FOOD
A single food contains hundreds or thousands of
chemicals, most unidentified, that makes up each
bite’s varied pharmacological activity.
often led scientists to discover strong medicines in
plants. At least 25 per cent of our prescription drugs
are derived from plants, including a powerful new
anticancer medicine, taxol. Ancient physicians and
healers who used natural medicines to treat diseas-
es were guided by their own experience and that
of their ancestors and kinspeople. They, of course,
knew nothing of germs they could not see, or of
hormones or cholesterol and how painkillers and
anticoagulants actually work, let alone how to test
foods for such pharmacological properties.
ers, cancer fighters and cancer chemopreventives,
hormones, fertility agents, laxatives, antidiarrhoeal
agents, immune stimulators, biological response
modifiers, antihypertensives,
diuretics, decogestants, anti-inflammatory agents,
antibiotics, antiviral agents, antinausea agents cough
suppressants, blood –vessel dilators and so on.
The food pharmacy is a viable as the pill pharma-
cy, and more complex. Nobody has yet invented a
“broccoli pill” that can match eating the real thing,
for example, and probably never will. A single food
contains hundreds or thousands of chemicals, most
unidentified, that make up each bite’s varied phar-
macological activity. At the same time, some strong
theories are emerging to account for foods pharma-
cological powers. Better medical understanding of
the biochemical changes underlying the progression
of chronic disease, from events in single cells to
disease symptoms, gives scientists reason to believe
in foods enormous potential for influencing disease.
These recent scientific happenings have catapulted
the study of food-power out of the realm of folklore
into mainstream medicine.
NEW PROOF OF FOOD POWER
Today scientists with new technology can detect,
isolate and test minute quantities of bio-active plant
compounds. Using sophisticated laboratory tests,
they can ferret out the biological activities of whole
foods and their constituents and their impact on
disease processes
Scientists also scrutinize the diets of populations
with low rates of disease – for example, Mediterra-
nean peoples and Japanese – to determine how they
eat differently from people with high disease rates.
In “case-control” studies, nearly identical groups
of individuals are studied, except one group has a
particular disease and the other does not, then their
diets are compared. A lot clues come from such so-
called epidemiological or population studies.
The best are intervention studies, in which re-
searchers actually put people with a certain malady,
such as heart disease or pre cancerous lumps, on
very specific but different diets. They then keep track
of who gets worse or better in the next two or three
years. In this way a food is tested much like a drug to
judge the potency of the therapy. Such intervention
studies are rare, but the advice derived from them is
golden. Tests using such precise scientific methods
convince many leading scientists of food’s extraor-
dinary effects on bodily functions and leave no
doubt that fods induce druglike reactions. Countless
tests confirm that foods can act as anticoagulants,
antidepressants, antiulcerants, antithrombotics, an-
algesics, tranquillsers, sedatives cholesterol reduc-
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