Food Therapy
Food Therapy
Beating Disease with Eating
No doubt there were those who thought Hippocrates was behind the times back in 400 b.c., when the so-called father of modern medicine said “Let food be your medicine and medicine be your food.” And more than a few probably considered lightbulb-inventing visionary Thomas Edison to be a tad dim for his claim that “the doctor of the future will give no medicines but will interest his patients in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the causes of disease.”
Heck, even you snickered when that wisest voice of all, Mom’s, boasted of the curative powers of homemade chicken soup or nagged you to eat more vegetables.
So who’s laughing now?
Not the statisticians. After all, the numbers they report are some frightening food for thought: Four of the ten leading causes of death in the United States—heart disease, cancer, stroke and diabetes—are linked to the way we eat. Diet also is increasingly being implicated as the cause of or a contributing factor to scores of other ailments, from acne to arthritis, from hair loss to hearing loss, from premenstrual syndrome to postnasal drip.
The experts aren’t laughing, either. “What’s really tragic about this is that we were so busy learning how to fix broken arms, deliver babies and do all of those ‘doctor’ things in medical school that we considered nutrition to be boring,” says Michael A. Klaper, M.D., a nutritional medicine specialist in Pompano Beach, Florida, and director of the Institute of Nutritional Education and Research, an organization based in Manhattan Beach, California, that teaches doctors about nutrition and its relationship to disease. “But after we get into practice, we spend most of the day treating people with diseases that have huge nutritional components that have long been essentially ignored. I frequently get calls from doctors across the country saying that their patients are asking questions about nutrition and its role in their conditions and they don’t know what to tell them.”
Now, after decades of depending on drugs and high-tech surgery, more Americans are finally heeding the words of Hippocrates, Edison and dear ol’ Mom—straight-faced, we might add—and realizing what has been known since the beginning of time: Food is strong medicine.
The Downside of Progress
This change in attitude didn’t come overnight. In fact, it took nearly 100 years. Up until the turn of the century, food therapy was widely practiced as a way of healing the sick and keeping the healthy well. Archaeological findings in Mesopotamia believed to be 5,000 years old showed that the ancient Sumerians, Assyrians, Akkadians and Babylonians all used foods, herbs and spices as medicine. Ancient Egyptians treated asthma with figs, grapes and even beer and touted garlic for curing infection and other conditions—a practice we continue today. Celery has been used since 200 b.c. in Asian folk medicine to lower blood pressure. And through the generations, the much-ballyhooed claim by sailors that lime juice could protect against scurvy on long voyages proved to be anything but a fish story.
Until the twentieth century, food therapy was commonly practiced in the United States. Before that, we were primarily a nation of small farms. “People largely ate what they grew,” says Dr. Klaper, and what they grew were fruits, vegetables and grains—“whole” foods high in nutrients and fiber and low in fat. And since they didn’t have today’s antibiotics and other medications, their gardens also served as their medicine chests, and their kitchens acted as pharmacies.
But then came the industrial revolution and, with it, a new way of eating and a new attitude toward food. “When Henry Ford started turning power tractors off the assembly line in 1905, the American diet started to change—and as a result, so did the health of Americans,” says Dr. Klaper. “Suddenly, the farmer who did three acres a day behind a team of horses could plow 50 acres with a tractor. Prairies erupted with mountains of corn, soybeans and oats to be fed to millions of cattle, pigs and chickens, and so meat became a plentiful staple in the diet instead of a special-occasion dish.”
The American diet went from low-fat, high-fiber and plant-based to one that centered around high-fat, low-fiber animal sources. “This contributed to many of the diseases we’re seeing today, such as heart disease and cancer,” adds Dr. Klaper. “People rarely got cancer back then. Heart disease is a twentieth-century disease; the first heart attack was described in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1908. In fact, if you look at a medical book from the 1860s, you won’t find anything on coronary atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries). If the condition existed, it was rare and generally unrecognized. Now it’s one of our most prevalent conditions.”
By the end of World War II, factories and processing plants had all but replaced the mom-and-pop farm, and our post-war prosperity found new healing heros. “People started relying on the so-called wonder drugs, such as antibiotics, and paid less attention to food as medicine,” says registered pharmacist Earl Mindell, R.Ph., Ph.D., professor of nutrition at Pacific Western University in Los Angeles and author of Earl Mindell’s Food as Medicine and other books on nutrition. “About the same time, as television became more popular and was introduced in more people’s homes, foods went from being whole and nutritious to being processed and refined and void of necessary nutrients. People started eating these quick-to-prepare meals quickly, in front of their television sets.”
