Food or drug? Can you tell the difference??

Was thinking over the past week that food really is like medicine. The more I study about food, the more I see how similar it is to medicines that I used to dispense in the pharmacy. Here are three of those things...


1. 
So many foods these days are almost as synthetic as the medicines we get. We used to eat a lot of REAL food (as in not processed or highly refined) but now food has been processed to the point where food is so synthetic it isn't really food anymore - our body can't recognise most of the ingredients in that packet of 'food' you get off the supermarket shelf so how do you expect it to metabolise it and break it down into something useful or of nutritional value. Half the stuff in the ingredients you don't even know how to pronounce and the other half are numbers cause they don't even have names for what they are!

In the same way in medicine we have moved away from the natural herbs and remedies our ancestors used to treat symptoms. Again it was a move away from natural compounds easily recognised and used by the body. Even as recently as a generation ago there were pharmacists that actually compounded medicines - not like today where all we get to do is put labels on the boxes of fully synthetic, pharma-industry-made medicines.

2.
Food has effects on the body and the body has effects on the food just like medicines affect your body and your body also affects your medicine. To oversimplify, in pharmaceuticals the study of how your body affects the medicine is pharmacokinetics and the study of how the medicine affects the body is pharmacodynamics. Food can change the way your body digests other foods - it can change the pH (how acidic or alkaline) in your body affecting many other processes. Medicines also have an effect on how your body works and the 'side effects' are just that medicine working in different parts of the body other than the area we were 'targeting'.



3.
There are unknown side effects from medicines that we don't know about and cannot or do not test long enough for in clinical studies. In the same way I am finding that 'food' is not always tested for human consumption over as sufficiently long enough period of time and in some cases there are no tests done on foods to assess the effect on the people. There are so many side effects we don't even know about - the crazy thing is that some of those effects that come from food are what we then go to the doctor for to get medicine which we think will make it better?! In many people those side effects we know about can show as food allergies, food intolerances, and food sensitivites. In many others these effects can take form that we just don't expect and so would never relate back to food.

More on this stuff to come....