20/ Nutrition

Caught up in today’s fake news storm it’s hard enough to disentangle fact from fiction.  Overloaded with information that is spun and stretched and shrunk into sound bites; skewed and skewered into marketing slogans, sophistry plus image.  The claim to hand-on-heart, honest-to-goodness authenticity has now reached back to early Stone Age.  I’ve just come across some foodstuffs professing to have been a staple of our ancestors during the Paleolithic period.  Hmmm… Difficult to see the grains of truth amongst the chaff.

Over two millennia ago Hippocrates may or may not have said, ‘Let food be thy medicineand medicine be thy food’. (It would be a little chauvinistic to pretend disinformation is a modern invention.)  But the general idea is sound and consistent with his confirmed faith in the body’s power to rebalance and heal itself. 

A friendly, concerned neighbour has sent me a link to a pithy, plain-speaking video that sets this precept of Hippocrates in our contemporary context.  The academically and professionally manifestly abundantly qualified doctor, with the benefit of modern medical knowledge, confirms the crucial importance of eating well to keep well.  She is antipathetic to the Big Food Industry peddling processed food.  She believes that the world’s burgeoning population can be adequately fed by more traditional methods.  In her practice she is reluctant to administer drugs, in particular, antibiotics.  Eating well, she maintains, obviates the need and can avoid the collateral damage.

The video is limpid and persuasive.  I highly recommend it.

©Benóg Brady Bates