"Let Your Food Be Your Medicine"

"Let Your Food Be Your Medicine"

Hippocrates (460BC – 370BC), widely considered the “Father of Medicine,” said “Let your food be your medicine, and let your medicine be your food.”

Over 2000 years later, this is still the single best prescription for optimum health. Our abject rejection of, and failure to heed, this advice is the single largest cause and unifying explanation of the lifestyle diseases that plague Western cultures. These Western diseaseses including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancers, strokes, osteoporosis, and Alzheimer's disease are responsible for most deaths. They have become invisible diseases to the extent that we consider them part of normal aging. They are not.

As recently as 1900 cancer and heart disease combined accounted for only 13% of all deaths. By 2005, cancer and heart disease accounted for 50% of all US deaths. This meteoric rise occurred at the same time the intervening decades heralded significant advances in medical care and the explosion of pharmaceutical drug use.

The most dramatic change in the past 60 years that negatively impacted American health was the epic shift in the American diet and nutrition, compounded by an equal shift to a sedentary lifestyle.

  

Over the past 60 years the concept of “better living through chemistry” has dominated American life. Big Agra, chemical pesticide and processed food corporations, the restaurant and fast food industries, Big Pharma, and the medical care industry, as aided and abetted by the US government, have all redefined what and how we eat.

How and why this perversion of food occurred is expertly detailed in Marion Nestle’s: Food Politics. In short, it was the result of economic driving forces and special interests pressure on a government focused on driving down the cost of food; combined with bad, fraudulent, and corporate-friendly medical science, incessant marketing based on that science, a media functioning as a corporate mouthpiece, a medical system that feeds on disease, and a public in search of convenience in a fast-paced world with both parents working.

We humans foolishly believe that we can function outside of the laws of nature and the driving forces of millions of years of evolution that shaped our dietary requirements (like those of every other species) without consequences.

Our DNA is 43,000 years old, the same as our Paleolithic hunter-gather ancestors. As such, our food and exercise requirements are consistent with those of Paleolithic man, as dictated by that DNA. Nothing more, nothing less; except that we eat more (especially more simple carbohydrates and sugar, and chemical and processed foods) and exercise less, if at all.

The basics of health are simple:

1.      Eat natural/whole foods: fruits, vegetables, nuts seeds, meats, and fish. Basically, if it lives, grows, dies, and rots out-of-doors (and is within our species specific diet), you can eat it. Cut out, or minimize, all dairy, wheat, corn, pasta, breads, grains/cereals.

2.   Stop eating chemically processed foods, fast foods and snacks, sugars, artificial sweeteners, and high-fructose corn syrup.

3.  Take Omega 3 fish oils and Probiotics.  

4.   Drink a lot of water.

5.   Stop drinking all sodas, carbonated beverages, power drinks, and so-called vitamin waters.

6.   Stop smoking, completely.

7.   Exercise at least 30 to 60 minutes, or more, every day: a mix of cardiovascular (running/walking/biking/elliptical, dancing, etc) and weight training.

8.  Get plenty of sunshine without sunscreen. Do not allow yourself to burn.

9.  Commit and connect: have meaningful commitments and connections to other people and/or groups.
10.  Cultivate hobbies, goals, etc. to give purpose and meaning to your life.

11. Stop using toxic body, hair, and bath products and sunscreens.

12.Commit to health and get off as many, or all, of your medications as possible. “Let your food be your medicine, and let your medicine be your food.”

Health largely boils down to your choices, priorities, and personal responsibility. Do you want to be healthy or do you want to be sick. The choice is up to you. But it is not a matter of what you want. It is all about what you are willing to change and do.

Toxic Chemicals, A New Evolutionary Pressure

Toxic Chemicals; A New Evolutionary Pressure

Never having read Darwin in depth, I can only offer my simple summary of evolution as ‘natural selection and adaptation/descent with modification’ over long periods of time.

I recently finished reading Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things.

My primary walk-away point:

Nothing is solid, especially human epithelium; the layer of cells that line the cavities and surface structures throughout our bodies. The epithelium, in its protective role, is more of filter than a barrier, and not a great one at that.

The cornucopia of chemicals, many of them toxic, that we are routinely exposed to; that we inhale, ingest (chemical foods, pesticides, etc, and drugs), touch (chemical fire retardants and stain protectors in furniture, household cleansers, laundry soaps, etc), and apply to our bodies (personal hygiene products) are absorbed by our bodies and enter our blood. We all, including newborns, have circulating levels of toxic chemicals in our blood; including mercury (from fish), BPA’s (from plastics and linings of canned products, etc.), phthalates (in shampoos, shaving gels, household products and children’s toys, etc.), and more. As the authors succinctly say, “We’re all marinating in chemicals every day.”

One part of the book I found fascinating had to do with the ubiquitous chemical, triclosan.

We live in a germ-phobic world and any fear can, and usually is, exploited for profit: create and build fear and sell the antidote. In this case, triclosan is the chemical industry’s Holy Grail anti-bacterial. As such, and as you would imagine, chemical companies are putting it everywhere, from hand soaps and toothpastes, to toothbrushes.

