Eat Your Medicine: Food as Pharmacology

There was a great article in the Huffington Post about food as medicine. The Chinese have been doing this for thousands of years. That is why the Chinese drink tea as a beverage. This article is by an M.D. Drugs or medications have side effects and are not good for health or healthy.

Eat Your Medicine: Food as Pharmacology

Dr Mark Hyman says in his article:

What you put at the end of your fork is more powerful medicine than anything you will find at the bottom of a pill bottle. Food is the most powerful medicine available to heal chronic disease, which will account for more than 50 million deaths and cost the global economy $47 trillion by 2030. All you need to do is eat your medicine and think of your grocery store as your pharmacy. The Chinese have known this for centuries.

 This article is similar to other article, GOMBBS by an M.D., that is talked about on my other blog on this website. GOMBBS stands for greens, onions, mushrooms, berries, beans and seeds and nuts. This article divides the foods up into color groups.

The red group has the phytochemical lycopene. This article calls them phytontrients but the original word for them was phytochemicals. Lycopene is for cardiovascular health and for preventing or fighting cancer. The orange foods contain alpha-carotene which protects against cancer.

The orange/yellow foods may help prevent heart disease. It says that the red/purple foods prevent heart disease but I also know that that they are very effective in preventing cancer also. The white/green foods are anti-tumor foods so they are also good for preventing cancer.

There is a yellow/green group that has the leafy greens. I  know that greens help the inner lining of the arteries to resist the build up of plaque (not on the article). The following is not on the article either. The best source of the B vitamin folic acid or folate is greens.

Actually the green group on this article is like the cabbage family foods like broccoli, Brussels sprouts and cabbage. The phytochemicals in these help to ward off cancer.

Folate | Folic Acid

A recent study in the British Journal of Nutrition found that those with the highest folate levels, lose 8.5 times more weight when dieting. When folate levels drop, levels of obesity, heart disease, stroke, cognitive impairment, Alzheimer's disease and depression goes up.

They used to say that folic acid and folate are the same thing. Now they are saying that folate is the kind in foods and folic acid is the kind in supplements and the folic acid does not work anywhere near as good as the folate in foods. I say that it is better to eat foods than to eat chemicals.

This should be folate that comes from food. They have found that the artificial form of folate, folic acid, can produce some problems in people so Joel Fuhrman M.D. says that no one should take supplements containing folic acid. On the other hand, there is a lot of folate in greens and beans.

Folic acid is a B vitamin and is also known as folate. There was a study with this done with 2 groups of women. One group of women were 43 to 70. The other group was 23 to 44.

When they increased their intake of folic acid to 800 mcg with supplements and food, the younger group had a decreased risk of high blood pressure (hypertension) of 45%. The older group had a decreased risk of high blood pressure of 39%.

If people have a deficiency of folic acid, vitamin B-6 or B-12, it can cause homocysteine levels to rise. Homocysteine is an amino acid in the blood that is created by the liver. Elevated amounts of homocysteine in the blood put people at an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.

It sounds to me like these people were not eating enough food high in folic acid like dark green leafy vegetables that include kale, swiss chard, spinach, romaine lettuce or vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower. People should still make sure to eat organic green vegetables. They have nutrients in them that activate something inside the blood vessel called the Nrf2 mechanism that prevents plaque from binding to blood vessels and accelerates the rate at which fat melts away from the inside of the blood vessel.