FOOD MATTERS: Prevent Illness, Reverse Disease & Maintain Optimal Health... Naturally.

FOOD MATTERS: Prevent Illness, Reverse Disease & Maintain Optimal Health... Naturally.

BY HUW GRIFFITHS

Medical and health care systems have always been among the great bastions of Western civilisation, something that, if all else failed, we look to as proof that we, the people of the West, are the most cared for and technologically protected people that science and money can buy. This was my general understanding for a period of my life that lasted until I was more or less in my mid-twenties.

At that point I begun to generate a keen interest in natural medicine. I experienced a mild dose of ill health in the form of gastric ulcers and having had a less than successful run in with conventional medicine, progressed to a point that could be loosely described as one at which I began to think for myself.

What I was starting to figure out was that there were a number of personal and public health related issues that are presented to the public by governments and the mainstream corporate media as if they were state of the art medical advances, but which are, in reality, the very opposite. Far from being in the very best and safest of hands when we commit our trust to public health systems, an objective glimpse at even the most basic facts easily convinces anyone with half a brain that this is not the case at all.

The public are deliberately encouraged to be blissfully unaware of the paramount importance played by good food and nutrition in the maintenance of health and well being. In truth, because medical institutions and the corporate media are so closely entwined, we are actively educated to believe otherwise.

We are also taught to accept that the institutions administrating and operating our health care industries have the best interests of the individual at heart, when in fact it is an indisputable fact that, by virtue of them being fundamentally run as private businesses, they have a far greater commitment to bottom line profit and shareholder value than they ever have to patients. These are only two anomalies, but what’s so strange is that most of us haven’t got the vaguest clue this is going on.

It’s also the case that there are few amongst us who have enough of the big picture to be able to put the true facts across to others. If and when we do, we tend to offend sensitivities more than we enlighten and engage.

I often sense, even in my most light hearted of anti-mainstream medicine rantings, that I’m being written off as some sort of tub-thumping naturopathic evangelist. The moment that I get even remotely stuck into residual agricultural pesticides, processed foods, the iniquities of our national diet and the short comings of our public health system, I always get the uncanny feeling my audience have begun to move their eyes up to the ceiling.

Maybe I do tend to sound like a broken record and yes, perhaps I could express myself better, but it’s also endemic in the human condition that most of us don’t appreciate being given unpleasant or uncomfortable news, particularly when it threatens to upset a calm status quo.

Telling friends and colleagues that their sugar, processed flour and salt intake is helping them to an early grave can be very good practice for losing friends and not influencing people. It remains a fact that when it comes to preventing and treating chronic disease, the current medical establishment simply doesn’t cut the mustard and sadly there are many among us who would simply prefer to remain in blind ignorance of these matters rather than confront them head on.

Fortunately, having watched the recently launched Food Matters, The Secrets to Good Health Revealed DVD, I suspect that all is about to change. At least I hope it is.

Food Matters appeared on the market, simultaneously with its website of the same name, some time around mid-last year and already seems to have carved out an impressive level of international awareness. Its subtitle ‘The Secrets of Good Health Revealed’, describes exactly what it delivers and, in contrast to my own technique of pointing the accusing finger and spluttering off a few insulting platitudes such as ‘valley of death’ when I’m talking about the local stupor-market, Food Matters projects an altogether more measured, articulate and professional message. Thank goodness someone has at last got it right.

The DVD is a hard hitting, fast paced look at our current state of health. It’s an extremely well crafted documentary that uses a small, but well selected group of host speakers, each of who are well known and highly reputed authorities in the field of international natural health and nutrition. Collectively they demolish a number of wide ranging misconceptions concerning our diet, the quality and consequences of our less than optimal nutrition, and the trillion dollar health care industry (otherwise known as our disease care industry) which does little but profit from the human tragedy that it, in reality, actually is.

By the end of the film you will be aware, if you weren’t before, of a number of scientifically proven natural solutions for both preventing and curing the endemic chronic degenerative diseases that currently plague Western society.

It’s a sobering thought, but since the advent of the industrial age and the massive urban populations that were spawned along with it, civilisation’s entire approach to the production, distribution and consumption of food has been nothing short of hijacked and utterly perverted. Fresh, local, natural and organic diets which had been more or less the order of the day, became subjected increasingly to the giant agribusiness. The result, which now presents itself as the ‘civilised’ way of running the global food industry, is rife with over-treated, over-processed, nutrient deficient, imbalanced and (depending on where you live) genetically modified cocktails of what is laughingly called food.

