Food Matters

I often wonder why I love gardening, especially growing fruits and vegetables. I watched Food Matters again today. Perhaps, these types of documentaries are responsible for making me grow fresh organic produce in my own backyard. The documentary was produced in 2008 and is about one hour twenty minutes long. Indians have a long ancient tradition of respecting Mother Earth, growing fruits and vegetables, going to market everyday to purchase freshly picked produce and freshly caught fish and cooking food, at least twice, for lunch and dinner. My old parents back home still go to market every morning to buy fresh produce. The fresh produce are cooked for lunch and consumed. Then, again in the evening, the remaining fresh produce are cooked for dinner. And, the scene continues the next day. While growing up, we were constantly told two things: 1. You are what you eat and 2. Do not waste even a small crumb of bread and we never dared waste anything; food is part of our religion and we even worship a Goddess, Goddess Laxmi, for food, health and money. Though I forgot about number 1 until I started watching documentaries like Food Matters, but I religiously follow number 2 because food is so precious. Food Matters tries to uphold number 1 and 2. Here are some important facts and points discussed in the documentary and I hope I got all these correctly:

1. Let food be thy medicine and thy medicine be your food, as told by Hipocrates
2. Modern medicine revolves around a pill a day, targeting only one particular type of disease. Less than 6% of doctors trained in the USA learn anything about diet and nutrition.
3. Heart Disease and Cancer are the two leading causes of death in the USA. Additionally, 39,000 people, every year, die due to errors in hospitals; 80,000 people die annually due to infections in hospitals. 106,000 people die due to adverse side effects from drugs and pills that doctors prescribe to them. 89% of patients in the USA suffer from nutrition-deficiency after staying in the hospitals.
4. Heart Disease is not only preventable but even curable if one goes into a strict vegetarians, organic, fresh diet, and it's proved by research.
5. As the documentary claims and as many other documentary, research claims that cancer is preventable and curable if one eats fresh organically grown fruits, vegetables, nuts, grasses, seeds, beans, pulses, legumes, etc, etc, everyday. Gerson Therapy advocates this only.
6. The food that is available in any supermarket in the USA has traveled at least 1500 to 2000 miles and at least a week old!! If you are lucky, then you will get just 40% of the nutrients from those food .
7. The foods in the supermarket are not nutritious because majority of the food in the USA are grown on large industrial scale using herbicide, fungicide, insecticide, fertilizers and all sorts of other chemicals. Also, the crops are not rotated on the fields. As a result, the soil on which the foods are grown are like desert soil with no nutrients available. Soil needs at least 52 different minerals besides N-P-K.
8. The enzymes in the food are lost even if they are lightly steamed. Dr. Kurchoff first proved that the body produces lots of toxins if one eats 51% of cooked food. Thus, the motto is one should eat at least 50% raw food everyday.
9. Solid food requires lots of water for digestion so that the liquid digested food can be absorbed by our bodies. Thus, it is best to drink fresh fruits and vegetable juice everyday so that the nutrients can be at once absorbed by our bodies.
10. Multi-vitamins should be taken regularly. In the last twenty-three (23) years, there has been less than ten (10) deaths that are due to vitamin consumption, though the real cause of those deaths are not yet proven.
11. In the UK, about 10,000 people die every year due to adverse drug reaction. In contrast, only 3500 people die every year due to car accidents and about 9,000 people die to prostrate cancer. People in the UK are extremely concerned about such high deaths due to prostrate cancer or car accidents though the number of deaths due to such reasons are smaller compared to death due to drug reaction.
12. But still, drugs are prescribed at an alarming rate in both the USA and the UK for any minor complications. 25% of all the TV time in the USA are drug commercials. In the North America alone, the Drug Industry is a 300 billion dollar industry!!
13. The Drug Companies in the USA need to do just two successful trials to get the drug approved . Each trial might consist of less than 100 people. Thus, experiment the drug on only 200 people and then prescribe that drug to millions of people without doing a systematic, detailed study on side effects and other adverse effects from the drug. Also, all the trials and experiments and even FDA are controlled by these drug industries (for that one needs to watch all the other documentaries that are out there). Thus, they might not include all the side effects in their label warnings. Prozac-R is the greatest example. Trial showed that suicidal thought is one of the side effect of the medicine and yet it was not initially included in the warning labels.
14. One of the scientist in the documentary claims that consuming two handfuls of cashew nuts give the same dose of anti-depressant as given by Prozac.
15. Another scientist in the documentary claims that at least 3000 mg of Vitamin B Niacin cures depression.
16. When drug companies claim that they have an 80% success rate with a cancer treatment, that means they are claiming that 80% of people live 5 years after the treatment. They cannot guarantee anything beyond 5 years. However, statistics have shown that 70% of all patients die within 5 years even after all the modern cancer treatment.
17. Good food and nutrients is the key to avoiding cancer. Research has shown that high concentration of Vitamin C given through IV can kill all cancer cells in the body. Gerson Therapy and other alternative medicines have also proved successful against cancer. However, doctors in the USA are not allowed to prescribe any alternative medicines to the patients. If they do so, their medical license can be revoked. The Cancer Treatment Industry is a 200 billion dollar industry in the USA alone.
18. Research is constantly showing that people with Mediterranean diet, Japanese diet (based on green tea, seaweeds and fish) and other diets that are based on fruits, vegetables, nuts and fish have the lowest rate of cancer, heart disease or any chronic disease.
19. Modern medicine, drugs, medical advancement are absolutely required and we all need to use. But, the doctors also need to be trained in diet and nutrition and therapy through nutrition/diet should be a big part of any diagnosis/treatment.

Now, what do I believe? I actually believe in all the above points that we need modern medicine but at the same time, we also need to pay attention to our diets. My personal experience has taught me that nutrition and vitamins are extremely essential. We also need to pay attention to our climate, environment and nature because polluted air is not going to help us. We will also lose the urge to live if we destroy nature. Thus, keeping all these in mind I am going to make salad from freshly picked greens and a radish from our backyard :-).