Food As Medicine

About 400 D.C., Hippocrates was said to say; "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food." Quite likely that's not true, it's an invention of much later times. But Hippocrates was interested in the quality of the food he ate.

In contrast, Dr Tim Noakes, and many other medical doctors confirm that in their medical degree, there was no focus at all on the possibility that good food itself was the best medicine. In fact no emphasis on food as a critical aspect of good health.

This topic has become very contentious. The anti-meat lobby is very strong. There is huge propaganda in favour of a plant based, preferably a vegan diet. A great deal of investment is being made in plant based meat alternatives and plant base milk alternatives. At Open Future Health, our belief is that animal based foods are essential to good health. Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride, (See below) says that in here clinical observations she has yet to meet a healthy vegetarian. In nature, animals that eat mainly plants have special digestive systems, multiple stomachs, and pre gut, or hind gut organs where the fermentation of plant fibre can take place. The human gut has almost no capacity to do that. Then people wonder why they have digestive problems.

WHO Recommendations are not Reliable

If you look at the recommendations of the WHO, as an example, they are interested in encouraging you to eat a wide variety of food. Such a wide variety that the recommendations are not really useful.

Many WHO recommendations have been scientifically proven to be wrong. WHO is dependent on external funding. The recommendations are badly outdated, but they can't be changed without stakeholder approval. For instance they still recommend substituting saturated fats with unsaturated vegetable oils. That recommendation has been shown to increase cancer rates and to badly increase inflammation in the body. It's wrong. There is also a recommendation to prefer white meat to red meat, because white meats are lower in fat. That's also wrong. As is the recommendation to use low-fat dairy products. For fifty years we've been told that a low fat diet protects us from heart disease and strokes, and perhaps also from breast cancer. The Women's Health Initiative demonstrated in 1998 that that was wrong. However reporting that was delayed for eight years, becasue the negative and unexpected result, caused enormous controversy inside the National Institute of Health, that funded the study. The report was finally published in 2006.

USA's Dietary Guidelines are not Reliable

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, were originally the result of a political agreement (Late 1970's), they were not science based because there was very little science available. The introduction of the guidelines, has led to a huge increase in obesity, and type two diabetes, has not protected us against stroke or heart disease and has made some cancers worse. So what changes have happened to the guidelines in the last 30 years, as the result of new science? Almost nothing at all.

The political deadlock that created the original guidelines remains. It's almost impossible to change them even though the evidence that they are wrong is abundantly clear, so much so that Congress has ordered an inquiry into how the guidelines are set.

The first crack in the facade of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, was at the end of 2015, when the recommendation to limit total fats in the diet, was withdrawn without fanfare.

(This is not the original video.) Here Dr Natasha Campbell-McBride talks about how she began to use food to treat her patients, beginning with her own health, and poor health in her family. Please watch at least the first six minutes or so. In this world of conflicting information, working in a practical way with her patients, Dr Campbell-McBride seems to be making progress where few others are venturing.

For me there are shades of what happened to Dr Robert Atkins here. Widespread support for what Dr Campbell-McBride is doing doesn't exist. The science to support much of what she says doesn't exist. But she's had a lot of success, and there's a good deal of sense in what she says. Personally I think her GAPS theory is nonsense, but a lot of what she says isn't so silly.

John Stephen Veitch
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