There are many reasons why we should pay attention to what we eat. The processed, low-variety foods many of us consume regularly may be convenient and tasty, but they compromise our health.
Good nutrition and what you put into your body are the foundation for good health. “Food is Medicine” is a term that was originally coined by Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine; he believed that eating wholesome food is the basis for good health. Hippocrates said almost 2500 years ago leave your drugs in the chemist's pot if you can heal the patient with food.
Many people attribute this phrase to the ancient Greek physician and father of medicine, Hippocrates. Although there is no actual evidence that he stated these exact words, his teachings and ideologies suggest that he acknowledged the importance of diet in maintaining health and preventing disease. Both Ayurvedic and traditional Chinese medicine date back even farther back than Hippocrates’s time, and similarly viewed this “food as medicine” concept as a component of a balanced body system.
Vitamins and minerals
Although your body only needs small amounts of vitamins and minerals, they’re vital for your health.
However, Western diets — high in processed foods and low in whole foods like fresh produce — are typically deficient in vitamins and minerals. Such deficiencies can substantially increase your risk of disease. Now, many people are catching on to the notion that certain eating styles have the potential to influence disease prevention, too, not to mention influence quality of life, health, and longevity. We especially need to pay attention to what we eat when we are sick, so we can give our bodies the nutrients it needs to heal. And if you want to be even more deliberate in improving health—perhaps to address a chronic disease or condition—a Functional Medicine approach can yield great benefits. Although there is no established definition of “food as medicine”, it can generally be understood as using diet and nutrition to promote health and decrease the risk of disease or illness. Unhealthy diets high in sugary drinks, fast food, and refined grains are the main contributor to conditions like heart disease, diabetes, and obesity.
Eat-in harmony with your genetic programming — i.e, The way our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate. Use foods rather than supplements to treat and prevent chronic illness—whenever you can.
Combine your nutritional plan with a program to reduce stress and raise awareness about how as well as what we eat.
Hippocrates believed that illness stemmed from inadequate nutrition and bad eating habits and that if people were to learn good eating habits then optimum health would be restored. Long before doctors and medicine were commonly used, wise tribal elders would seek out healing herbs and plants for their community and food would be applied prescriptively to bring about healing. Slowly through the years, man has moved away from the healing power of nature and toward prescribing packaged synthetic drugs and artificial remedies to deal with illness.
Ancient health practitioners used diet as an integral component of their holistic health approach, but this viewpoint seemed to fade as modern medicine and technologies developed. However, there has been a resurgence in interest in food’s medicinal properties as chronic disease rates have increased over the last several decades
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