The simple point being that the daily use of normal household and personal hygiene products result in personal pollution that spikes the body’s blood levels of triclosan, and other chemicals.

When the author asked a scientist if he should be worried about the extremely high levels of triclosan in his urine the response was: “It shows that your body is working properly in removing triclosan. It is high for the moment. But, you should know that the human body usually adapts in the metabolism of triclosan.”

Whoa!

The authors go on to say: “The concept that our bodies need to adapt to synthetic chemicals is an interesting one. Given that triclosan is a human creation, the metabolic pathways necessary to break it down and excrete it are indeed things that our bodies need to learn how to do.”

The authors continue” The huge number of synthetic chemicals that surround us every day of our lives is creating a new kind of evolutionary pressure, a new kind of natural selection every bit as powerful as the process that resulted in human populations developing lighter or darker skin pigments in response to prevailing climatic conditions. Because of the increasing evidence that many human illnesses—including fatal ones like cancer—are linked to exposure to chemical pollution and because some people’s bodies are better able to adapt to and cope with these new environmental stressors than others , perhaps the human population is being culled by toxic chemicals.”

Whoa, and whoa again!! This is the essence of evolution, adaption and descent with modification; that some of us are ‘genetically predisposed to deal with the daily assault of toxic chemicals and some are not.’

The idea of genetic adaptation, modification and selection for toxic chemical hardiness or ‘immunity’ for survival is mind bending. That this survival mechanism of evolution has been ‘built-in’ since the first life forms, to adapt to an ever-changing environment, is the epitome of perfection.

“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one: and that whilst this planet has gone on cycling according to the fixed laws of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.” Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species.

The Nose Knows

I am reading another amazing book....Nature Via Nurture...and I just read an incredible thing.

(paraphrasing pgs: 138-9 )

The story begins in 1856 when a Spanish medical doctor did an autopsy on a 40-year-old man who had no sense of smell, a small penis and very small testes.

Anyway, many years later, it turns out, embryologically speaking, that the primitive cells for smell send axons to the area of the brain that will form the olfactory lobe. On their way, they lay down, and travel along, fascicles/rails to get there. If anosmin is not present the axons derail, and the rails do not get laid down....hence anosmia.

Amazingly, the cells for sexual development in males begin in the nose, in the vomeronasal organ. They neuronally migrate along the rails/fascicles laid down by the developing olfactory axons. In the absence of anosmin and the rails, the cells never reach their target to trigger the release of gonadotropin releasing hormone. In the absence of gonadotropin releasing hormone, the pituitary is never stimulated to release leutinizing hormone… hence the small penis/testes.

Gentlemen, you know who you are.

Go figure…evolution; incredibly efficient, and funny too!

I gotta go… I smell something in the other room that requires my immediate attention.

The Human Brain: Use It Or Lose It

The Human Brain:

Use it or lose it

Nicholas Kristof recently wrote a wonderful article: When Our Brains Short-Circuit. The article describes how our brains “systematically misjudge certain kinds of risks.”

Above all else, evolution has programmed us for survival. One basic survival mechanism, hardwired into the most primitive part of our brain, is our instinctive surveillance for, and recognition of, immediate threats. However, perhaps evolution’s greatest achievement, the neocortex, our thinking brain, “is not equally hardwired to respond to dangers that require forethought.”

Kristof gives wonderful examples such as our intense fear of snakes verses our nonchalant response to global climactic change with the potential catastrophic consequence of ending life on the planet as we know it.

This short circuit in our brains explains why so many of us fail to plan for our futures, especially in terms of our long-term health. The evidence for this abounds.

A mother scolds her obese four year old for running into the street, seeing the immediate threat to her child’s life, but not the long-term health consequences of obesity.

Food poisoning at a fast food chain claims eight lives nationally, forcing a government re-call and plant shut-down, while the public continues to eat massive quantities of the untainted, but none-the-less, lethal fast foods that are killing them slowly and by the millions.

Swine flu claims a total of 127 lives in one year, creating a national panic and a run on the Tamiflu vaccine. Meanwhile, the largely preventable lifestyle-related chronic degenerative diseases of heart attack, diabetes, obesity and stroke kill an estimated 2.5 million lives each year yet we reject known and simple preventive and curative measures such as exercising more and eating natural, healthy foods.

An ache or pain has us immediately and unquestioningly reach for an advertised drug, in spite of our awareness of its long list of disabling, life threatening or even lethal potential adverse effects.

The pharmaceutical industry capitalizes on our fears of disease and death with the false promise of drugs that further derail our personal responsibility to commit to a lifetime, lifestyle for health.

And on and on.

The miracle of humans is that we are so much more than the hardwiring of the primitive parts of our brains. Our neocortex, or new brain, gives us the ability to think, reason, learn and remember to further increase our chance for survival. Sadly, while the brain is hardwired for instinctual adaptation mechanisms for survival, there is no natural instinct to protect us from our own stupidity.

However, do not despair. Ultimately, the only deterrent for long-term risks is thinking.