The basics of nutritherapy
Do you remember when you were a kid and your mother was giving you specific food when you were sick? I have memories of my mother giving me chicken noodle soup when I had the flu. Well, there’s some truth behind our mother’s home remedies. While some of it might makes you laugh (Jello and flat Seven-up anyone?), experts constantly discover more healing properties to food. And in our Western world, where the four major death causes are directly linked with food – cardiovascular diseases, cancer, heart attack and diabetes – we shouldn’t disregard the importance of the connection between food and diseases. If eating food can cause diseases, eating the food can also help us heal.
Until the beginning of the century, healing with food was something common. Even in ancient times, foods, spices and herbs were used in a therapeutic ways; figs and grapes were used to treat asthma, and garlic was used to treat several infections. Even in more recent times, in America, people didn’t always have access to drugs and antibiotics, and had to rely on Mother Nature. Things started to change with the industrialization period. Our food supply changed, and we begun to see more processed foods. We started to trust the newly discovered drugs to treat our health problems.
However, we didn’t fully realize at that time how all this would affect our overall health. We now know that around 30% of cancers are linked to food. Scientific proof adds up to show how our diet affects every aspect of our health, from disease prevention to anti-ageing properties.
When we eat, our body absorbs many substances that will affect what will circulate in our blood for the rest of the day. Most of people don’t see food as a remedy, but it’s probably the most influent of any remedy you could take. Unfortunately many foods we eat are “sick”. The majority of our food supply is processed or transformed, and even the vast majority of fruits and vegetables, the least processed foods, are grown using pesticides and other toxic substances.
It’s now well known that having an appropriate diet can help in many diseases prevention. But few know that by our food choices, we can actually treat and heal those diseases. Nearly a dozen of extensive researches have shown that it is possible to reduce the atheromatous plaques within the walls of coronary arteries – one of the major cause of heart attack – by adopting a diet low in saturated fat. The same thing goes for all inflammation related diseases like arthritis, asthma and psoriasis. A diet change can not only prevent those conditions, but also cure them.
It is clear now that food can create and heal various diseases, depending of the food quality you ingest. So next time you’ll sit at the dinner table, you can ask yourself: “Will this meal will more likely make me healthy or ill?”
Have some food remedies of your own? Share them with us!