Tag Archives for " biochemistry "

6 Basic Principles Of Using Food As Medicine

In 1973, when I was a researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and beginning to become interested in alternative therapies, I met Shyam Singha, a London-based Indian osteopath, naturopath, herbalist, acupuncturist, homeopath, and meditation master. Shyam had gleaming yellow eyes and flowing black hair, and wore impeccably tailored Savile Row suits or floor-length, orange silk gowns.

Lecturing, he paced the front of the hall like a panther. A brilliant, challenging, occasionally terrifying trickster, he became my guide to the frontiers of healing. Together Shyam and I cooked meals that astonished my taste buds, raised my energy, and lifted my mood. The fast, “chaotic” breathing meditation he had learned in the Indian mountains pushed me through fear and anger.

Shortly after meeting Shyam, I was crippled by a back injury. The orthopedists were issuing dire warnings and getting me ready for a surgery I didn’t want.

Desperate, I called Shyam in London. “Eat three pineapples a day, and nothing else for a week,” he said.

I thought the phone had gone bad, and then suspected, not for the first time, that he was mad. He repeated it and explained, using principles of Chinese medicine, how the pineapple would “work on your lung” which was the “mother of the kidney,” and that the kidney was “connected” to the back. It made no sense to me then, but I knew that Shyam knew many things that I and the orthopods didn’t.

And I really didn’t want back surgery.

Amazingly, the pineapple fast worked. Later, Shyam suggested I eliminate gluten,dairy, sugar, red meat and processed food to relieve my occasional allergies, asthma, and eczema. That worked, too.

Ever since, I too have been committed to using food as medicine. Soon I was reading scientific studies that were validating the therapeutic power of traditional remedies and suggesting the need to eliminate or cut down on foods that had become staples of the standard American diet. I began to prescribe nutritional therapies for my medical and psychiatric patients.

By the early 1990s, I had decided it was time to teach what I was learning to my students at Georgetown Medical School. I asked Susan Lord, MD, my colleague atThe Center for Mind-Body Medicine, to join me. To honor Hippocrates, who coined the phrase, we called our course “Food As Medicine,” and it quickly became a hit with med students.

The students experimented with diets that eliminated sugar, gluten, dairy, food additives, red meat and caffeine. Many felt less anxious and more energetic; they slept and studied better and learned more easily. They shook their heads at how little attention their curriculum paid to nutrition.

A few years later, Susan and I made an expanded version of this course available nation-wide, to medical school faculty, physicians, other health professionals and anyone who was interested in improving her own nutrition.

Together with the dietician Kathie Swift, we created exactly the course we wish we’d had in school — one combining impeccable science and traditional wisdom, presented in the most interesting, practical user-friendly way. We called it “Food As Medicine” (FAM)

The course is comprehensive, but the basic principles are simple and straightforward:

1. Eat in harmony with your genetic programming — i.e,. the way our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate.

This doesn’t mean conforming to a strict Paleo diet, but rather following the guidelines it suggests. Consider a whole foods plant-based diet with as little processed food and added sugar as possible.

Ideally this means consuming far fewer grains (understanding that some people can’t tolerate wheat and other grains at all); little or no dairy (even if you don’t seem intolerant to it); cold water fish like salmon, sardines and mackerel as the preferred animal product; and far more intestine-activating fiber — we consume a paltry average of 15 grams a day; our Paleolithic ancestors took in 100 grams.

2. Use foods rather than supplements to treat and prevent chronic illness.

Whole foods contain a number of substances that work synergistically and may be far more effective than supplements that just deliver one of them.

Why take the powerful antioxidant lycopene in a pill when you can eat a tomato that contains both lycopene and a number of other antioxidants, along with vitamins, minerals and other nutrients that work together to prevent heart disease by decreasing cholesterol and lipid levels and stopping abnormal blood clotting?

3. Combine your nutritional plan with a program to reduce stress and raise awareness about how as well as what we eat.

Stress inhibits and interferes with every aspect of digestive functioning and with the efficient use of nutrients. Stressed-out people can’t make very good biological use of even the most healthy diets.

Learning to eat slowly and mindfully will increase your enjoyment of meals, reduce your consumption of food (most of us eat so fast we don’t have time to register signals from our stomach that we are full), and help you make food choices that are better for you.

