The Connection Between Nutrition and Disease

Food is probably THE most important medicine. It is the most powerful tool to treat illness and has the power to transform health in just 5 days! When people change their diets for just one week, their health concerns such as headaches, congestion, joint pain, fatigue, sleep problems or obesity, decrease. That is because food has the ability to change your biology instantly. Your fork has some amazing power!

Poor diet, food additives, toxins, and stressors led to the phenomena that we call disease. Focusing on whole food and getting the right nutrients within the diet is key to improving many of the symptoms that you experience. Eating the right foods can help prevent and treat illnesses such as hypertension, chronic inflammation, diabetes, fertility issues, digestive disorders, heart disease, cancer, and depression. When given half the chance, the body can cure itself!

We know that a poor diet full of highly processed, nutrient-void foods lead to our health conditions. Wouldn’t it be safe to assume that a diet rich in whole, nutrient-dense foods could reverse those conditions that we created as well?

How much of health is determined genetically, and how much is determined by lifestyle? It’s a combination of both. But the influence of our lifestyle is enormous and much larger than many people are aware of. Specific aspects of our lifestyle, like nutrition, can influence genetic expression, even to the point of turning genes on and off. We might be genetically predisposed to things like diabetes or cancer or hypertension, but lifestyle choices are what ignite those diseases in our body.

Our healthcare system is largely based on managing already existing diseases. We do not place enough emphasis on or enough teaching on changing our lifestyle to prevent such diseases from starting. Many of us go through life believing that illnesses like cancer or diabetes happen to other people, and will never happen to us. We also believe that if such disease should impact our life, that modern medicine will be there to fix us. We need to make the shift from managing diseases, to preventing diseases! And the key to maintaining our health is to ensure that our lifestyle and our diet are ones that turn off those genes that predispose us to illness.

Our country has a very high use of prescription medications when we experience health issues, when drugs can often just mask our symptoms. We see $200 billion in prescriptions written every year. There is $25 billion spent on marketing by the pharmaceutical companies. The top drugs sold in this country are all lifestyle drugs: cholesterol medication, reflux medication, anti-depressants, and high blood pressure medication. These are all symptoms of an imbalanced lifestyle and the solution is not always medication. For example, lifestyle is more effective in preventing the progress of diabetes than any medications. We see how foods like shellfish can increase joint health. We see that using fiber to reduce blood sugar is equally effective to using medication!

There is an undeniable connection between nutrition and our health. And although some critical health conditions will require medication, looking at nutrition as an alternative can be a healthy option.