription drugs is that they bandaid symptoms they do not fix the root of the problem, thus causing more problems in the process.

If you listen to the medication commercials on TV notice that there is always a list of adverse side affects. These commercials mid as well say, "take this pill and it will reduce pain in your joints but cause skin lesions, blistering, impotency, and heart failure!" My favorite is the one for Cymbalta.

If you nourish the body it will heal itself because it has it's own healing mechanism.

“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” 
― Hippocrates

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