4. Understand that we are all, as the pioneering biochemist Roger Williams pointed out 50 years ago, biochemically unique.

We may be the same age and ethnicity, have very similar health status, ethnicity, and income, but you may use 100 times as much B6 as I do, and I may require 100 times more Zinc.

Sometimes we may need a nutritionally oriented physician, dietician or nutritionist to do specific, sophisticated tests to determine our deficiencies and requirements. We can always learn a great deal about what’s good for us by experimenting with different diets and foods, and by paying close attention to the outcomes.

5. Find a health professional who will help you begin treatment of chronic conditions with nutrition and stress management (as well as exercise) rather than medication.

Except in life threatening situations, this is the sane, common sense way to go. The prescription antacids, Type 2 diabetes drugs, and antidepressants that tens of millions of Americans use to decrease acid reflux, lower blood sugar, and improve mood, only treat symptoms and do not address causes. And they have very significant and often dangerous side-effects. If they are only prescribed, as they should be, after a thorough trial of non-pharmacological treatment, they will rarely be necessary.

6. Don’t become a food fanatic.

Use these guidelines (and others that make sense to you), but don’t beat yourself up for deviating from them. Just notice the effect of a questionable choice, learn, and return to your program.

And don’t waste your time and energy judging others for what they eat! It will just make you cranky and self-righteous, stressful emotional states that will ruin your digestion. And it sure won’t do those other people any good.

SOURCE…www.mindbodygreen.com

Is Capitalism To Blame for Worldwide Obesity?

Lets take a moment to really consider the truth about why people get fat? Doctors have proven this increases  their personal risk of heart disease, diabetes and other “lifestyle” diseases and society’s risk of fiscal collapse from the expense of treating millions of people with those ailments.  Conventional wisdom, favored by governments and a vast and growing  ” Wellness Industry” around the world, is that it’s because individuals can’t control themselves. Accordingly ( “trillions” / with a T)  of dollars, euros, yen, rupees and other monies will be spent in the next few decades to nudge people into jogging and giving up potato chips and dessert, for their sake and their nation’s fiscal capacity . It would be a damn shame if that turned out to be a colossal waste of money. But it may be, if we learn years hence that obesity wasn’t caused by individual choices at all. A number of researchers have been making this argument, pushing against received opinion, and of them, the most striking is probably this new paper :

The key cause of the global obesity epidemic, it says, is capitalism.

It’s a striking paper (perhaps the only one you’ll ever read that references both receptor pathways for the hormone leptin and data on the size of the Indian economy before and after the British took over). There is, for example, where it was recently published: Not in some obscure pool of Marxist theorizing, but in the peer-reviewed American Journal of Human Biology. The author, Jonathan C.K. Wells, is an expert on fat metabolism in humans who works at the Childhood Nutrition Research Centre at the Institute of Child Health of University College London. On the evidence of this paper, he is as far from an ideological ranter as a human being can be. He seems instead to be a scientist who has been driven to exasperation by conventional wisdom, which looks to explain obesity only within the narrow viewpoint of individuals and the calories they consume.

Let me paraphrase Wells’ intricate argument as a multigenerational saga. It begins with you, a poor farmer growing food crops in a poor country. Capitalism appears with your colonial masters when Europeans take control of your economy. The new system encourages you and your neighbors to stop growing your own food and instead produce, say, coffee for export. Now that you aren’t growing food, you need to buy it. But since everyone in a capitalist economy is out to maximize profit, companies strive to pay you as little as possible for your crop, and to pay your factory-worker children as little as possible for their labor. So capitalism has, first, removed various traditional protections against starvation by changing your farming system, and, second, made sure you aren’t paid enough to eat well.

Cut to 80 years later. Thanks to globalization and outsourcing, your descendants have risen out of the ranks of the poor and joined the fast-growing ranks of the world’s 21st century middle-class consumers. Capitalism welcomes them. They are now targets for efforts to get them to buy things they don’t need, which of course includes foods and beverages that you could never have afforded. They’ve been put at risk of obesity because capitalism encourages them to over-eat.

