Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food
-Hippocrates, the Greek physician and father of medicine.
What should I eat? More greens, more Vitamin D, more fish, no meats, no grains, or should I become a vegetarian, go on a ketogenic diet, or evolutionary diet? There are so many options. What are the best choices?
The foods we eat provide the building blocks and energy source for our body. If you eat high quality foods, the body has the opportunity to create and maintain a healthy strong structure; on the other hand, if you eat low quality foods, it is more challenging to create and maintain a healthy body. The analogy is building a house. If the materials are high quality, the structure well engineered and well built, the house has the opportunity to age well. On the other hand, if the house is built out of inferior materials and poorly engineered, it is easily damaged by wind, rain or even earthquakes.
Although we are bombarded with recommendations for healthy eating, many of the recommendations are not based upon science but shaped by the lobbying and advertisement efforts of agribusiness. For example, the scientific recommendations to reduce sugar in our diet were not implements in the government guidelines. This demonstrates the power of lobbying which places profits over health.
Officials at the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services rejected explicit caps on sugar and alcohol consumption. Although “the preponderance of evidence supports limiting intakes of added sugars and alcoholic beverages to promote health and prevent disease.” (Rabin, 2020).
To make sense out of the multitude of nutritional recommendations, watch the superb presentation by Dr. Marisa Soski, ND, Nutrition to Support Stress Response.* She discusses how and what we eat has direct impact on how our bodies manage our reactions to stress.
*Presented April 16, 2021 at the Holistic Health Series on Fridays: Optimize Health and Well-Being Lecture Series. The series is sponsored by the Institute for Holistic Health Studies and Department of Recreation, Parks, Tourism, San Francisco State University.
Reference
Rabin, R.C. (2020). U.S. Diet Guidelines Sidestep Scientific Advice to Cut Sugar and Alcohol. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/29/health/dietary-guidelines-alcohol-sugar.html
Reposted the blog of Erik Peper: