FOOD MATTERS

by Jerome Burne

Medical Health Journalist

As Featured in Food Matters

Children as young as eight with high cholesterol should be put on statins, according to a report published last week. This is the latest idea for tackling the obesity epidemic and the fact that it came from the highly regarded American Academy of Pediatrics means many doctors will take the recommendation seriously.

However, it has stirred up a furor in America as well as in Britain, with experts viewing the suggestion with alarm. ‘There are far too many uncertainties involved with giving children these drugs,’ said Professor Andrew Neil, a clinical epidemiologist at Oxford University and adviser to HeartUK. ‘The way to help them is with lifestyle changes, getting them to eat properly and exercise.’

Statins can help reduce the risk of heart attack in adults who have already had one. But the benefits for other people – such as those who have never experienced a heart attack, particularly women – is questionable. There is also the risk of potential side-effects, muscle pain and mental problems such as memory loss.

With question marks over their use in adults, there are even greater concerns about giving statins to children.

First, the drugs have not been properly tested for them. They were developed for – and tested on – adults; the only tests on children have involved those with a rare genetic disease. Children are simply given a reduced dose according to their weight. No one has looked at the risks of giving such drugs to children, whose bodies are still developing.

‘We don’t even know what the proper childhood cholesterol level is,’ says Dr David Haslam, chair of the UK National Obesity Forum. ‘Children need more cholesterol than adults for brain growth and to produce the hormones they need during puberty.’

Furthermore, there is no data on the possible side effects of taking statins for 50 years, which is what some children could end up doing. Yet despite experts’ concerns about giving statins to children, Good Health has found that the drugs are already being prescribed to them – and that the numbers are going up. In fact, the controversy about giving statins to children has only highlighted an even bigger problem – the use of ‘adult’ drugs to treat children generally.

When your child is prescribed a medicine, you assume it has been thoroughly tested to make sure it is safe and effective. Not just because children are precious, but also because their bodies don’t always respond in the same ways as adults. For example, amphetamine drugs, such as Ritalin, given to calm children with ADHD have a stimulating effect in adults. One of medicine’s darker secrets is that about half of the drugs given to children are actually less well tested than the ones adults get. For instance, like statins, most anti-epilepsy drugs or the newer antibiotics have never been through separate trials to discover how they work in children.

Instead they are prescribed ‘off-label’, meaning they don’t have a licence for use on children. Doctors prescribe these medicines on their own judgment and assume they will have much the same effect as on adults. But this can sometimes go badly wrong, as Professor Terence Stephenson, of the Royal College of Pediatrics and Child Health and Nottingham University, explains: ‘For instance, there’s no licence for morphine for very young children. So it only comes in adult doses. This can be dangerous because giving even a 1,000th of an adult dose to a newborn baby in severe pain could be deadly.’

A report published earlier this year by an American hospital watchdog found that children were more likely to suffer side effects from drugs than adults because their kidneys and liver – where drugs are processed – are still developing. ‘One of the great frustrations of children’s medicine is that we have to prescribe so many medicines off-label,’ says Prof Stephenson. Doctors have to rely on intelligent guesswork and clinical experience to decide the right dose – and even whether a drug is right for a child.

Understandably, some parents are willing to try anything to help their offspring. But there are times when that may not be wise, as has been seen with the tragic experience of children prescribed anti-depressant SSRI drugs. This is because off-label prescribing is almost entirely unregulated.

Four years ago, the UK drug watchdog the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency issued a report saying SSRIs were not effective in children and raised the risk of suicide. It recommended that all brands, except one, should not be given to children. Something similar seems to be happening with strong anti-psychotic tranquillisers, licensed for use on mentally disturbed adults, but increasingly being prescribed to children with behavioral problems such as ADHD. Evidence is growing that they are more dangerous than originally claimed and less effective, and yet off-label prescription is rising. Doctors now write almost twice as many prescriptions for anti-psychotic medication for children as they did six years ago – 90,000 in England alone in 2006.

‘Giving these drugs to children with behavioral difficulties is the equivalent of giving chemotherapy for a headache,’ says Dr David Healy, head of the Department of Psychiatry, University of Wales, Bangor. So until there is a better and faster system for monitoring off-label prescribing – and finding out which drugs are causing problems – it would be wise to ask just what is, and what isn’t, known about any drugs being given to your child, says Professor Stephenson.

