Can Food Reverse Disease?

Image Courtesy: Down to Earth.

Fed by pharma misinformation, many people refuse to believe in food. It reflects on the extent to which we have been brainwashed.

Hippocrates and many greats after him including Sir William Osler had great respect for food as medicine. Ayurveda places the greatest stress on right food as per body type and always advises about the importance of digestion, assimilation and elimination. It also asks us to rest once a month by fasting (with water).

The modern medicos are very slowly waking up to the value of nutrition. But as I have written earlier many challenges exist as appetite and the digestion system itself has been profoundly affected due to misdirected interventions.

As naturopaths point out, a petrol vehicle needs petrol. It runs perfectly on good quality petrol. You do not need anything else. If you do not feed it petrol it does not run. If you put anything other than petrol in it, it malfunctions and breaks down. Then you need to clean the entire system and again start using petrol.

Our body runs on food and food alone. You should never expect it to run on anything else. Giving processed food to it is like putting petrol mixed with sand into a vehicle. It has no other go but to break down. To recover one needs to first detoxify and then return to a diversified balanced diet as traditionally consumed. The body rhythm and cycle too needs to change; what we call a lifestyle change.

In all TV debates I am called to I stress that first the agricultural system should change for health to return. You need healthy soil to provide the produce with nutrition. You need to move away from chemical pesticide intensive agriculture. You need indigenous seeds to provide vigour in food. You need localized agriculture to get fresh food.

And then you should similarly heal the gut whose microbes are in gross disarray thanks to vaccines, antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, caesarian deliveries, and processed junk food.

Therefore there are three aspects to food we need to address; doing away with toxic food, establishing a system that provides safe and nutritious food (clean, green and fresh), and you need to detoxify yourself and heal your gut. The fire in the belly must be rekindled so that we can heal ourselves with the right food at the right time.

Invest in food. Grow your own food to the extent possible in a healthy soil. Eat mindfully. Stay away from toxins and processed food as you would stay away from putting sand in the fuel tank of your vehicle.

Do all of this and you will end up becoming healthy.