Can Food Treat Your Illness?

I think we all agree that you can't underestimate the impact food and your daily diet have on your health.  But the most common concept patients have when they walk in my door is that simply changing their diet will cure their illness.  That's asking a lot given that it's so difficult to get food that is free of chemicals, pesticides, growth hormones, environmental toxins and even genetically modified material.  Then when you do, how long can you wait for change to take place?  When you use food as therapy, which is a great thing, it can take weeks and months for the body to assimilate, create essential factors such as enzymes, new cells, hormones, and then initiate a cascade effect that ends in alleviating your symptoms.

Now this is not to say that changing your diet and eating healthier right now, right this minute, isn't the smartest thing you can do .... it is!  But the real problem with relying on your food to cure you is that once you reach the age of 30, 40 or 50 when you have overcome that feeling of invincibility and finally realize that you want to be healthier, you don't generally have the time to wait for the food you eat every day to do it.

Often you are so seriously deficient in essential nutrients, that it would take truckloads of spinach to get your muscle strength back before more symptoms begin.  It's like a slippery slope ... when you first start to lose your grip, it's still not too bad and you can still pull yourself back up.  When you first begin to slide, it's a gradual process and you may be able to get a grip on something and haul yourself back up.  But the further you go, the faster you go and the less you will be able to catch yourself. 

Every minute of every day, our bodies and their systems are working for us or against us. Just look at a "free radical". These chemicals are naturally produced by our bodies every time we use oxygen for energy. Normally we can capture and eliminate these chemicals with the nutrition we get from green foods, but if you have eaten poorly for years, then the neglect that your body has sustained will take more than greens to get better.

Working strictly through your foods can be too little, too late. If too many of these free radicals build up, they can permanently damage an essential component of our cells known as mitochondria, the energy "power-house" of our body. In a very short time, this can alter our genetic structure by dissolving the protective coating on our chromosomes and change the way our body creates energy, making us tired, burned out and older. So free radicals cause oxidation or "rust" of healthy tissue in the body.

Damage to our genetic structure changes the pattern we use for growth and change. Genetics are like blueprints which present a plan for construction. The outcome can vary from the plan, since each stage is based on the outcome of the previous stage. Our bodies are genetics expressed in our environment, meaning that our experience develops the initial plan. The expression of genes are also polymorphic, in other words, they will express one way in certain situations and under other circumstances can express differently. This is what accounts for people having differing detoxification abilities at a genetic level. Some people can smoke, drink and eat poorly without noticeable effect, while others seem to be sick continually. Nutrition, both macro [the food we eat] and micro [the resulting nutrients] can affect the expressability of a gene's detoxification ability.

But it is not just the food you eat, it is also the micronutrients that you derive from food that provide essential building materials for the cell. These micronutrients are what design and define the body. Every cell is capable of meeting the body's needs. But if the parents are unhealthy, then the cells of the child will be genetically deficient from the beginning. When we work with our clients, we look at the health history of the parents. This approach can point out the most likely nutritional deficiencies that the child will have inherited. 

The best way when symptoms are already problematic is to begin with raw, organic concentrated food in pill or powder.  It's exactly what you would eat, but in a megadose form.  This way whatever nutrients your body doesn't need are excreted while there are plenty of the ones that are needed made bioavailable. At the same time there are some great hints about food combining and food effects to keep in mind when you're sitting down to your next meal.

So don't just change what you're eating now, change what you've eaten in the past by incorporating concentrated whole food nutrition into your routine.  It's a therapy everyone can benefit from.