Raw for 30 Days is an independent documentary film that chronicles six McDonald’s-munching Americans with diabetes who switch to a diet consisting entirely of vegan, organic, live, uncooked, raw foods in order to reverse diabetes naturally. The six participants are challenged to give up meat, dairy, sugar, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, soda, junk food, fast food, processed food, packaged food, and even cooked food – as well as go without their loved ones and many of their creature comforts – for 30 days.

Can food heal the body? Can diabetes be reversed or cured through diet? Can a diabetic thrive without insulin injections and other drugs? Can people subsisting on a Standard American Diet (SAD) give up their favorite foods and favorite vices for 30 days? Can six strangers of diverse ages, races, and backgrounds support and nurture each other through this life altering challenge?

Raw for 30 Days shows each participant’s remarkable journey and captures the medical, physical, emotional and spiritual transformations brought on by this radical diet and lifestyle change. Participants were supervised by Gabriel Cousens, M.D., M.D. (H) and Helen Ross, M.D. at the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center in Patagonia, Arizona.

The six participants were selected in a nationwide search and brought to the quiet and rustic desert retreat, which is world famous for turning around even chronic conditions with a regimen combining raw, organic, living nutrition, exercise, yoga, meditation, education and counseling. The program was developed by Dr. Cousens, who is working on a book about his findings and the techniques he uses to reverse diabetes naturally in as little as two weeks.

The feature film Raw for 30 Days is now available through their website.  A compendium DVD is also being produced about the program to reverse diabetes, consisting of interviews with experts plus raw food preparation demos with top chefs. The compendium DVD is being made for direct online purchase so that individuals and families can follow the health program at home.

David Wolfe from ‘Food Matters‘ features in Raw for 30 Days along with Morgan Spurlock, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Robbins, Rev. Michael Beckwith, and Doctors Fred Bisci, Joel
Furman, and Gary Null.

Raw for 30 Days has just been released and is available excluisvely through the films website

By Professor Ian Brighthope
M.D., M.B.B.S., D.Ag.Sci, FACNEM, FACHM
As featured in Food Matters

Here is my version of a well-worn modern parable.

A surgeon is out jogging by a swiftly flowing river, when he hears the cry of a drowning man. The surgeon dives in, puts his arms around the victim, pulls him ashore, and resuscitates him. He resumes his jogging, only to see another man drowning. He drags the second man out and gets him breathing. The surgeon gets back to jogging, but before long he comes across another man drowning, and another.

Looking for help he calls upon a practitioner of complementary medicine, who is standing nearby, absorbed in thought. The surgeon calls out to him to go after one drowning victim while he attends to the other. When the a the practitioner of complementary medicine is slow to respond, the surgeon shouts, “Why aren’t you doing anything?”

The complementary practitioner finally responds, “I am doing something. I’m desperately trying to figure out who’s throwing all these people into the river.”

This story illustrates one of the ongoing dilemmas in our current healthcare system, a system so desperately busy treating the pathological endpoints of disease, endpoints that have more and more people seeking medical care, waiting on hospital beds, queuing up for surgical interventions, that it has little hope of contemplating what got these people there in the first place.

Which is not to say that such efforts are necessarily futile, or that a considerable amount of short term good is not being accomplished. Nevertheless the system is so preoccupied with what the sociologist John McKinlay has called ‘downstream endeavors’: “superficial categorical tinkering in response to almost perennial shifts from one health issue to the next”, that it has little chance of actually resolving anything. [1]

The current system is so busy fishing people out of the river, that it has little time to contemplate causes, or implement prevention, or ‘upstream medicine.’

I am talking in extreme terms here, of course there are many conventional medical practitioners who do implement prevention, lifestyle reforms etc, but in the main its the complementary healthcare practitioners that are achieving these ends, even though they may not be receiving the acknowledgement they deserve, especially from surgeons.

Things are certainly changing, nevertheless the situation remains a ‘two steps-forward-one-step-back’ progression at best. Up against the drug armamentarium of big pharma, nutritional supplements are often viewed as something of a novelty item, something to be toyed with but not to be taken all that seriously. Patients deserve ‘something that really works’, as opposed to a spurious concoction of vitamins and minerals, things that we should be getting from our diet anyway. Nevertheless the medical conservatives are taking notice.

Yet as Dr Andrew Weil – an enthusiastic proponent of nutritional supplementation – has suggested, this is a medical system that is on the verge of collapse anyway. He is confident, as many of us are, that when the collapse finally happens, a new integrative medical model will emerge. An ‘upstream’ model, that encourages individuals to ‘express ownership of their own health’ rather than leaving it up for grabs, hoping that they will be saved by drugs and surgeons and the hospital system, and be resuscitated when they go under.

