Food as Medicine Does It Really Work?

All that your body has to run on are the foods you put into it, environmental toxins that are virtually impossible to avoid in today's world. In this way, whole foods certainly can act as “medicine” in that they can protect and heal your body...

The notion that foods play an enormous role in your health is not new thinking as evidenced by Hippocrates' statement from nearly 2,500 years ago, “Leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food.” Unfortunately, this simple statement and smart way of thinking is yet to become a mainstay of modern culture. The concept fell into obscurity by the 19th century, and during the first 50 years of the 20th century the discovery of the essential elements and vitamins, particularly in the context of deficiency diseases, occurred. This led to “enrichment” of processed foods to help people regain the health they lost when they abandoned real whole foods.

It is possible to eat all day long and still starve yourself. Why? Because if all you eat are junk foods and other foods with little to no nutrition, such as overcooked foods, you will not receive the nutrients your body needs to function properly, let along heal diseases.

All that your body has to run on are the foods you put into it, environmental toxins that are virtually impossible to avoid in today's world. In this way, whole foods certainly can act as “medicine” in that they can protect and heal your body. Another way to look at it is if you fortify your body with healthy nutrients from fresh foods, you likely won't have a need for medicine. Individual foods each have their own unique set of nutrients that meet the varying requirements of your body. This is why it is so important to eat a wide variety of foods, to ensure that your body gets all of the diverse nutrients that it needs.

Naturally, in order to achieve the most optimal results you should eat foods within your metabolic type guidelines. To get an idea of the healing power of foods, consider fresh vegetables, which are among the most powerful of foods. They contain many natural anti-oxidants including vitamins A, C, E, carotenes, zinc, selenium, bioflavonoids, tocopherols, lutein and quercetin and many beneficial phytochemicals.

These can help to fight age-related and chronic diseases like cancer and heart diseases, boost the immune system, fight osteoporosis, lower your risk of diabetes, and slow brain aging. They will also help to alkalinize your system, as most of us are far too acidic.

Eating healthy vegetables everyday, or juicing them, generally has more comprehensive nutrition than nearly any multi-vitamin supplement. This is because the combination of substances in a whole food is more synergistically effective than a specific dietary nutrient that has been isolated and artificially combined with other nutrients.

A free full-text article published in the January 24, 2004 issue of the British Medical Journal really displays this concept. The article reviews some of the many benefits of folic acid. Ideally, this nutrient is best obtained through organic, fresh whole vegetables, but supplement companies (many of these are drug companies) have rushed to provide cheap chemical look-alikes that do not work.

The form of foliate in supplements and in fortified foods is pteroylmonoglutamate (PGA), a form that does not occur in nature. It is both cheap and stable unlike most native forms of the vitamin.

The article goes on to warn that we have no idea as to the consequences of using high doses of this cheap synthetic to reap the benefits of folic acid that researchers have found from natural foods.

However, foods can also negatively impact your body, and anyone who has ever had heartburn or indigestion can attest to that. Consider what you are giving your body if you eat an order of French fries: trans fat, the potent cancer-causing substance acrylamide, and large amounts of damaging free radicals.

Contrary to the nutrients in vegetables, which your body uses to build itself up, the substances in French fries will work against your body which will have to expend energy just to keep the toxic substances in check. Of course, if your diet is skewed in the way of junk food, sooner or later your body will be unable to adequately detoxify the harmful substances and disease will occur.

What can you do? The good news is plenty, as you are the one who controls what goes into your body. Choose foods that have the greatest nutritional value and that go along with your metabolic type and they try to eat them in a way that will maximize their nutrients. In most cases, this means raw. At least one-third of all the food you eat should be raw, as cooking and processing can destroy essential micro nutrients.

Mercola is the author of Dr. Mercola's Total Health Program, an essential resource book for those who are serious about improving their health through proper diet.