By the 1950s, food had lost its status as a healing agent and was regarded strictly as fuel for the body. Fast-food burger joints sprang up everywhere “to offer a quick fill-up of heavily processed, high-fat fare,” says Dr. Mindell. “When patients asked physicians about nutrition or vitamins, their questions were often dismissed with ‘As long as you’re eating a well-balanced diet, you have nothing to worry about.’ ”
Problems on the Plate
They were wrong. There was plenty to worry about, as we’re learning today with our rates of disease. Our nation’s diet is the single biggest contributor to heart disease, the top cause of death in the United States, according to Basil Rifkind, M.D., of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. And diet is believed to play a crucial role in approximately 30 percent of cancers. More and more, researchers are learning how the way we eat can influence our physical and emotional health, playing a leading role in scores of other diseases—everything from arthritis to wrinkles.
“When you’re sitting down for meals, three times a day you are dosing yourself with huge quantities of things that will determine what’s coursing through your arteries and blood vessels for the rest of the day,” says Neal Barnard, M.D., president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine in Washington, D.C., and author of Food for Life and other books on the healing aspects of food. “Most people don’t think of food as medication, but in reality, it’s the single biggest medication we’re exposed to.”
And unfortunately, most of such “medicine” is ailing itself. Most foods in the American diet are no longer whole, a term used to describe a food in its most natural, unadulterated form—free of processing, preservatives and additives. Even most fresh fruits and vegetables, clearly the most nutritional foods in the American diet, are suspect: Only 1 percent of the U.S. produce is organic, grown without the use of cancer-causing pesticides and other dangerous chemicals.
When a food is processed or refined, it loses its nutritional punch. There are fewer vitamins and fiber, more fat and more sugar, says Elson Haas, M.D., director of the Preventive Medical Center of Marin in San Rafael, California, and author of Staying Healthy with Nutrition. And that spells trouble.
“The reason why so many of us are sick and stay sick is nutritional imbalance,” he says. “And when you think of nutritional imbalance, there are two primary problems: congestion—too many of the wrong foods going in and not being processed and eliminated properly—and deficiency, from not getting enough vitamins, minerals, amino acids and essential fatty acids. Both of these problems interfere with the body being able to do the functions it needs to, so we get colds, dry skin and hair loss and feel fatigued.”
Perhaps even more significant is the possible danger of many common food additives. Aspartame, the artificial sweetener sold as NutraSweet and Equal, can cause headaches and migraines, rashes, ringing ears, depression, insomnia and loss of motor control, according to a study by the Food and Drug Administration. Nitrates and nitrites, used as preservatives in meats and fish, form cancer-causing compounds. Other common additives, such as monosodium glutamate, butylated hydroxyanisole and brominated vegetable oil, can create an alphabet soup’s worth of problems; they’ve been linked with heart palpitations, nausea, headaches and nerve damage.
“Within minutes after you eat, molecules of that food are in every cell of your body,” says Dr. Klaper. “There they produce changes in every level, from pH changes in your blood to membrane changes in your muscles and nerve cells.”
The Skinny on Fat
Even additive-free foods can cause problems if they’re high in fat, like much of what’s in the typical American diet. Most of us have diets that are approximately 40 percent fat. Ideally, experts say, fat should comprise about 25 percent of total calories.
“Around every cell is a cell membrane that contains a little envelope of fat; this is needed so that cells can talk to each other,” says Dr. Klaper. “One way these cells communicate is by throwing little pieces of these cell membranes back and forth at each other.” So when you get an infection or catch a virus, or even get a splinter, your body is able to call on the inflammatory reaction and then turn it off again (when the splinter is removed, for example) because of this cell-to-cell membrane communication.
If this little envelope of fat becomes a big envelope, as it does in many Americans, cell communication becomes muddy. “Fat acts like an oil slick on cells, especially on the immune cells that help fight disease and other invaders,” adds Dr. Barnard. “It keeps the cells from working well.”
The only problem is, it’s not always easy to detect the dangerous fat in your diet. “All people see are those three letters: F-A-T. But the reality is that all fats are not created equal,” says Dr. Klaper. “There’s a big difference between beef fat and flaxseed oil: One can clog your arteries, and the other has the opposite effect and can help lower cholesterol. Everybody needs about 30 grams of fat every day to build new cells and nerves as well as for other functions, including helping to heal certain health problems, so you might as well make it the right kind of fat.”
