The idea that foods play an important role in our health is nothing new. Hippocrates said nearly 2,500 years ago, "Leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food," something science has proven true time and again. Unfortunately, no matter how many times people hear this it has yet to become a mainstay of our culture. After the late eighteen hundreds, time of the true health spas or better known as sanitariums, this idea fell into obscurity. With the biased Flexner Report published 1910, favoring our current medical model over a proven one in use at the time, provided the impetus to move away from simple cures to chemical medicine relying heavily on technology and science-controlled by a handful. The first 50 years of the 20th century brought many discoveries with regard to essential elements for health, minerals and vitamins and later, micronutrients. Along with the beginnings of nutritional science came the knowledge of nutritional deficiency and the diseases it can cause.

Today, it is possible to eat all day long, three meals and snacks and still be starving, nutritionally. How can this be? Junk food, highly processed food, stuff that shouldn't even be considered food is the reason why. If that is not bad enough, our food is often contaminated with bacteria, chemicals and genetically modified organisms-also referred to as frankin-foods, foods made in some laboratory rather than they way nature had designed them. If all people eat are fast or junk foods or other foods with next to no nutritional value, the the body will not receive the much needed nutrients it needs to stay healthy.

With a diet like this, your body tries to run on food that is junk and with junk going in, you get junk back out in the form of mental stupidity, lack of energy, poor health, allergies, rashes, poor eye sight and so many other health problems, not ending with cancer or heart disease. Not only does the body not get the nutrition to stay healthy it also can not fight off all of the stressors or environmental toxins, pollution, chemical waste, radioactive waste, and much more, that are impossible to avoid in a world we have created for ourselves.

So, with this in mind food can certainly act as "medicine," in that it can protect or heal the body from disease. You have to eat fresh organic foods, starting with a diet made up mainly of vegetables, some grains, two or three fruits per day, a few eggs each week-not a dozen, half that or less, no milk beyond the age of 5 and meat only to flavor-15 ounces a week at most or about 8% of the total diet. This type of diet would keep you healthy and nearly 100% disease free, nearly because we still all live in a very polluted world and no one can guarantee 100% when it comes to your health.

Each individual food has their own unique set of nutrients that meet the varying requirements of your body. Eat a large variety of foods and you meet all of your nutritional needs. This is why it’s so important to eat a wide variety of foods--to ensure that your body gets all the nutrients it needs.

Food that is manufactured is not healthy and genetically modified food is even more un-natural. How many human genes does it take to be spliced into our foods before we become cannibals? Don't laugh, human, bacterial, fish and other genes are currently spliced into our food, making them something else that only future generations will possibly classify as unhealthy, un-natural, and just plain wrong.

Not only can food be of benefit but the lack of food, as in the case of fasting can have just as much of a power benefit. Food as medicine, food as poison.

"Treat an illness first with food. Only if this fails should medicine be prescribed."
(Sun Simao [ 581-682 AD ], court physician in the Tang Dynasty [ 618-907 AD ])
Keep in mind that the medicine Sun Simao is talking about is not what people today would think of, but rather a plant based medicine for the most part, as Chinese medicine does make use of animal parts too. Keep in mind, today's Allopathic medicine, with it chemical based medicines, is only a few hundred years old, starting somewhere in the later 1400s to 1700s. By the 1800s chemical medicine was on its way out, as it had not proven itself killing more people than helping while Herbalists on the other hand were able to help people get well.