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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 Until States. And diet is believed to play 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 day. “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.

“The reason why so many of us are sick and stay sick is nutritional imbalance. 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. There they produce changes in every level, from pH changes in your blood to membrane changes in your muscles and nerve cells.

This change in attitude didn’t come overnight. In fact, it took nearly 100 years. Up until the turn of 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 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 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 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.Suddenly, the farmer who did three acres a day behind a team of horses could plow 50 acres with tractor. Prairies erupted with mountains of corn, soybeans and oats to be fed to millions of cattle, pig 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.. ”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.

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. 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.