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.

What is the anti-inflammatory diet?

Shrimp bur blanc on linguini with a side salad.

Dr Andrew Weil says:

It is becoming increasingly clear that chronic inflammation is the root cause of many serious illnesses — including heart disease, many cancers, and Alzheimer's disease. […] Learning how specific foods influence the inflammatory process is the best strategy for containing it and reducing long-term disease risks.

The anti-inflammatory diet is not intended to cause weight loss, which is fine. Other than the constant pain, I am pretty comfortable in my body (I think I look hot). The anti-inflammatory diet isn’t so much a diet as it is a lifestyle change, in which you eat foods that reduce chronic inflammation in your body. Dr Weil calls understanding which foods to eat ‘scientific,’ though I still think parts of his approach are hookum, for example vitamins are a racket (Sheldon Cooper once referred to supplements as “very expensive urine”). If this means that the placebo aspect of this diet doesn’t work as well on me, so be it. I’m really sick and I want to feel better, but I prefer evidence-based medicine.

Supplements appear third from the top of Dr Weil's anti-inflammatory diet food pyramid, which illustrates the recommendations of the anti-inflammatory diet in a visually pleasing way -- not according to recommended quantities. Red wine and dark chocolate are the two recommendations that top supplements in the pyramid. Supplements were the first thing that made me skeptical of Dr Weil's approach, but he is not the only advocate of the health benefits of anti-inflammatory foods.

The Arthritis Foundation promotes the idea that certain foods help combat inflammation, implying that a diet of these foods may benefit people with rheumatoid arthritis (that's me). The Arthritis foundation recommends eating 3-4 ounces of omega-3 rich fish twice a week; "at least 1½ to 2 cups of fruit and 2 to 3 cups of veggies per meal"; a handful of nuts every day; lots of beans; 2-3 tablespoons of olive oil every day; onions (I'm not a big fan of those); lots of fibre; less processed food and salt; and moderate alcohol (they have a picture of red wine and that is good enough for me). The Arthritis Foundation encouraged me to calculate a diet plan that is right for me through the USDA.

The USDA recommended I eat 2600 calories a day to maintain my current weight, or 2400 calories a day to lose weight. I chose the 2400 calories a day option, because I can't imagine I ate more than that before I started really thinking about food, and this is what was recommended:

For breakfast I had enough fruit and grains for the day with a glass of pro-biotic blueberry pomegranate juice, half a cup of 7-grain oatmeal, topped with blueberries and strawberries. I put almond milk on my oatmeal and soy milk in my coffee, so (according to this) I can have two more cups of dairy, three cups of vegetables, and 6.5 ounces of protein before the day is over.

This is similar to, but not the same as Dr Weil's food pyramid. His food pyramid would have me eating more (I like him for that). Dr Weil says I can have all the mushrooms, garlic, ginger, turmeric, and cinnamon I can eat. After the wonderful breakfast I had, he would also let me have 2-4 more servings of whole grains; two more servings of protein than the USDA recommends (if one is beans and the other is tofu); another serving of fruit; and one more helping of vegetables than the USDA recommends. According to Dr Weil's food pyramid, I can also have 2-4 cups of tea and a couple glasses of red wine before bed. Either way, I am not going to starve.