Either This or That

Have you, or someone within your circle of loved ones, ever had these symptoms?

fatigue
skin disorders
headaches
muscle pain
joint pain
neurologic symptoms
neuropsychological symptoms
symptoms involving the respiratory system
sleep disturbances
gastrointestinal symptoms
cardiovascular symptoms
abnormal weight loss
menstrual disorders

I know I have, many times, (accept maybe the abnormal weight loss) but rarely did I ever go to the doctor. According to www.military.com, these are the symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome.

How is it that I have never been in the service, yet have had the same symptoms exhibited by solders who served their country in a foreign land? www.wrongdiagnosis.com has a data base that contains 12,000 symptoms & 20,000 diseases! It's obvious just by the numbers that many many symptoms are going to overlap into many many diseases.

One of the tv programs I watch regularly is a medical show. The scripts usually begin with a person who is admitted into the hospital with specific symptoms. The rest of the show revolves around the cast trying to diagnose the patient's illness based upon their symptoms so they can treat the illness before the patient dies.

Sometimes the symptoms reflect more than one illness, so during the course of some of these diagnosises and the treatments that are applied, sometimes the patient comes closer to death than they were before they were treated.

You may be asking what any of this has to do with the mission of this blog. The bottom line is that sometimes it may not be safe to go to the hospital. Therefore, it is most important to avoid having to go to the hospital.

Hipocrates, author of the Hipocratic oath, the oath taken (but not required) by many doctors upon graduation says, to "let food be your medicine and medicine be your food". I don't see any food in the drugs we are given as a prescription or choose to buy over the counter...only chemicals. www.thefreedictionary.com defines a chemical as: "any substance used in or resulting from a reaction involving changes to atoms or molecules".

The human race is a very young race in comparison to the universe. There is no way we can be completely knowledgable about what eating, drinking, or breathing substances that have been changed at the atomic or molecular level will do to our bodies at the cellular level.

Whole foods, on the other hand, have been tested for safety much in the same way the FDA established part of their GRAS (Generally Recognized as Safe) list. ("Under 21 CFR 170.30(c) and 170.3(f), general recognition of safety through experience based on common use in foods requires a substantial history of consumption for food use by a significant number of consumers".)

There must be a lot of people finally beginning to realize the benefits of eating whole foods vs the dangers of eating a meal that begins in a box or a can. The food manufacturing industry (emphasis on manufacturing industry) must be feeling the crunch, because there has been a new eating disorder identified. It's called Orthorexia. It basically says that anyone who is obsessed with eating whole foods and nothing else may have a serious psycological disorder.

If they are so scared that they have to invent a "disorder" (which, by the way, will probably end up to be managable with some new drug), we must be on the right track. Choosing more and more to eat whole foods rather than "edible food substances" (which Michael Pollan calls anything other than whole foods) will be beneficial in more ways than just keeping our bodies healthy.

It may even promote a healthier world by encouraging the food manufacturing industry to go in a different direction. If we choose to eat foods that are chemical free, more chemical free foods must be made available to us, by them, if they want to stay in business.