Diet Therapy

The concept of natural healing isn’t new. I read in the newspaper this morning that getting enough sleep can ward off winter colds. A recent newsletter from The Holistic Chick states,

“Eating unhealthy, not being active and abusing our bodies with such things as smoking causes our bodies to deteriorate. Obesity, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, stroke, heart disease, premature aging, cancer are all effects of unhealthy lifestyle....”

I also went to a Juice Plus seminar this weekend where I learned that doctors and scientists spent millions on researching a cure for heart disease only to learn that it is easier to prevent—with diet and exercise—than cure. I mean, if you think about it, what did people do for thousands of years before modern medicine when they caught a cold? They sure didn’t take Nyquil. What they probably did was something more like this cough remedy a friend forwarded to me:

Add three tablespoons of dried thyme to one pint of boiling water. Let cool, then add one cup of honey. Take one teaspoon every hour as needed. Stores in fridge up to three months.

More and more, healing through prevention and natural methods like dietary changes are becoming mainstream. Several months ago People magazine and CNN featured Jenny McCarthy’s son’s recovery from symptoms of autism—improvement to the point that doctors now think he was misdiagnosed altogether—largely based on diet change. She is now the founder of Generation Rescue, an organization which claims that “autism is reversible.”

Dr. Peter D’Adamo expounds upon this idea in his Eat Right 4 Your Type eating lifestyles. He explains in remarkably coherent terms results of his scientific research into why different blood types thrive on or are weakened by certain types of food. While his research can be limitingly specific, the takeaway is that via dietary change many people have found relief from a multitude of symptoms—from digestive issues to arthritis and beyond.

This idea is so prevalent that it has a name: “Diet Therapy,” defined as “treating an illness with the food you eat instead of traditional medicine.” This is applied to everything from MS (!) to ADHD to cancer. Just think of all the health conditions described as “incurable” by the medical community that can be cured with dietary methods. Think of all the symptoms that, instead of being numbed while they continue to wreak havoc with the body, can be reduced or removed completely—chronic pain, fatigue, sleeplessness—not to mention weight loss, lowered cholesterol and blood pressure, and increased life span!

So why isn’t the medical community embracing this more? One reason is insurance demands (see the quote in last week’s blog); another is pharmaceutical sales; another is ignorance, the result of education in a culture that knows nothing else but to trust what it has been taught for decades.

I’m not bashing mainstream medicine (well, not much). Ideally there will be a unification of these two schools of thought—holistic practitioners won’t be labeled as quacks and conspiracy theorists, and medical doctors won’t be branded as immoral and irresponsible.

In the meantime, it’s clear that there is more to our health—or maybe I should say there’s less to it. It might seem hard to give up fast food or cut out wheat or stop drinking soda, or to start taking supplements, buying organic, and getting more fruits and vegetables in our diets, but when compared to a (shortened) lifetime of drug dependency, the repercussions of a painful surgery, or simply a lesser quality of life and physical and mental comfort and acuity, these simple lifestyle changes, implemented gradually and realistically, can mean the difference between a normal life or an extremely handicapped one, if you take Evan McCarthy’s case.

*deep breath*

Now that I’ve got that out of my system, some exciting news: I have my first weekend of classes at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition this Friday through Monday! I’ll be back with lots to write about.