Change your food, Improve your health

Functional Medicine

In an earlier post I had mentioned about my recent increase in blood sugar level and how diabetes is reversible. There I had mentioned about Dr Mark Hyman, and I have learnt that the medical practice that doctors like him practice is called Functional Medicine.

Today all around us, specialist doctors are on the increase and general practitioners seem to be on the way out. Here is the definition of General Practitioner taken from Wikipedia.

• General Practitioners intend to practise a holistic approach that takes into consideration the biological, psychological and social factors relevant to the care of their patients. Their duties are not confined to specific organs of the body, and they have particular skills in treating people with multiple health issues. They are trained to treat patients of any age and sex to levels of complexity that vary between countries.

Doctors focus on specializing to increase their earning potential. From here you can have an indication about an average doctor's earnings. Only the geriatrician and palliative care physician, both to do with very old and terminally ill, earn lower than a Family Medicine Practitioner.

Medical Specialist

Wikipedia has a long list of medical specialists. Specialization can be organ based, disease based, medical technique based etc. A medical specialist is restricted to treatment in a specific domain of expertise. What happens when someone needs to consult more than one medical specialist at the same time? Each doctor gives his own medical treatment, often without taking into consideration treatments given by other doctors. So the patient does not get a specialized treatment taking care of all issues in an holistic manner. Doctors who practice Functional Medicine treat the patient in an holistic manner by working at the root cause of the problem.

The Bible Food

In an earlier post I had mentioned that I believe in the God of The Bible. Genesis 1:28-30 says

28 Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

29 And God said, “See, I have given you every herb that yields seed which is on the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for food. 30 Also, to every beast of the earth, to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, in which there is life, I have given every green herb for food”; and it was so.

So the early God given food was vegetarian for both man and animal. After The Flood, non-vegetarian food was added as seen in Genesis 9:1-3.

So God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be on every beast of the earth, on every bird of the air, on all that move on the earth, and on all the fish of the sea. They are given into your hand. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. I have given you all things, even as the green herbs.

People who lived before The Flood lived several hundreds of years, with Methuselah living the longest at 969 years as seen in Genesis 5:25-27.

25-27 Methuselah: Methuselah was 187 years old when his son Lamech was born; afterwards he lived another 782 years, producing sons and daughters, and died at the age of 969.

When I look at Genesis 11 I see that the life of successive generations seems to be decreasing. In Verse 28 Haran dies before his father. Could the vegetarian food before The Flood be the reason for their long lives? Could God have supplemented non-vegetarian food after The Flood because of the devastation caused to the original plant kingdom in The Flood?

Food as Medicine

When we think of medicine we only think of some chemical substance that we get from the chemist. We need the doctor to prescribe that chemical substance. As a second thought we might ask the doctor the food that we may eat. Functional Medicine considers food as the primary source of medicine and nutrition. Hippocrates, father of western medicine, is said to have quoted "Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food". 

Today we seem to have forgotten what Hippocrates advocated. Our body is built up based on the food that we eat. The chemicals that we ingest in the name of medicine produce wide variety of side effects. Today, properly prescribed FDA approved drugs are supposed to be the third leading cause of death in the US. Check this article "Doctors Are The Third Leading Cause of Death in the US, Killing 225,000 People Every Year". Check also this article "Death from Prescription Drugs: The New Epidemic Sweeping Across America". Do we have any statistics for similar deaths in India?

Changes in my food habit

Because of blood sugar elevation problem, as any one would expect, I have stopped all processed sugar. In addition to that I am trying to stop all processed food. The reason being, food processing industry destroys almost all nutrients, and the food that we eat are only non-nutritional food. I am trying to eat most of the food from the collection shown in the above image, where possible raw. I have gone from white bread, to brown bread and now to whole wheat multi-grain bread. I have replaced Coffee with Green Tea. My blood sugar level is continuing to improve. Basically, I am moving away from man-made factory food to God produced food, directly from His Factory, The Ground.