References

1.    B.McKinlay, J., A Case for Refocusing Upstream: The political Economy of Illness. 3rd ed. ed. Patients, physicians and illness: a sourcebook in behavioral science and health
ed. E.G. Jaco. 1979, New York: Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan. xiv,479p.

This wonderful tasting Green Superfood Smoothie is sure to transform your morning, it’s a favorite of the team members at Food Matters! Take it first thing after drinking plenty of water and before any solids. Try this for a week and see your life explode with energy!

This recipe makes 2-3 glasses

1 small avocado or 1 banana

1 handful of baby spinach leaves or rocket leaves

1 heaping tablespoon of barley grass powder

1 teaspoon spirulina or blue green algae

1 tablespoon of raw honey or agave nectar

1 tablespoon of bee pollen

1 tablespoon of raw cacao powder

1 tablespoon of maca powder

1 cup of ice and 2 cups of water

All ingredients should be as organic as possible, as local as possible and as fresh as possible.

Blend all ingredients in a highspeed blender and voila….

To learn more about the nutritional properties of each of these superfoods click here

Where can I get these Superfoods online? click here

Enjoy…

The world wide debate on the effects of conventional farming practices on soil fertility is getting a lot of attention. And so it should, as many start taking ecologists’ warnings more serious and are discovering for themselves that maintenance of soil fertility is critical to the sustainability of our food supply.

Conventional farming practices see the soil as a means to an end. Driven by the dollar, soils are used and used and nutrients are drawn out of the soil rendering them as new deserts. Without crop rotation the soils are, if you will, raped of their minerals. Farmers are then forced to periodically saturate their crops with unnatural chemical fertilizers.

These fertilizers however are made up of primarily 3 nutrients NPK (Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium), but as Charlotte Gerson in Food Matters explains, ‘where are the rest of the 52 minerals needed for optimum soil health? They are missing!’

So poor soil health is leading to poor plant health and when plants are deficient they loose their defences and then the bugs come. Then the farmers come crying to the chemical companies for help who are more than happy to supply these deadly toxins like pesticides, herbicides and fungicides.

What we end up with from conventional farming is not just poor soil health and poor plant health but also our food supply becoming deficient and toxic leading to our bodies becoming deficient and toxic.

Over the short term these vitamin and mineral deficiencies manifest themselves as mood swings, lack of energy, joint pain, failing eyesight, hearing loss and thousands of other ailments that medical science would tell us to accept with advancing age.

Over the long term these deficiencies contribute to major illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, Diabetes & Mental Illness.

So where do we go from here?

As Jerome I. Rodale (founder of Rodale Press and known for his Prevention Magazine) noted many years ago:

“The health of the people is dependent upon the quality of the food they consume. And the quality of their foods depends on the quality of the soil on which that food is grown.”

It was from studying the Hunzan people, who are nestled in the mountains of North Pakistan, that Rodale developed many of his ideas about organic agriculture. He believed that the legendary health and vitality of the Hunzan people grew directly out of their profound agricultural systems. The Hunzan agriculture was the pinnacle of the organic way of life and an ideal model for humanity to follow.

Their sophisticated system was fully symbiotic. The agricultural terraces where the crops grew were strategically irrigated with the mineral rich water that flowed down the mountain. Commercial pesticides and fertilizers were not available to them so instead they used the mineral rich ash from wood fires and carefully collected compost from the village.

As this process was repeated endlessly over the centuries it conditioned and enriched the soil with minerals and through their intelligent farming practices there were never any issues with top soil erosion.

This shows that the health of our soil and our methods of agriculture are critical to the supply of our food chain. And interestingly enough, top soil erosion has played a determining role in the decline and demise of many great civilizations including those of the ancient Egypt, Greece and the Mayans…

It is estimated that more than 3 billion tons of topsoil is eroded from US farmlands each year and soil is eroding seven times faster than it is being built up naturally. In organic farming, soil is the foundation of the food chain and it is therefore critically important to support organic and sustainable agriculture sooner rather than later for the health of our people.

From a health perspective when we choose organics we not only look after the health of our own body and immune system but also the health of our family, the health of our soil and the health of our planet. So everyone wins.

References:

- Charlotte Gerson, Food Matters

- John Robbins, Healthy at 100, How to extend your life and stay fit (2006)

- Gerson, Charlotte and Walker, Morton, The Gerson Therapy, the proven nutritional program for cancer and other illnesses (2006)

Our nutritional health is now recognized as a vital factor in determining whether we can prevent and reverse heart disease. With so much research supporting the role food has in preventing heart disease, a consortium of world leaders in nutritional medicine have been asked what they would do if they were suffering from a heart condition. The common factors in each of their recommendations helps to simplify what we can do ourselves, to keep heart disease at arm’s length.