Trans-forming Your Diet
You probably already know that saturated fat, the kind abundant in animal sources such as meats, cheeses and whole dairy products, is nasty, clogging arteries and linked with scores of other health problems. And you may have heard that polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fats, found in vegetables, nuts and seeds, are the “healthy” kinds, playing a role in lowering cholesterol and reducing inflammation.
But reputations can sometimes be deceiving. Take trans-fatty acids, which are made from heart-healthy vegetable oils. Through a cooking process called hydrogenation, these healthy oils are made unhealthy, transformed into a spreadable consistency resembling butter that can raise cholesterol levels. Hundreds of food manufacturers use this process to give their products— including many labeled as “low-fat” or “cholesterol-free”—more texture and a richer, more appealing taste.
You’ll know a product is hydrogenated by reading the label. If you see the words “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil,” the food contains trans-fatty acids and should be avoided or eaten sparingly, especially if the oil is listed among the top four ingredients. Another tip: Labels that read “May contain one or more of the following” and then list partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, soybean oil or other oils also indicate that the product has been chemically changed and contains trans-fatty acids.
While they may lack saturated fat, hydrogenated products such as margarine can be even more dangerous to your heart. Three studies have found that trans-fatty acids can raise cholesterol even higher than saturated fat, according to Alberto Ascherio, M.D., Dr.P.H., assistant professor of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. And the damage isn’t only to your arteries.
“When you eat foods containing these processed hydrogenated oils, it’s like putting sugar in a gas tank—it messes up the combustion of your body,” says Dr. Klaper. “The cell membrane is transformed from having this flexible, pliable curve that it gets from the ‘right’ fats such as polyunsaturates to becoming straight and rigid through hydrogenation. The trans-fatty acids are not incorporated into the new cell membrane, so cells can’t divide properly. When they do divide, they can have unstable membranes that are prone to breaking, which might put you at increased risk for various diseases, including cancer.”
Gut Response
Some say the center of your healing potential is your center—quite literally. “Most people aren’t aware just how important intestinal health is to overall health,” says Dr. Haas.
Literally dozens of health woes, including unexpected ones such as mood swings, acne and rashes, may result from problems formed in the gut: bacteria overgrowths, congestion in the intestines or other conditions caused by eating the wrong foods, according to Dr. Haas. And conversely, they can be treated with simple changes in the diet.
Dr. Haas recommends what he calls a detoxification diet (see “Detoxing Your Ills” on page 48), a three-week eating plan that he says purifies the body and helps rid it of scores of congestive problems. Unlike a fast, which avoids solid foods, Dr. Haas’s plan includes plenty of solids: steamed vegetables, whole grains, fresh fruits and, after the initial three-week period, legumes, nuts and other whole foods. “It’s a transition plan to help rid the body of toxins and rebalance abnormal yeasts, bacteria and parasites that cause diseases. It helps the body heal itself,” says Dr. Haas. “The proper elimination of these toxins is essential to intestinal and overall health.”
Another advantage of this type of diet is that it’s high in fiber, a crucial part of healing with food. “High-fiber foods fill you up, so you eat less,” says Rosemary Newman, R.D., Ph.D., a registered dietitian and professor of foods and nutrition at Montana State University in Bozeman who has studied fiber and its relationship to cholesterol since the early 1980s.
That’s important, since many of the health problems that affect us are the result of being overweight, a condition that afflicts more than 47 million American adults. But perhaps even more significant, says Dr. Newman, is that fiber helps prevent the absorption of fat and cholesterol from the intestinal tract.
There are two kinds of fiber, and they are found in varying degrees in different foods. Soluble fiber is abundant in beans, fruits and grains such as oats, barley and rye. Insoluble fiber is found in vegetables, cereals and grains such as wheat.
Soluble fiber forms a gel-like material that keeps dietary fat and cholesterol from getting to the interior wall of the intestines, where it is absorbed by the body, says Dr. Newman. So if you’re having a fatty food such as steak, be sure to include a soluble-fiber food such as beans with it.
“My belief is that you should have most of your fiber with your fattiest meal of the day in order to have it work most effectively,” she adds. “Since soluble fiber inhibits the absorption of dietary fat, it makes sense that it would be most effective when we’re having most of that dietary fat.”
