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Hippocrates

The Greek physician Hippocrates (460 BC) is often quoted as having said: "Let food be thy medicin and medicin thy food", meaning so much as: "Eat the right food, and you don't need a doctor". But if Hippocrates would have been alive today, he probably would have said: Healthy food is all about micronutrients and micro-organisms!

The bad news is that in today's highly industrialised countries most of the mass-produced food does not contain many micronutrients at all and by consequence this (fast) food has lost its vital qualities in the original sense of the word. In Latin, vita means life and alere means feeding.

What we buy nowadays from our regular supermarkets is mostly dead: de-natured stuff that is edible allright, but without micronutrients. It does not even come close to what our (great-) grandparents would recognise as food, with vital qualities such as delicious taste and smell, brimming with anti-oxidants and grown in their organically manured kitchen gardens where nobody had heard of petrochemical pesticides and fertilisers from polyester bags. Therefore eating 'an apple a day' from an industrial cultivation is no longer sufficient 'to keep the doctor away' as the old saying goes. Even fresh fruits and vegetables are now affected! Indeed our agriculture would have been far better off with Justus von Liebig gone fishing, and the gentlemen Haber and Bosch joining Livingstone to disappear into the rain forests of Africa.

The good news is that we can start now to put Hippocrates' advice into practice again, and grow our own crops in such a way that they will pick up enough micronutrients to become vital again: life-giving. The way to go there is to observe the rules applied in an organic type of circular agriculture, where organic nutrient cycles are closed (especially the organic carbon cycle), in order to recycle much more nitrogen for protein production and to avoid high nitrogen losses in the form of NPN (Non-Protein Nitrogen like nitrates and ammonia). This requires the presence of soil organisms to have them perform their original functions again: braking down the old plants in order to produce humus and organic nutrients for the young plants to choose from. The result will be a resilient crop that does not need pesticides anymore, because it contains micronutrients such as vitamins, enzymes and alexines again, which fend off pests and diseases. Those compounds are exactly the same nutrients that we also need as humans, to digest our food properly in order to remain in good shape and spirits. It is the type of food that we call wholesome food, because it has the capacity to heal(th).

Summarising the bonuses of restoring an organic type of circular agriculture, we get:

• a more sustainable agriculture, with much less impact on the environment,
  
• a better living for the farmer, when he starts saving on external input requirements,
  
• resilient crops, that do not need protection other than Integrated Pest Management,
  
• vigorous seeds that do not need a coating of pesticides, so harmful to living organisms,
  
• increasingly healthy people, and an impressive reduction of health care costs,
  
• soil erosion under control, resulting in restoration of soil structure, and last but not least
  
• enormous volumes of CO₂ being stored in the soil again, by soil organisms for free!
  

The bridge to health is built with wholesome food, with proteins/fats at 15%/15%
Right from the moment that the insulin hormone was discovered, it turned out that the science around insulin sensitivity provides a totally new prospect for reversing diabetes 2. The keyword here is wholesome food. That means that you start being choosy about the nutritional value of the food that you put into your mouth: you should never eat food that only contains macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins and fats), because without inclusion of the necessary micronutrients, food has a lower nutritional value and cannot properly be digested. This explains how wholesome food becomes fast food: it contains no micronutrients, and it makes you obese, diabetic, chronically ill and cancerous in the end.

Always eating wholesome food is the best option for restoring insulin sensitivity
What is wholesome food? It simply contains enough micronutrients to digest the food properly and omega-3 fats in balance with omega-6. This will enable you to eat less food, releassing the same amount of energy and loosing weight at the same time! By also limiting the contribution of calories from fats and proteins to less than 30%, your health will quickly improve! If you are (pre)diabetic already, the video and article below will demonstrate you one thing clearly: as long as dietary fats inhibit the action of insulin in normal cells, the overloaded fat cells cannot heal either. This simple truth means that insulin sensitivity (the precondition for a normal blood glucose level) cannot return until

• dietary fats have been removed from regular cells first, by exercise, slimming and fasting,
  
• the specialised fat cells are functioning again, enabling all dietary fats to be stored there
  
• fat intake has been restricted to a level that does not exceed 15% of the total caloric requirement of your lifestyle.

This is extremely urgent in order tot stop the chronic inflammation of regular cells, overloaded with surplus amounts of fats being diverted to liver and muscles especially.

But: reducing excess proteins is as important to the heart muscle as fat reduction is
As said, reducing the intake of fats can be done through adoption of a low fat, plant-based, whole food diet, with omega-3 and -6 in balance. But it brings in another advantage: the protein intake can easily be reduced to 15% as well, when meat consumption is restricted at the same time too. This takes the pressure off the coronary arteries (and eventually the tiny blood vessel walls where surplus proteins are normally stored). You can imagine what that means for the reduction of blood pressure, inflammation and heart disease!

Restoring your insulin sensitivity for control of blood glucose and blood pressure is the single most powerful measure that you can take against chronic disease, noting that your combined fat and protein intake should never exceed 30% of your caloric requirement, because chronic inflammation and the diseased state of the cells increases, when being overloaded with surplus fats and proteins.


PS1 Hippocrates has also said that once a disease has struck, it is more important to look into the conditions under which the individual organism contracted the illness, than to focus on suppression of its symptoms. Under the circumstances, each individual shows his own unique set of symptoms in his reaction to a certain disease.

A symptom is not equal to the underlying cause of bad performance of the organism, but only the indicator through which the real reason of the bad performance may be traced. Interpretation of the symptoms in order to translate them correctly into an effective health advice for the patient is the field of integrative medicine. The integrative medical practitioner works together with the patient to design a change in lifestyle and food habits that will drastically improve his health. Crucial in all this is that the patient stops to be a patient! He will take the immediate responsibilty for his own lifestyle and food intake and takes all the actions necessary to cure his disease. It is self-evident that this requires good insight in all the factors that contribute to a better health.

In order to heal, the organism that is ill has to come to terms with the real trouble maker that caused the disease(s) in the first place. Only then can it come back into harmony with its environment again.
That has been forgotten for ages and it applies to cancer patients just as much as to plants and crops. Using the odd chemical in a therapy will probably suppress a symptom, but will seldom address the full scope of the cause(s) underlying a certain problem. This applies to chemotherapy as well! It just creates another problem, and probably one that is more serious. Don't shoot the messenger; he only rang the bell!

PS2 Eating the right food is even person-dependent, according to the Ayurveda. This Vedic work was scripted some 1000 years BC in India. At that time it could not have elaborated of course, on the impact of chemical pesticides and fertilisers. Which is really a pity, because it would certainly have meant an additional chapter in the Ayurveda.