But that’s not the worst of it. As Wells describes in detail, there is a lot of recent research to suggest that a body’s physiological response to food is heavily influenced by experiences in the womb and in early life. Moreover, it’s also influenced by the environment that a person’s mother lived in—not just when that mother was pregnant, but also when she was a child, and even a fetus in the womb of her mother. So the effects of under-nutrition last a lifetime, and are even passed across generations. And those effects appear to promote obesity.

It seems under-nutrition in a person’s early life, or even similar food deprivation in the life of that person’s parents, can set the metabolism to create fat reserves quickly and keep them. In other words, if you or your parents or their parents were under-nourished, you’re at a higher risk of becoming obese in a rich-food environment. (As Wells explains, when food is insufficient, evolution favors bodies that make and keep fat reserves, and once this adaptation is set it can’t be turned off when food becomes more plentiful.) Moreover, obese people, when they have children, pass on changes in metabolism that can predispose the next generation to obesity as well. Like the children of under-fed people, the children of the over-fed have their metabolism set in ways that tend to promote obesity.

So a past of undernutrition, combined with a present of overnutrition, is an obesity trap (Wells memorably calls the “metabolic ghetto”) that can’t be escaped by turning poor people into middle-class consumers. In fact, that turn to prosperity is what sets off the trap. In India, China and many other rapidly expanding economies, capitalism itself caused under-nutrition in previous generations and now causes over-nutrition today.

In other countries (Wells cites Ethiopia, where he has done research), the two forces are at work at the same time, making some poor workers unable to eat well even as their richer compatriots switch to a diet of processed foods.) Since capitalism is the driver of both past and current under-nutrition and today’s over-nutrition, Wells has concluded that capitalism itself is a long-lasting world-wide “obesogenic” force. “Obesity,” Wells writes, “like under-nutrition, is thus fundamentally a state of malnutrition, in each case promoted by powerful profit-led manipulations of the global supply and quality of food.”

He buttresses this claim with some detailed theorizing about the biochemistry, physiology and epigenetics that link poor nutrition in early life and later obesity. As the environmental epidemiologist Paolo Vineis  pointed out in his review for the F100 website , Wells’ theory suggests plenty of questions that could be answered by both lab and field experiments. This is not an ideological screed; it’s a peer-reviewed proposal for a theory that connects work on the economics of food with work on the way that environment affect bodies and behaviors.

But aren’t we all free to choose not to participate in this fattening system? As Wells sees it, the “unifying logic of capitalism” is exactly the opposite of this cliché about free markets. We may think we’re free to choose what to eat and how to eat it, but, he writes, food companies maximize their profits by restricting our choices, “both at the behavioral level, through advertising, price manipulations and restriction of choice, and at the physiological level through the enhancement of addictive properties of foods” (by which he means those sugars and fats that make processed foods so habit forming as well as fattening).

What is to be done, then?

Rather than harping on personal responsibility so much, Wells argues, we should be looking at the global economic system, seeking to reform it so that it promotes access to nutritious food for everyone. Also, we need to develop policies to fight hunger that don’t send people into the “obesogenic niche,” and, finally, regulate commercial interests so that they pay poor people better and market less fattening shlock to the better off.

I admit, I read that list and thought, Good luck with that. You can get rich people to fund efforts to get others to jog and watch their diet and be disciplined about check-ups (which amounts to trying to get the population to act more like rich people, so it’s an easy sell). But who is going to fund work that questions the very basis of their power to fund things?

Still, maybe I’m too pessimistic. It’s increasingly clear that the current consensus—people are obese because they individually decide to eat too much—is unsatisfactory. (To cite just one reason, that explanation doesn’t account for why in the 21st century animals are also becoming obese along with our species.) A number of alternative theories are circulating, which locate the cause of our “obesity epidemic” in society’s collective activities rather than in individual decisions about exercise and cookies.

One candidate, as Kristin Wartman   recently explained , is all the chemicals we modern people ingest, specifically organic pollutants like BPA. Another, as Beatrice Golomb  (search the page for her name to find the post), are industrial metals. Others have cited the stresses of modern life, including loneliness and lack of sleep. Wells’s idea is, to my mind, the most mind-blowing of all these alternative ideas about obesity. Whether or not he’s right, this paper will scrub your mind of unexamined assumptions and leave you thinking more clearly about a major global problem.

SOURCE…WWW.bigthink.com