History of Food as Medicine: Introduction

If you have ever had a cup of tea with honey to sooth a sore throat, or a bowl of chicken noodle soup, when you were sick, you've used food as medicine. As far as I can tell, food has always been used as medicine.

In 400 B.C. the Greek physician Hippocrates, the “Father of Medicine” said, “Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.” Hippocrates realized that food impacts a person’s health, body and mind to help prevent illness as well as maintain wellness.
In Hippocrates’ Greece, as well as across pre-modern Europe and Asia since ancient times, foods were used to affect health. For instance, the juice of liver was squeezed on the eye to treat eye diseases, connected to Vitamin A deficiency. Garlic was used to cure athlete’s foot, and eating ginger was thought to stimulate the metabolism.
In 1747, a British Navy physician, Dr. James Lind, saw that sailors were developing scurvy, a deadly bleeding disorder, on long voyages. He observed that they ate only nonperishable foods such as bread and meat.
Lind’s experiment fed one group of sailors salt water, one group vinegar, and one group limes. Those given limes didn’t develop scurvy. And although Vitamin C wasn’t discovered until the 1930s, this experiment changed the way physicians thought about food, creating a market for nutrition careers. Source.

From curing scurvy with limes to promoting better health with the latest fad diet, there has always been a lot of experimentation in the field of nutrition science. Not surprisingly, the advent of vitamin, or dietary, supplements (I hate supplements) was an advent of the 1930s, when scientists began isolating those properties of food and documenting the ways in which nutrients interact with the body. As with the long history of anything, it is tempting to look for progress and evolution in the narrative, but Dr Andrew Weil and Dr Oz are the John Harvey Kellogg and Frank Orth of the industry today.

The disinformation charlatans contribute to the culture of nutrition makes skeptics like me see nothing but fad diets, when I might actually benefit from making changes to my lifestyle and eating habits.

Dioscorides' Materia Medica, c. 1334 copy in Arabic,
describes medicinal features of cumin and dill.

Do herbal remedies count as food? Is a remedy medicine?

What is medicine? For the purposes of this blog, I will define medicine as a preparation that you participate in, or ingest, to prevent, or treat, sickness. For example, I'm sick... almost in a general way, but it has become overwhelming, so I am experimenting with the anti-inflammatory diet to feel better. The diet itself is prepared by others and I am both participating in it and ingesting it. I am treating the diet as medicine, but I am also treating each meal as medicine, which I prepare (or someone else prepares for me, lucky me).

In doing so, I am participating in the long history of using food as medicine. Even chocolate as medicine has a long history.

The earliest evidence for the medical use of chocolate are to be found in Mesoamerican civilizations: iconographic works and fragments, writings and remnants in the pottery suggest that cacao was prepared in beverage form at least as early as 600 B.C.

But before you bite into that Hershey bar, read the ingredients. Food can hurt you! For centuries, the history of food as medicine tells us we should be careful of what we eat. Morning cartoons were teaching us this in the 1990s.

Moreover, Hershey has played an insidious role in the history of food as medicine for its use of child labour. Nestle is worse with its scandalous baby formula history.

So, while the history of food as medicine is long, it has become most interesting in the last 100-200 years. We've learned a lot about what food can do to improve health, while encountering some cautionary tales. Like the video says, we shouldn't eat food from strangers, like Hershey and Nestle. Read the labels. Has it been approved/inspected by the FDA? Treating food as medicine means not ingesting it, if we don't know what it is!

To find out more about my journey in exploring food as medicine, like my Facebook page.