All fine if you are a manufacturer who wants a stable, beautifully coloured, nice tasting, long shelf life food that looks like the real thing and sustain a good business, but which is lousy if you are a consumer who wants to live a long, vibrant and healthy life with the full spectrum of nutrients that nature always intended us to have.

Years since it first became mooted that our modern diet could possibly be the root of society’s degenerating health standards, it is still difficult to prove anything, yet it remains empirically evident that when individuals who are sick choose to revert to a natural, well balanced, organic whole food diet, most of their disease symptoms have a tendency to spectacularly and routinely disappear. Hence Laurentine ten Bosch, one of the pair who created and produced the film, says in a profound yet simple publicity statement, “There are simple lifestyle changes that we as individuals can make to start reversing the increasing levels of serious illness.” Therein lays the very backbone of the documentary.

James Colquhoun, the other half of the production team, and ten Bosch were, it seems, tipped into their enterprise by having seen the negative side effects of pharmaceutical drugs on members of their own families and realised, both being graduates of the Global College of Natural Medicine in California, that their own personal observations and experience were representative of a worldwide malaise. Something needed to be done.

Their response, as evidenced by the film, has been to examine in a brief, non-technical and engaging style, each of the key contributory factors in the broad process that created the overwhelming levels of ill-health and that have come to be accepted as normal in the developed world. From food production and processing, to public and professional medical education through to the consequential development of endemic levels of disease and the worryingly inefficient ‘disease’ management industry, it’s all covered and presented to anyone who cares to watch, listen and learn.

There are, of course, limits to the amount of information that can be covered within one DVD, but the Food Matters team has used their limited time economically and well. It begins with a reference to Hippocrates (the father of modern medicine) and his famous quote, “let food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food,” a clear reminder that there is nothing truly new in the Food Matters message to the world. The central role that nutrition held in the very earliest days of health care is just as valid now as it was back then. It reaffirms Hippocrates’ inherent belief that the human body had (and still has) an innate capacity for self healing.

This principle, along with the underlying sentiment of the Hippocratic Oath’s most famous line, “First do no harm,” seems to have ‘gone down the tubes’ long ago and the documentary pulls none of its punches as it sets off down the road to demolish not only that myth, but one misguided preconception after another.

The Food Matters DVD is a litany of information about the ways in which we have all been diverted from the true path of health and vitality towards degeneration and disease at the hands of the unrestrained agricultural, food and medical industries. At the crux of the matter is the sad truth that they are far too profit-driven for us ever to be able to truly and safely place our trust in them anymore. Clearly it is time for a new paradigm and a new vision for health care, a vision that the DVD does a fine job defining.

Food Matter’s tone and style is direct, incisive and at times challenging. You will learn about the age of your food by the time it gets to the average dining table and the implication this might have for the nutritional benefit we derive from it. You will be familiar with the issue of soil depletion resulting from mono-cultivation (otherwise known as factory farming) and the inevitable outcomes that this has in relation to the health of the fruit and vegetables we eat, and therefore on our own health. You will be aware of the reasons why you probably shouldn’t go to your GP for reliable nutritional advice and of the predictability of the ‘Pill for every Ill’ approach to medical care that arises from the immense educational bias towards the pharmaceutical industry as a consequence of medical industry training programs.

As host speaker Dr. Andrew W. Saul points out, “Good health makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t make a lot of dollars.” It’s all about the money.

Keep watching and you will be enlightened as to why heart disease and cancer, between them the two biggest killers in the Western world, are largely preventable using natural methods, good nutrition and known, but still available (if you know where to look) suppressed natural methods.

It’s a sad indictment that under current systems of global disease management, these two diseases, which we have been taught to both fear and revere, make so much money for the heaving industries that underpin them, that they would never allow, nor could they afford, to unleash a genuine and unprofitable cure.

In 1972, when US President Richard Nixon first announced his war on cancer, there were 220,000 deaths from cancer in the US. Twenty five years and $39 billion dollars later the best that medical research was able to come up with was an increase of the number of deaths to 560,000 in 1996. Things have not improved since then, and it still remains a crime in most Western nations to treat cancer with anything other than surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

Natural, organic, and for that matter, mostly plant derived raw food should be a major part of your daily diet and is crucial to the maintenance of a disease free life. The inclusion of the so-called super foods such as spirulina, nori, raw natural honey, pollen, goji berries and the cacao bean, to name but a few, have also been shown to exert such a powerful and positive influence on our health and well being that their future place among mainstream foods is a forgone conclusion.

