Food can be our miracle medicine

Make no mistake about it, eating is not a trivial event for the billions upon billions of cells that constitute your being. As scientists, for the first time in human history, have begun to vigorously investigate and appreciate, the act of eating is of great consequence, a communion with nature that promotes life or death. The choice is increasingly ours, as new scientific discoveries uncover the enormous impact of our every day diet on our prospects for health and longevity.
New research shows that food can bestow health and vigor, freeing us of minor discomforts and protecting us from devastating diseases. Or it can make us ill and miserable.
Food can quicken the brain and lift out mood. It can infuse our brains with spurts of electrical energy that make us think faster and perform better. It can quite our distress as surely as a prescription tranquilizer can, or it can make us drowsy and play havoc with our concentration. It can pull us out of depression or reduce us to panic. Food can set in progress silent attacks that erode our joints and clog our arteries – and it can help reverse the damage. The type of food we eat as children or young adults may subtly alter our brain chemistry, leaving us in middle age the victims of muscle-destroying multiple sclerosis or in old age with the tremors of Parkinson’s disease.
Food can promote aberrant activity within cells that years later end up as cancerous growth. Conversely, food can release agents that literally vaporize cancer-causing chemicals or extinguish chain reactions of molecules that roar through the body, ripping apart the membranes of healthy cells corrupting their genetic good intentions or leaving them to die. Even after abnormal cell growth. Have emerged on their way to becoming cancer, food can cause them to shrink or disappear. Or when the wandering cells from a breast cancer are scouting for new places to attach and grow, foods’ emissaries can create a hostile surface that can be colonized by cancer cells.
The list is endless. There hardly a health problem or natural body process that is not influenced in some fashion by the substances you put in your mouth. Food is redefined a powerful medicine – medicine you can use in preventing and curtailing diseases of all kinds and in boosting mental and physical energy, vigor and well being.
Andrew Weil, M.D. Natural Health, Natural Medicine has aptly said – “Diet has the distinction of being the only major determinant of health that is completely under your control. You have the final say over what does and does not go into mouth and stomach. You cannot always control the other determinants of health, such as quality of the air you breathe, the noise you are subjected to, or the emotional climate of your surroundings, but you cannot control what you eat. It is a shame to squander such a good opportunity to influence your health”.