Meanwhile, the insoluble fiber found in most vegetables doesn’t gel, so it’s less effective at preventing fat from being absorbed. But it still provides a very important benefit—keeping you “regular,” so food and the toxins in it pass through the intestines faster. “Once again, this prevents congestion, one of the two reasons for the nutritional imbalance that causes so many health problems,” says Dr. Haas.
Meals That Heal
Once you reduce the fat in your diet (including those tricky trans-fatty acids) and increase your fiber intake, you lower your risk of developing certain diseases—and you also help your body’s ability to recover from them. “It has been well-established that the right diet can protect against certain diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, hypertension (high blood pressure), arthritis, diabetes and problems associated with obesity,” says Dr. Barnard. “But these conditions can also be treated with food—namely, a low-fat diet.”
Probably the most widely studied is cardiovascular disease, which kills two of every five Americans, according to American Heart Association statistics. There have been nearly a dozen major medical studies showing that you can actually reverse plaque in the arteries—a leading cause of heart attack—by adopting a diet that’s low in saturated fat, says Neil Stone, M.D., associate professor of medicine at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago and chairman of the American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee. In fact, he notes that in some cases, a low-fat diet alone may be as effective in reducing heart attack risk as going on a low-fat diet while also taking cholesterol-lowering medication.
Meats, whole dairy products, eggs and snack foods such as potato chips, crack ers and cookies are the biggest sources of saturated fat in the American diet.
“With a low-fat diet, especially one free of animal food sources and those processed junk foods, you’ll see all kinds of welcome changes,” says Dr. Klaper. “Joints often stop hurting. Asthma frequently improves. Psoriasis can get much better or completely disappear. You start to see that there is a large group of diseases with an inflammatory component that is improved with diet.”
And it’s not just fat that causes problems. “We were raised with the mistaken notion that protein makes us big and strong, so we ate huge amounts of meat and drank large quantities of milk—and now we’re seeing a dramatic increase in cancer, arthritis and other health problems,” says Dr. Barnard. That’s because many proteins can have as harmful an effect as animal fat upon the blood and cell membranes.
“In the past few years, there has been a lot of research finding that arthritis can be treated with diet. When patients go on a low-fat vegetarian diet and get away from dairy products, in many cases their arthritis will go into complete remission,” says Dr. Barnard. “And while we’ve always used diet as the treatment of choice for Type II (non-insulin-dependent) diabetes, it appears as though Type I (insulin-dependent) diabetes is caused at least in part by exposure to dairy proteins during infancy.”
Cancer Phyt-ers
That is not to say you need to become a full-fledged vegetarian to prevent and treat disease (although some certainly advise it). But most experts do recommend that you eat more like one. The National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland, has spent about $1 million a year on a media campaign aimed at getting people to eat more fruits and vegetables.
Why? Because most of these plant foods—fruits, vegetables and legumes—are nutrient-dense, meaning they’re extremely low in fat while being high in fiber and key nutrients that help protect against and treat illness. But fruits and vegetables offer an additional nutritional payback.
“While you could get the nutrients you need from taking vitamin supplements, the advantage to getting them in fruits and vegetables is that you also get other micronutrients that you can’t get in a pill—trace minerals and other compounds that are believed to play key roles in protecting against certain diseases and possibly even helping to heal them,” says Barbara Klein, Ph.D., associate scientific editor for the Journal of Food Science.
Among these compounds are phytochemicals, which are natural chemicals found in all plants—but not in most vitamin supplements—that may protect the plants against their stresses, such as sunlight, disease and being eaten by animals. Researchers believe that the protection they offer isn’t limited to plants.
“We’re just getting to the tip of the iceberg regarding phytochemicals, but what we’re learning is very exciting,” according to Dr. Klein, who is also professor of foods and nutrition at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where studies of phytochemicals in soy products are ongoing. “It appears that these micronutrients may be the real secret to staying healthy.”
Most research indicates that these tongue-twisting phytochemicals protect against an array of cancers, particularly those that line the body’s organs, including the lungs, bladder, cervix, colon, stomach, rectum, larynx and pancreas, says Herbert F. Pierson, Ph.D., vice-president for research and development at Preventive Nutrition Consultants in Woodenville, Washington. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore have already concluded that one phytochemical found in broccoli, sulforaphane, appears to help protect against breast cancer in animal studies. And another research team found that animals exposed to tobacco carcinogens were half as likely to develop lung cancer when fed a diet rich in watercress compared with those who didn’t eat the vegetable.