Nor is it simply new discoveries in whole foods that are capable of making the difference. Food Matters directs us to older discoveries, long since bulldozed into oblivion by the medical powers that be, that demonstrate, in addition to the human body’s own healing mechanisms, the amazing results that have been achieved with vitamin therapy and its close cousin high dosage vitamin therapy. Several major degenerative diseases ranging from chronic heart disease, dementia, depression, diabetes and cancer have been successfully treated and in many instances completely cured by the simple application of high dosage vitamin therapy. These simple, safe and low cost solutions would, one might reasonably think, revolutionise the health care industry, but the answer as to why these techniques have never been accepted into standard medical practice may well surprise as much as they outrage you.

It’s all there in the DVD. The truth behind the rampant deceit and mismanagement and the extent to which the medical industry would rather put the lives of its patients on the line rather than stop its profit wheels turning. There are, and have been for a long time, effective, drug free and non-invasive healing protocols available that are routinely overlooked or suppressed by the establishment in favour of procedures that have well known and unacceptable failure rates and devastating side effects. Yet, in our contrived ignorance, we are content to let this state of affairs continue unabated.

No where is this better exemplified in the Food Matters film than in the sections on detoxification and cancer. One will seldom, if ever, come across a medical practitioner who recommends cellular detoxification as a viable health promoting strategy. By and large there is no such thing as the ‘stitch in time’ that may avert a biological meltdown. It’s much more likely that a reflex burst of pharmaceuticals will be recommended achieving little more than smothering the symptoms and adding to the existing toxic load. Common sense should tell us that no one ever became sick through a cellular pharmaceutical deficiency.

The essence of a healthy body is metabolic nutrients ‘in’, metabolic waste ‘out’, and anything that fails to comply with this simple and natural formula either sets up the platform for a nutrient deficiency or an accumulation of toxicity. It is with this in mind that the section on cancer will acquaint the viewer with the spectacular successes demonstrated through the work of Max Gerson in the treatment and cure of many types of cancer using simple, but disciplined orthomolecular (also known as ‘nutritional’) treatments alone.

But we continue to live in a society that allows only legally approved medical treatments (which we know don’t work) and conspicuously disallows other natural treatments (which ironically do work). It’s not just that the medical treatments don’t work either. Surgery, often the first resort, is recognised for the trauma and debilitation that are inherent in its outcomes, while the other protocols, radiation and chemotherapy, are recognised as powerful cellular toxins that in themselves demonstrate carcinogenic properties. If that isn’t alarming enough none of them, in any way whatsoever, provide a solution to the underlying metabolic causative factors that create the cancer condition in the first place. So where in the world does common sense fit into the equation here?

Sadly, and all too familiarly, cancer care and treatment is simply too profit-driven for its own good. If you’re a cancer sufferer and want to give yourself better odds for a safe and affordable cure and rehabilitation, your best chance remains to go to one of the overseas treatment clinics that are outlawed by most Western governments. Oh, and did I mention, you might do worse than to start following some of the nutritional advice handed out on Food Matters.

Food Matters is not about the doom and gloom of the failed state of our health and the health care industry, however. In essence it carries a very vital and optimistic message that we would all benefit from heeding. Its message is all about opening our eyes to the truth about the level of control that we can exert over our own lives and our own well being through what we eat. Sure, there is a lot of value in making us aware of the dark sides of a disease care system which jolts us into a realisation we need to think more for ourselves on these matters.

The equation is a simple one: we can choose to live in a world on which we depend on natural, effective, low cost and safe foods as our medicine, or we can choose synthetic, ineffective, high cost and unsafe foods and take our chances with the disease management strategies thrown at us by the so called health care industry. It’s that simple and it’s our choice.

Lest you have the impression that the DVD is all there is, don’t forget to take a good look at their excellent website on which you will find a great deal more information, resources and links to guide you in your quest for a better, healthier life.

The producers have done a brilliant job combining ancient wisdom with contemporary health and lifestyle issues in a documentary that has balance, tempo and rhythm.

Also highly recommended are the learning programs available on the website for conditions like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, depression, along with detox and rejuvenation. They cost, but not much and, if the one’s that I have looked at are anything to go by, well worth the modest investment, especially if you’re on a quest to regain your health.

The Food Matters website is located at www.foodmatters.tv.

HUW GRIFFITHS is a British-born naturopath who came to Australia in the early ‘90’s. His interest and passion for natural and traditional health therapies was developed and nurtured alongside an international career in marketing and communications. He lives in Sydney’s Northern Beaches and can be contacted via New Dawn magazine.

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