Food Fears & Health FanaticsFood fears? Anyone who’s healed themselves of a gut disorder knows that the food you eat is vitally connected to your health. This is why healing usually involves dietary modification and restriction for a period of time.

Some health experts advocate staying on a particular or restricted diet for the rest of your life (for example, The Specific Carbohydrate Diet by Elaine Gottschall) because this diet worked to heal symptoms and alleviate the original condition.

However, the process that facilitates healing is not necessarily a good regime for ongoing health. In fact, since healing involves often intensive measures to correct an imbalance, isn’t it just common sense that if you continue with the intensive treatment past the midline, you will negatively throw your body out of balance the other way?

The problem, however, is psychological. When we’ve found a regime that makes us feel so much better, we are often frightened to give it up or modify it. Likewise, when something has worked for us, we can become fervent evangelists trying to get everyone else to experience the same benefits as us – forgetting that everyone’s body is different and people can have vastly differing deficiencies. One person’s life-saving supplement can be another person’s poison.

Then you have to look at the research about food and nutrition being released on an almost daily basis – often from parties who have a vested interest in food trends. When manufacturers had an insane surplus of soy byproducts they created a buying market for that surplus by touting soy as an amazing healthfood. No mention of the fact that it depresses thyroid function, inhibits mineral absorption, and contains massive amounts of estrogen! For virtually any food substance I can find articles convincingly for or against the substance.

So at the end of the day, I’ve concluded that you’re best off just looking at the living evidence as Dr. Weston A. Price did. When he found a village/tribe of people who were free of degenerative disease and had a tooth decay rate of less than 1%, he studied what they ate. And took samples back home and analyzed them. I feel his research has resulted in the most foolproof eating guidelines and that’s what my family and I follow. I’m a big believer in “results trump reports”. You can give me all the scientific research, clinical studies, chemical analyses, rat studies, etc., but compared to showing me the long-term results in a large group of human beings – the real-life evidence trumps every time.

I encourage each and every one of you to read this amazing book by Steven Bratman MD that details his remarkable journey through the twists and turns of the health food maze, self-righteous eating, and spiritual flagellation through food:

“Twenty years ago I was a wholehearted, impassioned advocate of healing through food. In those days I was a cook and organic farmer at a large commune in upstate New York. Today, as a physician who practices alternative medicine, I still almost always recommend dietary improvement to my patients”…read more…

Jini