Can Diet Replace Medicine?

Since biblical times, people have suspected that food is little more than a remedy for hunger. The legend of the paradise apple, food sacrifices to the gods, recipes of folk medicine - all this is evidence of belief in the special properties of food .

Even Hippocrates believed that " food should be medicine , and medicine should be food ." So, we can think that blueberries help with myopia. After all, the miraculous cure for depression with the help of chocolate truffles has happened to everyone at least once, right? This is how we get used to trust life experience. However, sometimes it is useful to look at the healing power of food from a different angle.

Diet as treatment

Mankind received strong scientific evidence that food can be medicine in 1747. The British doctor James Lind was looking for the reason why sailors barely move their legs and spit out their teeth after long flights. The doctor divided sailors with scurvy into groups, prescribed their own diet to each of them, and began to observe them. As a result, only those who ate lemons and oranges recovered, i.e. compensated for the deficiency of vitamin C that occurred during swimming.

In this way, medicine has become convinced that food is extremely useful for diseases associated with the lack of normal nutrition , for example, starvation, anemia, scurvy. But does this mean that lemons can be considered medicine . Even if the sailors overcame scurvy under Lind's leadership, it was difficult to call them healthy. They did not grow new teeth, the biochemistry of the body changed irreversibly, and there is also no information about long life.

Fans of lemons may remember that a shock dose of citrus cures a cold. But scientists are less categorical in their conclusions and do not talk about full recovery, but about shortening the duration and easing the course of the disease. For some reason, it would be more correct to say that a full-fledged diet helps people to live healthy, avoid death and stabilizes the condition in case of certain diseases. That's not bad, but can you expect more?

You will not be full of food

Intuitively, most people understand that the molecular cocktail that the body receives in the form of a steak or an apple has a positive effect on the body. Both butter and spinach, if you look under a microscope, are full of useful substances. Eat for health . The Internet increases our belief in this due to the variety of articles, for example, about the benefits of salmon, or more precisely, fatty acids that can protect the brain from dementia, or carrots - the best remedy for premature wrinkles.

However, the authors of scientific works on the benefits of trace elements do not really like loud headlines like "Parsley protects against cancer." This is rather a manipulation of information, and not a scientifically proven fact. Why are studies on the impact of food on human health so ambiguous?

Conducting randomized controlled studies on human nutrition is difficult, if not impossible. For the sake of a reliable answer, whether salmon is really so useful, it is necessary to feed one large group of people with the same food rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids for several years or even decades. And the second large group (also with the same diet ) was given a placebo. It is also desirable that all experiment participants have the same health indicators , stress level, and living conditions. If this is possible anywhere, then it is only in popular science novels.

Most often, in experiments with nutrition , which are referred to on the Internet, rats suffer instead of people. And they are fed not with selected raspberries or tuna, but with researched substances in the form of supplements and injections. It seems like a small difference, but the results of such studies should not be transferred to people with identical conclusions.

Human studies are also underway. However, volunteers are usually surveyed, and this method raises doubts in the scientific community. People tend to embellish the reality and tell the truth during the survey - this is just a scientifically proven fact.

As a result, it turns out that modern science does not really know much about nutrition . Years of research show that some diets , such as the Mediterranean diet , are a smart way to maintain health and longevity. It is also clear that with food , especially diverse and of good quality, people live much better and longer than without it. It is obvious that the substances included in the composition of products can be useful - this is what nature intended.

But how exactly to consume food ? In what quantities? Does broccoli conflict with olive oil in the biochemistry lab of someone's particular gut? All this remains only questions for now. Most likely, unambiguously correct answers, suitable for everyone without exception, will never be found. Absolutely all products have contraindications .

Even if 10,000 people under the supervision of doctors ate strawberries for a whole year and became healthier, for someone alone such a diet may be ineffective or even harmful. For 100 studies on the harm of coffee, there are also 100 on its benefits, and all of them are in authoritative scientific journals. The most promising approach to nutrition today: be interested in scientific recommendations, but listen to your body.

What to eat?

Official medicine takes a strict position: no food can replace drug therapy in case of serious diseases. Science does not know of the existence of products that stop the growth of malignant tumors or the development of diabetes, although a significant part of the world's money and intelligence is aimed at their search. This is evidenced, for example, by the fact that cinnamon, certain substances in the composition of which are able to regulate the level of glucose in the blood, did not form the basis of any drugs against diabetes.

At the same time, no one forbids drinking tea with lemon or raspberry, if you are used to doing so when you have a cold. When the disease proceeds without complications, most doctors recommend drinking a lot of warm liquid. By the way, they have nothing against chicken broth, milk with honey and other grandmother's recipes. Because science has no alternative in the form of a magic pill for colds. A carefully prepared soup or tea can sometimes be more important to recovery than all the medicine in the world, and the placebo effect should not be underestimated.

Also, medicine knows that an individually selected diet can alleviate the patient's condition, increase the chances of recovery or stop the development of the problem. Numbered tables according to Pevzner, a vegan diet for some types of cancer, an elimination diet , i.e. clean from allergens, are effectively used as part of the treatment protocol. And, of course, they help patients feel better.

The main thing is not to hope that food will do everything for the doctors. Obviously, the fight against tumors requires more complex actions than regular consumption of antioxidant berries for dessert. Healing from a variety of diseases is not dependent on diet or lifestyle alone, and the decision to forego potentially life-saving treatment or to attempt to influence health through diet alone can be dangerous or even fatal.

Eat long and happily

Since the time of Hippocrates, who proposed to consider food as medicine (in the absence of real medicine ), typical human diseases and the quality of food have changed a lot . Today, few people complain of wasting or scurvy, but heart attacks and strokes, diabetes, obesity and various types of cancer claim millions of lives.

All these diagnoses are related to lifestyle in a broad sense, but the main role in triggering health problems belongs to the so-called fuel. And fast food and semi-finished products, by the way, are difficult to call high-quality food . According to experts, more than 60% of the diet of US residents is heavily processed products . The chemical composition and set of nutrients in such food in no way contribute to the normal functioning of the body.

It is not surprising that the average American barely lives to retire and at the same time cannot boast of good health , even despite the achievements of the pharmaceutical industry. In numbers, it looks like this: every 10% of unhealthy food in the diet increases the risk of developing cancer by 12%, and premature death by 14%.

Doctors highly appreciate the potential of food in the prevention of many diseases (in prevention, not treatment ). You have already heard all these recommendations, probably more than once, but it will not be superfluous to repeat them. The human body can work maximally productively and for a long time if:

• Regularly receives a variety of food with the maximum set of nutrients.

• Eats moderately, according to physical activity, age and gender.

• Plant food , including cereals, form the basis of the diet . Fish and seafood are on the menu regularly, and meat and poultry - several times a week.

• The body receives enough fiber for the normal functioning of the intestine, which is directly related to immunity, assimilation of vitamins and trace elements (there is evidence that the health of the digestive system affects life expectancy in general).

• Sugar and products of deep industrial processing make up a small part of the diet .