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....

Medicines in "chronic disease" - what we have been lied to about!

I was catching up with a GP yesterday who has been in general practice for the last 20+ years. He works in one of the practices that I do some work with so we know each other quite well now.

We were discussing medicines and why they have all of a sudden become, by a long way, the most common intervention used by doctors. Is it because we as patients go in expecting to get something and would feel ripped off coming away with nothing, or is it more because doctors are so overrun with patients that they prescribe to match symptom and don't have the chance to actually address the REAL CAUSE of the symptoms - possibly due to the patient wanting it fixed NOW! It is certainly an interesting dynamic. 

How would you feel going into the doctor and getting only advice about what you should and should not be eating and about the increased exercise you should be doing and not taking away with you any medicine to 'fix' the thing you went in for? 

Even more interesting is whether or not the doctors know or keep up to date about what the best lifestyle change advice is (is it still the food pyramid for nutrition? because that is the advice most often given to everyone that comes into contact with the health system). Then again, is it appropriate to try and help someone change their lifestyle completely in a 15 minute consult every 3 months? Do doctors even have the motivational techniques required to help people make changes? It isn't part of the 5 years at med school that's for sure. Do we really expect that the doctor can fix everything after some patients have abused their bodies for the last 30+ years and think they can return to complete health in a couple of weeks?! Some still see health as a guaranteed right but not realising it is a responsibility - and a personal responsibility at that.

For example, if your blood pressure is quite high one time you were visiting the doctor should you immediately be put on a blood pressure lowering tablet? Should other risk factors be taken into account first? Does the doctor have time to spend with you to identify WHY your blood pressure might be high - and do they then have time to explain what you can DO about it yourself?

I'm not trying to say doctors are bad or people are lazy or anything like that. I'm just saying that I find it interesting that we expect an overloaded health system (that is focused on disease) with a flawed model of delivery to keep us healthy?! The sooner we realise health is OUR personal responsibility the better - and the sooner we realise it is more cost effective for the nation to invest in our health from the earliest point possible in preventative techniques the healthier we will all be. 

But what will happen to the drug companies and the billions of dollars they make from finding a 'disease' (really just a set of symptoms they can then call a disease), and then matching that with their most recently developed medicine. Well I guess we will have no more need for them!! Especially not for those "chronic conditions". 

(I don't even like the term "chronic" because it immediately makes us as the patient believe that you have this for life - AND YOU DON'T HAVE TO!! If you make changes you DO NOT have to be on those medicines forever). 

In fact we have been lied to by big pharmaceutical companies trying to scare us into thinking that the risk of something bad happening to us is so much worse if we don't take their medicine. 

What they talk about is relative risk instead of absolute risk. What that means is that say there were 100 people and we put them all on a medicine. 5 of these hundred were going to get heart disease anyway. Of those 5, 2 did not get the heart disease as a result of taking medicine but 3 of them still did EVEN though they were taking medicine. This would be a great result for a drug company because they have reduced the risk of getting a heart attack by 40%!!!! ie 2 people of the 5 that were going to get heart disease were 'saved' and 2/5 is 40%. That is known as the relative risk reduction. Can you see the problem here??

What they don't tell you is that the ABSOLUTE risk reduction is actually only 2% as only 2 of those 100 people that took the medicine did not get heart disease as a result of taking medicine!!

Relative risk is how MANY if not ALL drug studies are written up and for obvious reasons. How much of a medicine could you sell by telling people it gave a 2% reduction in risk. I won't even go into this part yet but there is the whole thing of you won't even see that 2% reduction until after 10 years or more of taking the medicine... cRAzy stuff!!

Well I think I've gone on long enough and it wasn't even about what I initially was going to write so I will have to change the post title so it is relevant lol...

Anyway I would be interested to hear your thoughts, comments or questions about the current health system model and your experiences interacting with it so post/comment/question away lol

I wanna lose wheat!

Everyone wants to lose weight! But not everyone wants to do what is required to lose the weight..

Some research done recently shows that wheat has a HUGE impact on how our bodies store fat - particularly around the belly area which is where most of 'today's people' store fat. In fact they call it wheat belly now.

I've always thought but what about how in the bible it talks about wheat for man - well let's just say that we are not talking about the same wheat.

Wheat has changed significantly since biblical times. 

In fact in the last 50 years wheat has changed so much thanks to the geneticists and others that (with good intentions) have genetically modified the wheat in order to make it produce more - most likely with the good intentions of feeding the world and alleviating hunger throughout the world. And also of course for the money... but that's another story.

I've just bought the book Wheat Belly by Dr William Davis (a preventative cardiologist - check his blog in the link) and will be sharing some knowledge from what I get out of the book and how we as a family have tried to implement it in future posts so keep an eye out for them.

This particular idea to start with of not having breads, has been a bit of a journey for our little family. The first question was "so what will the kids take to school for lunches if they aren't going to have bread?" In truth this issue hasn't been fully solved as they still sometimes take sandwiches to school because it is the easiest thing to make (and they can make it themselves!). But as far as usage in our house overall goes we have reduced bread intake by at least 70%.

We have also stopped all pasta and cereals. Our kids are now having fish, steak, chicken, eggs, spinach or whatever else we as parents end up cooking for our breakfasts. They are loving it - our son will eat as much as we do if he could and he sure isn't missing cereals and grains. Our daughter on the other hand has found it a bit harder and still wants cereals and toast in the morning and is addicted to sandwiches for snacks. However, what I have noticed over the last few weeks is that because everyone else is eating something different, she wants to have what we are having now. Perhaps it has gone past the 'tipping point' for her because her brother now eats what we have been eating whereas before he would have what she was eating otherwise it 'wasn't fair'. And for snacks now instead of sandwiches they have fruit or a vegetable after school. We need to keep working on the lunches (and that just means we need to be better at preparing their lunches instead of doing last minute lunches or letting them do their own).

It really just takes some discipline and commitment to make changes and then slowly the changes will happen. It is certainly tough to get past the initial moaning and complaints and so on for the first few weeks but once you learn to be a little more creative with other foods around, it becomes so much easier!

So what's the difference?? No, our kids have not lost huge amounts of weight or 'lost inches off their waist' like all that other stuff you see on TV and of course we don't want them to (we already get in trouble as it is with grandparents for 'not feeding them enough').

But it's not about that - for our kids it is about teaching them what is the best way to eat so that in the future they are keeping themselves healthy and well and won't get into the problems and chronic illnesses that many adults are facing today.

If you are keen - give it a go and try not eating bread for a day.. or a week. Find some veges you like that you could use to eat instead of bread or different meal options. Let us know how you go!