These phytochemicals stop cancer in different ways. Have a piece of orange or some strawberries, and you’ll consume flavonoids that prevent cancer-causing hormones from latching on to a cell, says Dr. Pierson. Have some green pepper or pineapple, and you’ll get p-courmaric acid and chlorogenic acid, substances that stop cancer cells from forming. Have a slice of tomato, and you’ll get up to several hundred different phytochemicals, most of which seem to play some role in stopping tumors before they form. To further reduce your risk of oxidation-caused cancers, experts recommend that you thoroughly wash and even peel all fruits and vegetables before eating them to minimize ingesting sprayed-on pesticides.
Eating for Immunity
Another bonus offered by fruits and vegetables: They’re among the best sources of nutrients needed for a strong immune system, your body’s defense against disease. It’s your immune system that helps prevent and fight colds and other viruses, infections and even diseases such as cancer.
“When a patient of mine comes in with pneumonia, I may give him antibiotics,” says Dr. Klaper. “But then I say ‘Why did he get pneumonia? What is he is doing to his immune system?’ Healthy people don’t get pneumonia. Problems with immunity are often related to the way someone eats.”
That’s why a good diet becomes even more important as you age, since immunity naturally tends to weaken as time passes. By your fifties and sixties, your infection-fighting cells don’t function as well, placing you at greater risk for infection and cancer, says Ronald Watson, Ph.D., research professor and a nutrition and immunology specialist at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson.
But if you eat right, your immunity stays strong no matter what your age. And to most experts, that means a diet rich in the so-called antioxidant nutrients, vitamins and minerals that help protect against the damage caused by oxidation.
When a freshly cut apple turns brown, that’s oxidation, the process of deterioration that occurs from exposure to oxygen. Our bodies need oxygen to stay alive, but too much of it causes severe damage to cells. And in today’s society, where the air we breathe also contains cigarette smoke, car exhaust, background radiation and other dangerous pollutants and our drinking water has oxidizing chlorine, oxidation leads to premature aging and weakens immunity. Wrinkles, cataracts, arthritis and scores of other illnesses, including cancer and heart disease, are all thought to be caused in part by this oxidation process.
“When people talk about antioxidants, they are usually referring to vitamins C and E, beta-carotene and selenium,” says Judith S. Stern, R.D., Sc.D., professor of nutrition and internal medicine at the University of California, Davis. “But what we’re learning is that there are hundreds of other properties in foods that also have antioxidant qualities. Some of these are the phytochemicals. There are also other carotenoids like beta-carotene and other substances that we don’t even know about.”
What Supplements Don’t Have
What experts do know is that some of these goodies—phytochemicals, carotenoids and some micronutrients—aren’t in supplements. “The closer something is to its natural state, the better it is,” says Dr. Haas. “And vitamins and minerals are in their natural state in foods, not in supplements.”
“It’s like taking a fiber supplement. It may be better than not having any fiber, but you’re always better off eating high-fiber foods than taking a supplement,” adds Dr. Stern. “Once you take the fiber out of a food, the fiber is dehydrated, it doesn’t represent all of the types of fiber in foods, and it may not work the same way.”
Another problem with supplements: Exposure to air and light has a detrimental effect, so each time you open the bottle, the pills get weaker.
“The funny thing is, people hear about studies that show vitamin C helps for this and beta-carotene protects against that, so they run to the store and buy a bottle of vitamin supplements, thinking it will help them,” says Dr. Stern. “In reality, most of those studies are done with fruits and vegetables, so the benefit may be not only from that particular nutrient but from all of the other compounds in the food.”
Among those compounds are other nutrients that also play key roles in boosting immunity, even though they don’t get the publicity of the big-name anitoxidants. “You hear a lot about the antioxidant vitamins, but they’re only part of the story,” says Terry M. Phillips, Ph.D., D.Sc., director of the immunochemistry laboratory at George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C. “There are other nutrients that may be just as important—or even more so—in keeping immunity strong.” Among them: vitamin B6, zinc, folate, magnesium and copper.
When you bite into a carrot, a mango or broccoli, you are getting a great source of antioxidant vitamins as well as some of these other key nutrients—and a host of other goodies, too, including fiber, “good” essential fatty acids and even protein and calcium.
“The bottom line is this,” says Dr. Stern. “It may be easier to take vitamins. But if you’re really, really concerned about your health, there is only one thing you must do: You have to eat right.”
