Food is Medicine
Hippocrates discovered this long ago. Every time we choose to eat something we can either promote or fight disease. Therefore, if we wish to be healthy and free of disease we need to choose wisely how nourish our body.
Do you want to be healthy?
Do you want to be healed?
Sometimes, just like the man by the pool of Bethesda,
we look for excuses rather than solutions.
So how can we define healthy?
As I write this the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just announced it will be Making Sure ‘Healthy’ Means What It Says on Food Packages.
They admit that “Even for the well informed, choosing what to buy is challenging, especially if you want to choose a healthy diet for you and your families” and that “our understanding about nutrition has evolved”. I could not agree more. Their statement definitely confirms the need for clarity about what is healthy. They don’t have the answer – yet.
As our understanding of disease and health continues to evolve, so should our purchasing and eating behaviour follow. But our behaviour can only change if the science can offer us actionable guidelines, tools and tips, do’s and don’t.
Rather than waiting for the FDA to come up with the definitive definition of healthy – “This may take some time” – I want to propose here a working definition. One that works for me and that may for you.
A food is healthy when it adds value to my body and when it promotes its optimal functioning.
A food is unhealthy when it destroys value for my body, adds stress to the physiological processes my body performs or harms it in the short or long run.
I like to use the analogy of a bank account. The healthy foods are credits for your body to work with, to flourish and thrive, the unhealthy foods are debits and the more you add them up the worse you will feel. It might eventually lead you to physical bankruptcy…
In the weekly knowledge posts, I will review and discuss particular aspects of what is healthy, what our bodies actually need and how certain foods affect our body (whether they are credits or debits).
But before you move onto reading those, I want to come back to the notion that this life is a journey and that we are constantly learning new things. This brings me to an important question:
Healthy compared to what?
As we make the decisions about what to buy and what to eat day in and day out, and as we consider our desire to living in a healthy body, we have the opportunity to make better choices every day. Baby steps if you will, but every choice compared to previous may set you off on a journey that will for sure gradually improve your health. Every debit you refrain from adding will keep you in better balance.
Healthy for who?
While there is a great deal of consensus about what helps our bodies to function optimally, there are also individual differences we need to take into account. Nuts are generally healthy, but not if you have a nut allergy… When useful, I will also highlight those differences, which could be relevant for people with certain medical conditions.
Finally no knowledge can benefit us if we don’t use it or apply it. So I would encourage you not only to start reading on, but more so to start taking baby steps towards
finding your healthy…
Finding Healthy 