The History of Food

For more than five thousand years, humans have used foods to prevent or ease the symptoms of various diseases. The old adage "An apple a day keeps the doctor away" has recently been scientifically validated.

The truth is that modern medicine has a history of pooh-poohing old wives' tales, only to then discover they are based on verifiable scientific facts. This attitude is ironic, considering that using foods as the first choice to heal or prevent diseases was laid out by the father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, more than two thousand years ago.

In the modern world, it is important to find a great whole-foods micronutrient-support program. Sadly, most people today eat a diet filled with foods that not only do not but cannot actually nourish them.

Even seventy-five years ago, you didn't really need to think about what you ate — or even know what foods nourished your body or how. If you ate it, you would be nourished.

Until the mid-twentieth century, the majority of foods eaten on a daily basis were homegrown or locally sourced. Seventy-five years ago, the foods we ate were raised without an overload of herbicides or pesticides. There were no concerns with GMO contamination.

Milk wasn't homogenized for shelf life and then pasteurized to protect us from the results of cattle being raised in unhealthy conditions. Cattle weren't fed antibiotics, hormones, and steroids to increase productivity. Until the 1950s, practices such as shipping from massive farming complexes and using chemical fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides were not the norm.

After World War II, we experienced a dramatic downward shift in nourishment from our daily foods: the proliferation of convenience foods, fast foods, and foods shipped from around the world, rather than foods sourced locally.

Our diets moved away from freshly harvested, freshly prepared whole foods into convenient and fast foods. Today the average fast-food meal has about eighty synthetic additives to enhance flavor and texture. Any single one of these additives could cause slight changes in brain chemistry. Added up together, they can spell disaster for healthy brain function, especially in young, still-developing brains — yet doctors wonder about the increase in autistic and hyperactive behavior and say they can find no cause.

We now eat far more processed foods and synthetics than have been determined to be safe. I — and many health educators and health professionals — believe the side effects we deal with due to the addition of these additives and chemicals include dramatic increases in chronic diseases and a lowering of our standard of health at younger and younger ages. We see upward climbs in profound brain dysfunction and other diseases at early ages. ADD/ADHD, ASD (autistic spectrum disorder), juvenile diabetes, and asthma are just the tip of the visible health dysfunctions increasing in our children.

It's not only foods we have to worry about. There are increasing numbers of lab-created "nutrients" and synthetic supplements. They seem to offer everything you need. But synthetic nutrients, isolated amino acids, processed fatty acids, minerals from rock, or any type of genetically modified (GMO) foods don't — can't — offer wholesome nutrition.

The reason for this is simple: we don't assimilate them. Our bodies cannot easily utilize isolated nutrients, and some the body won't assimilate at all, let alone recognize as food.

In the last decade, people have woken up to the problem of not being able to find actual, real, healthy nutrition in the foods they eat. This has spurred a huge increase in sales of natural, green, and organic foods and supplements. Sales of supplements and organic foods are in the billions — and both categories have been growing yearly for over a decade. This isn't a trend — it is a movement. As such, manufacturers want in on the sales action, even if what they offer isn't really all that healthy.

There are trends within this movement toward healthier foods and supplements. Often these trends are a reaction to the problems caused by eating too much processed and fast food. For example, a scientific study will show a problem with salt or fat, but rather than saying, "Don't eat processed and fast foods, loaded with salt and trans fats", the advice is to remove that single nutrient, which is also found in healthy forms in whole foods. What all these trends have in common is this: if people will pay for something, a manufacturer will create it then sell and promote it.

Often this leads to some manufacturer making a "safer, better" food — usually through replacing the nutritional culprit with a different processed ingredient, which often winds up being far worse for your health. Let's look at a few examples.

One of the first trends was to limit salt. Indeed, high levels of regular table salt are deadly! However, rather than providing education on the need for drinking healthy amounts of good water, Americans were advised to simply eat low-sodium diets. Sodium continues to be a concern for many, primarily because most processed foods and restaurant-chain meals contain obscene amounts of salt as a cheap flavor enhancer for low-quality ingredients. Salt substitutes came into being, but information and understanding about the need for healthy salt is not readily available and information on the dangers of salt substitutes is hard to find.

Fast Fix: If you use boxed or canned foods or go to fast-food restaurants weekly, begin by replacing a single meal a week with whole foods, such as vegetables, fruits, whole grains, beans and rice that you purchase and cook yourself. Use flavoring spices to replace salt. Spices like paprika and mustard work with nearly any meal. Add garlic and other aromatics to add flavor. You will be in control of the amount of salt you add. Use a natural, unheated salt, such as Celtic Gray, and discover just how little salt you really need to add great flavor.

Next came the trend to limit fats. And like the no-salt/low-salt fad, people are still looking for a low-fat/no-fat number on their food — and too often pay next to no attention to any other information on the label, such as synthetic additives needed for flavor. Manufacturers have created chemicals that will prevent fat absorption — which are now found to lead to vitamin deficiencies and other severe digestive problems. Only this year has the government stepped in to actually limit sales of trans fats — processed fats that are known to lead to chronic inflammation, which is a root of hundreds of diseases and conditions. In recent years, the need for healthy...