Green Medicine

EcoHealth & Wellness advocates the use of green medicine for healing the body’s ailments.  Through the use of proper nutrition the body is able to adapt and correct many of its existing problems.

Green medicine

Imagine restructuring health care in a framework that has your best interests at heart — not those of the medical and industrial food stakeholders. The truth is, our medical system rates an A for emergency medicine, but suffers attention-deficit when it comes to chronic diseases. “Breakthrough” drugs and “cutting edge” surgery are the focus, yet chronic diseases still are causing most of the misery, death and expenses. Meanwhile, basic, proven prevention and treatment options involving nutrition are all but ignored.

By shopping at PCC and buying local, organic food, you’re practicing Green Medicine — scientifically verified therapies that address the nutritional causes of disease. In fact, nutrition outperforms drug treatments both for prevention and treatment of chronic disease. Why? Because the genesis of most chronic diseases can be linked directly to nutritional imbalances.

Let food be your medicine

When you eat whole, organic foods, you’re addressing core issues — preventing and treating disease by nurturing vital systems with the vitamins, minerals and other nutrients they require. You are warding off — or directly treating — a long list of chronic diseases that hardly existed before the introduction of artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and industrial food processing over the past 100 years.

Heart disease rates were around 4 percent 100 years ago; now they’re approaching 50 percent. Adult onset diabetes at the turn of the 20th century was a rare, rich-man’s disease. Now it’s considered an epidemic among baby boomers and a growing problem with children. All the diseases that are costing us the most money — diabetes, heart disease, stroke, obesity, asthma, arthritis, cancer, depression, allergies and irritable bowel disease — are linked directly to what we eat.

It’s not a coincidence that during this time of rising chronic disease rates over the past 50 years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) reports a 30 to 50 percent decline in nutrients in our fruits and vegetables.

Think of it this way: humans evolved eating whole, fresh, organic food over millions of years and then, suddenly, in the course of a mere 100 years, had to adjust to a diet that had half the nutritional value — and was laden with pesticides. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out the connection, but policymakers ignore these fundamental problems, instead pushing for universal drug prescriptions.

As destructive to health as poor diets are, the curative power of good food is even more remarkable. In one study published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, women treated for cancer had a 50 percent reduction in relapse risk if they ate five vegetables and fruits per day. Several studies have found that eating such nutritious foods as flax seeds, fatty fish, and fresh fruits and vegetables prevent and reduce the growth of prostate and other cancers.

Peer-reviewed research in Holland has found that children raised on organic dairy products in the first two years of life are more than a third less likely to suffer from allergies, asthma and eczema. Other research shows that consuming too little dietary potassium is linked to high blood pressure. You get potassium by eating (in order) sweet potatoes, beet greens, yogurt, halibut, lima beans, winter squash and (less so) bananas. Many blood pressure medications actually cause the loss of potassium!

What does nutrition have to do with depression, anxiety and insomnia? We know that blood sugar fluctuations, caused by eating sweets, disrupts brain function. Serotonin, the neurotransmitter that antidepressant drugs are designed to increase, is made from protein with the aid of B vitamins. Fish oil helps move the serotonin into the brain cells.

What about chronic diseases caused by genetic and developmental abnormalities? While not all of these are nutritional in genesis, we now understand that genetics is a code that can be rewritten by nutrition. Spina bifida, a condition in which vertebrae do not fuse, is now known to be caused by a folic acid deficiency in the mother. More often than suffering from the consequences of inheriting “bad genes,” we inherit unhealthy eating habits.

When you pick out a big bunch of chard or cook with any organic, whole foods, you’re a practitioner of Green Medicine.

For more information follow this link, http://www.pccnaturalmarkets.com/sc/1002/sc1002-greenmedicine.html