Prof Ian Brighthope MD, MBBS suggests that people:

· Adopt an Anti-inflammatory Diet (Scandinavian or Mediterranean Diet): Fish and vegetables, high intake of fish oils, olive oil, garlic and onions, complex carbohydrates, reducing animal fats (apart from fish).

· Stop smoking

· Exercise more regularly

· Reduce the intake of refined carbohydrates like white flour products and sugar.

· Reduce alcohol consumption

· Reduce stress

Patrick Holford is one of Britain’s leading nutrition experts. Patrick is a pioneer in new approaches to health and nutrition, specializing in the field of mental health. This is what he would do to avoid high blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart attacks and strokes:

· Good fats

· Balance your blood sugar

· Good intake of vitamins and minerals

· Reduce stress levels

Dr Dan Rogers is a trained Medical Doctor and Naturopath. He has been treating pa-

tients using integrative medicine since the late 1970′s with noted success in treating patients that have been deemed “incurable” by medical practitioners or hospitals. He recommends what we need to do is:

· treat the root cause of heart disease. By changing the internal biochemistry we will cure the disease

· almost all disease are improved by changes in diet and lifestyle. Improving the internal bio-chemistry of the body will develop healthy cells

David Wolfe is a leading authority on Raw Food and Superfoods. His recommended steps to better health are:

· Drink 12 to 16 ounces of fresh vegetable juice everyday.

· Add super foods (foods with an extraordinary high level of vitamins, minerals, co-factors, enzymes and special chemicals) to your diet

The common ground from these experts is that the true causes of disease are:

• Nutrition

• Stress

• Lack of Exercise

• Pollution

Food is good enough to keep you alive but apparently not good enough to fix you when you are sick. Nutritional supplements are necessary because the foods most of us eat are grown in mineral-depleted soils. There is evidence that increased intake of certain nutrients reduces the incidence of Heart Disease, Cancer and stroke.

The good word from these nutritional authorities is simple.

‘You’ll live longer and healthier if you exercise, have a good diet and supplement.’

Natural and powerful defenses in a normal human body make cancer impossible; a normal healthy body cannot and will not develop cancer. With a diet of healthy, rich organic food these diseases can be reversed.  Charlotte Gerson, daughter of Dr Max Gerson and founder of the Gerson Institute says nutrition alone is not the solution; we also need to remove the poisons.

All chronic diseases are the result of a dual problem, namley deficiency and toxicity. Let’s look at deficiency. One of the major problems is what we do to the soil. Our basic foods are grown in soils that are mineral deficient. Most commercial fertilizers contain 3 minerals; potassium, nitrogen and phosphorous however the soil requires approximately 52 different minerals to restore it to its natural state. These additional minerals have not existed in farmed soils in US since 1923 which means that we are missing rich minerals such as magnesium, calcium, iron, zinc, etc. in the foods that we are eating.

What about the toxicity in our food? Plants have their own defense against diseases, pests and fungus. When soil is deficient, however, plants are also weak and deficient and are more easily attacked by pests and fungus. Farmers combat this by treating their crops with toxic pesticides and herbicides.

Even if we eat only commercial vegetarian food we eat deficient, toxic food because with all this pesticide and fertilizer, our food is deficient and toxic.

We then need to consider the additional harm caused by food processing and added chemicals. Some 10,000 chemicals are approved by FDA as being safe as a food additive. When one is detected as harmful it is replaced, and the replacement is usually worse.  We are now facing a situation where our nutrition-deficient food has added toxins from pesticides and herbicides, and also has added chemicals due to food processing.

Dr Ian Brightthorpe M.D. states that our depleted soils lead to depleted nutrition, which leads to depleted health. He also relates the problem of cancer to depleted soils, agricultural systems, nutrients drawn out of soil and farming soils becoming deserts. Nearly every food available in shops has been processed and nutrients have deteriorated. While we feel we are eating a well balanced diet, we are actually deficient. Additives such as salt, sugars, fats, colors and preservatives damage the body’s communication system and causes massive damage to cells. He agrees that to turn soil back into functional soil we need to put the nutrients back.

To restore food to its nutritional and healing state, natural waste materials from this food, such as compost, must be put back into the soil. From this we can grow nutrient rich foods and when we consume this food in its fresh state we are restoring the natural and powerful defenses in our body that will make cancer impossible.