“Let Food Be Your Medicine and Medicine Your Food.” - Hippocrates 400 B.C.
Never before in history have Americans been so concerned about diet and nutrition, yet never before in our history as a nation have Americans eaten so poorly. We have drifted so far away from eating pure whole foods that we no longer have much of an understanding and connection with the foods we eat and how they affect us. Today our children have little idea of where food comes from or how it’s grown. They only know that they can go to a drive-thru and get great food really fast!
It’s important we understand how food changes our body. Food was created to sustain us and to help us rebuild. Foods are the primary source of energy and are designed to assist the body when healing. The foods we eat have a direct correlation to the way we feel, the way we look, our ability to rest, as well as our ability to stay healthy.
Nutrient Levels in Traditional Diets
Dr. Weston A. Price was a dentist who after 30 years of practice was seeing changes in his patients dental health and their overall systemic health. He suspected these changes were the result of the modern processing that had begun. He felt the refining of the food was causing nutritional deficiencies and the health decline he was seeing was the result of these deficiencies.
Dr. Price and his wife, who was a nurse, spent 10 years traveling to isolated parts of the world to study the health of populations not yet exposed to Western processed food. Wherever he went he found straight teeth, freedom from decay, good physiques, resistance to disease, and good moral character. There were the typical characteristics of the isolated groups eating their native diets rich in essential nutrients.
What Dr. Price found when he analyzed the foods consumed by these groups in comparison to the American diet was the isolated groups were consuming 4x more water soluble vitamins, calcium and other minerals and 10x more fat soluble vitamins (A, D, E, and K) than the modern American diet. These traditional diets of healthy, non-industrialized people contained no refined or denatured foods or ingredients.
4 x more water soluble vitamins and 10 x more fat soluble vitamins! This was in the 30s and 40s! Today our diet has diminished even further. Many chemical substitutes have replaced real food with no thought to the consequences to our bodies and our health. We are now 4 and 5 generations into eating these processed, devitalized foods and we know we can’t pour from an empty cup. Each generation is born with a more severe deficiency than the generation prior and then continue to eat foods devoid of the essential nutrients needed for proper growth, function, and healing.
Dr. David Katz from Yale Preventive Medicine Research Center has now predicted that due to the modern American diet, children born after the year 2000 will be the first generation in modern history to not outlive their parents. There is no more time for compromise.
Today we choose our foods based on the time and effort required for preparation, again giving little to no consideration to how those foods affect our body’s ability to function and heal. A lot has changed in the last 50 years. My grandparents lived into their 90s, lived independently, were active and maintained all their faculties into old age. They were raised when every family had their own cow for milk or had fresh milk delivered to their home, they had fresh meat butchered or purchased it from their local butcher, they grew their own vegetables in their garden. They had a very good nutritional foundation. There was little processed food and it was expensive. So, in order to stretch a dollar, everything was homemade and very little went to waste.
Today we are raised on white flour, hot dogs, cupcakes and coffee. 50 years ago the average person ate 12 lbs. Of sugar a year. Today, we eat over 12 lbs of sugar a MONTH!
The % of children and adolescents affected by obesity has more than tripled since the 1970s.
1 in 5 school age children is obese. Studies have shown nutritional deficiencies can create chemical imbalances that can affect children’s behavior and their ability to learn. In 2015/2016 we had 6.7 million, or 13%, of all public school students ages 3-21 receiving special education services. (www.nces.ed.gov). According to the IQVia Total Patient Tracker Database, in 2017 the U.S.. had over 7 million kids ages 0-17 taking psychiatric drugs for ADHD, depression, psychosis, and anxiety.
The National Institute of health estimates up to 23.5 million Americans have an autoimmune disorder. Autoimmune disease is one of the top 10 leading causes of death in female children and women in all age groups up to 64 years of age.
Although heart disease and Cancer were rare at the turn of the century, today despite billions of $ in research to fight them and despite huge advances in diagnostic and surgical techniques 1 in 3 Americans dies of cancer, 1 in 3 suffers from allergies, and 1 in 5 is mentally ill. Today chronic illness affects nearly half of all Americans (Nourishing Traditions, Sally Fallon). Tragically, these diseases used to affect only the very old, and now they are affecting children in the prime of life. Children today do not have the same chance for an abundant life as their parents and grandparents did. New viruses are learning our new headlines, and problems with the immune system are overwhelming to where we’ve almost forgotten that we have a natural state of balance and vitality.
Again, there is NO time for compromise. The body is energetic and needs vital nutrients to function properly. We ourselves must understand and then teach our children that a pure whole food is a food that has not been changed from its original state and as Dr. Bernard Jensen said, “Nutrition is probably the greatest of all the health arts...without a diet of wholesome, nutritious foods, wellness cannot be achieved and sustained no matter what else we do.”
Deb Weichel, ND, D. PSc
Bionetics Practitioner
German New Medicine Consultant
Certified Transformation Lifestyle Coach