The old adage, “You are what you eat” is actually true. The food choices you make every day affect your overall health and well-being, and may even reduce your risk for certain illnesses. It’s important to think about how the foods you eat can help you stay healthy or possibly improve a health condition.
What Is Food as Medicine?
Food as medicine means using food and its components — such as vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and phytochemicals — to prevent, manage, or treat chronic disease.
The power of nutrition and food to treat disease is now gaining mainstream acceptance with recent advances in nutritional science. This new understanding of the importance of food in our lives has led to a whole new approach to healthcare, called lifestyle medicine. Lifestyle medicine focuses on the use of healthy eating and exercise as a first-line treatment for many chronic diseases.
What are the benefits to your health?
Research shows that adopting Food as Medicine principles can reverse chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, obesity, cancer and dementia. In fact, healthy eating along with regular physical activity can help you to do all these things:
- Maintain a healthy weight
- Reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease
- Lower your blood pressure
- Minimise your risk of type 2 diabetes
- Prevent some types of cancer (including bowel cancer and possibly breast cancer)
- Protect against bone loss (osteoporosis)
- Improve your mental health and mood
- Strengthen your immune system
- Reduce low-grade inflammation in your body
The goal of Food as Medicine is to improve health outcomes by helping patients make changes to their diet and lifestyle. By eating more fruit and vegetables and less packaged foods, you can prevent many chronic illnesses, such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and certain cancers.
The benefits of eating well include:
- Better health for you and your family
- More energy to get you through the day
- Fewer visits to the doctor or hospital
- Saving money on groceries
Food as medicine. It’s a concept that has been practiced for thousands of years and is gaining traction in modern society as a natural alternative to medications for disease prevention, treatment and management.
But does it really work?
The idea of food being used as medicine is called nutritional therapy. There are several different approaches to nutritional therapy, but the most common one is nutrigenomics — the study of the effects of foods and food constituents on gene expression.
Nutrigenomics is based on the idea that food can change how your genes behave, either by turning them on or off.
Examples of some foods that may help turn off genes that promote disease include:
- Tomatoes containing lycopene, which may help protect against prostate cancer
- Cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli and cauliflower containing compounds that may inhibit tumor growth
- Walnuts containing omega-3 fatty acids and phytosterols, which may help lower cholesterol levels
- Berries such as blueberries and strawberries, which may have anti-inflammatory properties
Eating whole foods is an excellent way to get the nutrition your body needs. People who eat a diet largely composed of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean proteins tend to have lower blood pressure, better cholesterol levels and a reduced risk of some chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes.
Also, eating a healthy diet boosts your energy level, improves your sleep and helps you maintain a healthy weight.
If you’re concerned about nutrient deficiencies or want to address specific health concerns with food, ask your doctor about consulting with a registered dietitian.