Food as Medicine Celebrated

This year’s Institute for Functional Medicine conference on ‘Food and Nutrition as the Ultimate Upstream Medicine’ reminds us that besides humans, food-as-medicine is the way all other animal species do it.  It’s also the way we’ve done it throughout our evolutionary history, barring the most recent 0.004%.

Here are some takeaways from the conference:

• This year, for the first time in human history, more people will die worldwide from obesity than from starvation, much of it caused by excess consumption of sugars and other refined carbohydrates.
• The recent focus by the food industry and governments on low-fat products and cholesterol have increased, not reduced, the obesity epidemic.
• Modern interpretations of the paleo diet go a long way to helping people to avoid refined carbs
• Declining vegetable intakes in recent years are causing serious phytochemical deficiencies which in turn contribute to higher disease burdens.
• The food industry is corrupt and knowingly exploits the ‘bliss point’ for the sake of profit, in the knowledge that it is contributing to the epidemic of obesity and other chronic diseases.