Modifying Your Diet May be Your Most Powerful Weapon Against Disease

The benefits of eating the right healthy healing foods are staggering - and yet -people are sick, even dying, because they ignore this simple fact: eating healthy works. It can saves lives. Make a few changes to your diet and improve your life.

Cooking and eating good food are the cornerstones of human civilization, our daily reward for all the hard work and innumerable difficulties of life. Like it or not, what we eat has consequences for us and for the world. Dinner is not something that just magically appears on our plates. Eating is the most intimate relationship we have with the environment. In ordering a burger or making a salad, we are inextricably linked to the land, cycles of rain and sunshine, farmers and farmworkers, compost or chemicals, processing facilities and slaughterhouses, truck drivers and miles of highway, co-ops or corporations--to a whole web of ecological and human activity.

What you eat affects the well-being of many other lifeforms. Not so long ago, we knew where most of our food came from: from the garden, or from local farmers. But now the components of our dinner likely have traveled thousands of miles to reach our table. Not just tropical foods like bannanas, coffee, and tea--we're shipping even the basics: potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, meats, and greens, not to mention boxed and canned goods.

In August 1971, the U.S. Department of Agriculture published An Evaluation of Research in the United States on Human Nutrition; Report No. 2, Benefits from Nutrition Research. The U.S. government spent approximately $30 million analyzing the relationship diet has to disease. According to the study:

* Major health problems are diet related;

* Benefits would be shared by all...especially by lower economic and non-white population groups;

* Major benefits are long range... Early adjustments of diet could prevent the development of undesirable long-range effects;

* There exist geographical, regional differences in diet-related problems.

It's now known that within a very short time after its release, all copies of the report were seized by the federal government. It was not until the campaign in 1933-94 for the Dietary Health Education and Supplement Act that a copy was mysteriously forwarded to the grassroots organization, Citizens for Health, to help in its fight to prevent the Food and Drug Administration from classifying food supplements as drugs.

Within any group that seeks control and power over a population, even health is a legitimate target. If you can manipulate the population's health or induce disease by modifying what they consume, you can create a pseudo healthcare system that seems to care but is busy making billions off disease that is relatively easy to prevent or cure through diet alone. With the multimillion-dollar backing of an industry, you can also discredit any alternative to current, popularly accepted treatments by labeling them "old wives' tales," "quackery" or "unscientific."

All this goes on to show that modifying your diet may be a very powerful weapon against disease.