Can We Be Healed By Nutrition?

Hippocrates laid out the foundations for modern medicine, believing the human body was capable of innate self-healing. His ‘Hippocratic Oath’ is still recited by medical doctors today.

Our approach to curing illness and disease in society today, however, has understandably changed dramatically compared to our methods even as little as a few decades ago.

“Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.” – Hippocrates

Doctors today receive very little formal training in nutrition, and instead spend most of their time learning about synthetic pharmaceuticals which they can administer to their customers, or learning about surgery and other medical procedures etc. Heart disease and cancer are the two top killers in the U.S. Both contributing to more than half a million deaths annually. You are what you eat: the food you eat does matter and will make a difference to your health.

Optimum nutrition is the medicine of tomorrow.
– Dr. Linus Pauling

We decided we were going to spray everything with every kind of pesticide, every herbicide, larvicide, fungicide, we decided we were going to genetically modify things [that] we don’t know anything about.
– David Wolfe

One of the major problems of the soil, and what we do to the soil… The fertilizer is made up of [mainly] three minerals: nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium. Well that’s nice. But, the problem is that the soil requires approximately 52 different minerals. So where is the calcium, and the magnesium, and the zinc, and the iron, and all of the other things I can’t mention… they’re missing, but when the soil is deficient the plants also are deficient, and weakened, and they lose their defense and the bugs come and attacks them…. so they [go] crying to the chemical companies [who are all too happy] to sell them pesticides, and all kinds of other things
– Charlotte Gerson, founder of the Gerson Institute

Even when we eat commercial vegetarian food, we are still not eating totally healthy food: the food can even be deficient & toxic because of all the sprays, chemicals, and pre-preparation that is applied. Our body will be unable to use its own natural healing process if it is deficient in necessary nutrients, vitamins, and minerals. Even when we cook our food we destroy sensitive vitamins and nutrients. The cooking process also denatures enzymes, which are proteins that do the heavy lifting for our body and all other organisms, and are denatured by relatively high heat and extreme pH (almost all foreign enzymes are denatured during digestion by our stomach acid, which has a pH of 1: very highly acidic).

Dr. Paul Kouchakoff presented in the 1930s that if you ate a diet that consisted of more than 51% cooked food, your body would react to the food as if it was being invaded by a foreign organism. He demonstrated that if 51% of your meals were raw, you would have no abnormal white blood cell reaction, so your immune system would not be activated by the food. This has been explained by saying the heat destroyed necessary enzymes and made your body consider them foreign. Another, more likely, explanation for Kouchakoff’s results is that many raw foods contain necessary micronutrients for our beneficial gut flora, which can play a role in immune reactions, and which we may be starving by cooking too much of our food.

Many doctors are not interested in diets, and don’t get involved or ask questions about the diets of their patients. They forget to consider that perhaps what they are eating might be playing a role in the onset of their symptoms. From my personal experience alone I have had various doctors repeatedly tell me that what I eat “doesn’t matter”, and “won’t make a difference”. But we shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss diet from the conversation surrounding our health, considering that what we eat could easily cause excess inflammation, or lead to a deficiency in certain vitamins or nutrients.

If you are deficient in a certain vitamin, it could lead to a myriad of health problems. For example, deficiency in vitamin c alone can lead to: joint and muscle pain, fatigue, dry hair and skin, and infections. And an increase in inflammation can lead to: arthritis, Crohns disease, ulcerative colitis, peptic ulcer, cancer, and hay fever. Dr. Fred Klenner, pioneered using high does of vitamin c to cure viral disease in the 1940s. Linus Pauling, winner of two Nobel Prizes, first suggested that vitamin C could be used against the common cold. And both Dr. Max Gerson, and his granddaughter Charlotte Gerson, firmly believe that individuals can heal themselves by consuming a diet high in raw & fresh vegetables and fruits. Charlotte herself was cured of tuberculosis by her father when she was 12 years old. Dr. Gerson claims to have healed 50 terminally ill cancer patients using his natural therapy, detailed in A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases.

You cannot heal selectively, if you truly heal [then] everything heals…If a patient comes in with cancer, and high blood pressure, and diabetes, maybe fibromyalgia, all the problems disappear. You cannot heal one disease and keep two others, its impossible. When the body heals, it heals everything.
– Charlotte Gerson

When you eat proper nutrients and vitamins, you enable your body to heal itself. Healing requires nutrients. Unrefined carbohydrates, a variety of fruits, vegetables, and proteins, have proven to contribute to overall balanced health. Not only does what we eat directly affect our health: it is likely the primary factor in deciding it. In sum: you really are what you eat, and our nutritional choices have wide reaching consequences. References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8572874.stm

http://heart-disease.emedtv.com/heart-disease/statistics-on-heart-disease.html

http://www.theheartfoundation.org/heart-disease-facts/heart-disease-statistics/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwZY1jaw2EM

http://www.healingdaily.com/detoxification-diet/enzymes.htm

http://www.rpi.edu/dept/chem-eng/Biotech-Environ/IMMOB/enzymeac.htm

http://www.ehow.com/facts_6172947_vitamins-do-high-temperatures-deactivate_.html

http://sadieking.com/dr-paul-kouchakoff-the-influence-of-food-cooking-on-the-blood-formula-of-man/

http://www.logan.edu/mm/files/LRC/Senior-Research/2007-Aug-21.pdf

http://www.vitaminsall.com/vitamin-c/

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/info/cancer-oncology/