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The Infancy of Nutrition Science

What you eat, and when you eat it, does matter. Better nutritional health is possible.

Few of us imagine that the food we eat might be causing the bad health and the Local Fileexcessive physical ageing that we experience. Thousands of daily good decisions, create improved health. But that's possible only if you know the difference between good and bad diets.

Your body will adapt to whatever diet you choose. Typically in modern society, if you choose badly, before you are fifty there will be obvious serious disease. If you chose more wisely, that disease is often not apparent until our 70's or 80's. Local FileIs that "normal health" inevitable, or is there an alternative?

General Nutrition

Food differs from medicine, only in the intensity of the delivery process. In the short-term most foods are harmless. Your body is well able to cope with over-eating, or over-drinking, if that happens occasionally. However, if we choose our diet badly, firstly, your body adapts and tries to compensate. When we continue that practice over many years, the body's effort to cope is likely to cause Local Fileinflammation, and slowly that is likely to become a Local File"lifestyle disease."

Because your diet is controlled by you, it gets very little attention. You can only successfully control your diet, if you yourself have good knowledge. Otherwise you live in blissful ignorance until something happens to your life to force you to take notice. Local FileYou can significantly change your life by changing your diet. Local FileThere is much to learn, so start slowly, but be sure to start. Don't put it off, the only learning that counts is the learning you do. Local File50 years of prejudice and misinformation, is not easy to overcome. Buying the nutrition book you didn't read, or visiting this web site and not following up with repeated visits, is a mistake you can avoid.

If you are going to learn about the chemistry of your food, and understand how it affects your body, Local Fileyou'll need to keep notes, and you'll need to experiment for yourself. There is a practical way to do this, making small changes, and building routines for planning meals, and eventually for changing your lifestyle.

You must not assume that dieticians and doctors are good authorities about your diet. So much has changed in the last 10 to 15 years, and because of that the tide of change seems to be running even faster.

Ancel Keys, almost single handed, created the basis for our current obesity epidemic. He was helped along by a political desire to build a strong market for American corn and wheat, and a failed politician's need to be seen to be doing something really "great" (Senator George McGovern, after his failed bid to be President), in this case, to reduce the rising level of heart disease in America.

Everybody KNEW, what a healthy diet was, and how to prevent heart disease. Or so we were told. Modern medicine would save us all. So here are some of the failed "solutions" for the last 50 years: Local FilePresident Eisenhower's Heart attack: Local FileThe Framingham Heart Study: Local FileThe Anti-Coronary Club: Local FileMultiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial: Local FileThe Women's Health Initiative. That brings us up to 2006, and "the answer" seems to be, that we don't KNOW, at all.

That is a great step forward. When you don't know you can begin to look for what you've "lost". In fact, when you do that, many Local Filenew possible solutions pop out of the woodwork. Local FileLike the Ketogenic Diet, abandoned by researchers in the late 1920's.

When you don't know the answer, real science can finally overcome political dogma and prejudice. Dr Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Local FileDr George Mann, Dr Weston Price, Dr Fred Kummerow, Dr Robert Atkins, and more recently, Local FileDr Stephen Phinney, battled for years against the prejudice that "we already know" the answer. They all tried to show that Ancel Keys was wrong. We live with that misdirection of nutrition "science" today.

A large number of people are still taking statins to reduce their Local FileLDL-Cholesterol. Why? The science says that the side effects are much worse than any possible benefit. Local FileType 2 diabetes is increasing at epidemic levels. Why? With a good diet, the need for additional insulin can be reduced and often eliminated. Type II Diabetes can be reversed, not by medication, but by proper diet. Too many people are Local Fileobese. Why? Getting your weight under control is possible if you are well informed. Later in life Local Filecancer and Local FileAlzheimer's disease threaten to disable many of us. New science seems to show that by diet, exercise and attention to your lifestyle, that Alzheimer's (Sometimes called type III diabetes.) can be avoided.

In the 1950's it was thought that the key to the rising rates cancers in modern community was in understanding genetic variation in our DNA. Many researchers have reported that in communities that eat what we would call a primitive diet cancer is virtually unknown. So perhaps some cancers at least like diabetes are metabolic diseases, as Prof. Thomas Seyfried has proposed, we should avoid a diet that feeds the growth of cancer cells.

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