Healing with Whole Foods

Healing with Whole Foods by Paul Pitchford is a book that I have owned, loaned, and given away many times in the past decade.

It's not a book that you read start to finish, nor is it a cookbook; it's more like a much-loved resource that keeps you coming back for a paragraph or a few pages. It's the ultimate in references because it combines food knowledge with health to the point that the two are inseparable.

Hidden within the encyclopedia are some of the most beautiful and succinct interpretations of Chinese medical theory. If you know part of your Chinese medical diagnosis, then you can simply look it up in HWF and follow the path to the exact foods that you need to eat to stay healthy or turn things around if you're having troubles.

Better yet, the diagnosis look-up isn't just for Chinese medicine. Whether you have heart trouble, hypertension, IBS, and many other commonly-diagnosed illnesses in our modern world, Pitchford has information about that, too.

And it's not even the best part.

Healing with Whole Foods can show you
the relative benefits of any food in this photo.

The best part is being able to look at the ingredients of your dinner (or recipe) and say, "I wonder what effect this has on my body." Look up 'broccoli' in the index and there you are, staring at the wonders of broccoli from a balanced, integrative perspective.

This tome is so comprehensive. If you want to learn more about Chinese medicine, if you are the health and food expert in your family (or are choosing a gift for someone who is), this book will be actively jumping off your shelf every day.

By the way, it's a great reference. There are recipes included, but I recommend them only for advanced users who know how to incorporate flavor in a healthy way. Otherwise, you'll end up eating dinner with Blandy McBlanderson. I tried making some of the recipes while I was in school, and my dog loved them! He's a labrador - they'll eat anything.

Nutritional Supplements

When we've begun to eat right but are still struggling with health problems, we may turn to supplements for help. Unfortunately, many supplement providers cannot tell us the actual effect of their product on our bodies. When we eat Centrum or Flinstones chewables, they have a high "nutrient content," but most of it cannot be absorbed and used by the body, so we just pass it via urination or defecation. Many people taking multivitamins report significant changes in their urine color for this reason. Passing huge amounts of nutrients through our bodies is not proportional to the nutrient benefit our bodies are actually metabolizing from the product.

Vitamin vendors may give information about their product which can be valuable and true, given that we apply it to the vitamin and not the supplement product. They say, "Your body would benefit from additional Vitamin D." I usually nod, smile, and walk away from their pill table and into the free sunshine. (Apply aloe vera gel for added Vitamin E and UV protection. Applying it directly from the plant works best.)

Whole supplements are the most efficient method of integrating nutrients into our bodies. Here are some examples of supplements I use:

• Floravital is an excellent supplement for regulating anxiety, sleep disturbance, lethargy and more.
• Emergen-C is an important electrolyte replacement method, which uses much less sugar than Gatorade. (I use bell peppers, fresh herbs, and oranges as a source of Vitamin C.)
• Chinese herbs are whole food supplements that can be combined to balance the whole body, with emphasis on your specific concerns.

Mangoes are rich in Vitamin A

When the "whole" aspect of food is removed by extracting or synthesizing more intense versions of a useful compound, the nutrient becomes less useful. Toss your supplement pills in favor of more nutrient-rich foods. If you need to adjust your metabolism, the appropriate combination of acupuncture and Chinese Herbs will smooth the root of your digestion.

Whole Foods & Our Moods

If you're feeling depressed, I suggest having a banana. If you came here looking for answers and you haven't eaten in the last four hours, please use the time you would finishing this post and dedicate it to a strawberry or something that you find super yummy.

It's hard to think when we're hungry; it's a part of the human condition.We require food to physically relax and without it, we are basket cases. Ever seen your uncle blow up at the staff at a restaurant because of a long wait? He was hungry.

We can pack pills full of all the nutrients in a week's worth of meals, but they cannot replace the food, and we will become hungry. Why ignore the hunger mechanism and give our bodies only part of what they need? Food is bioavailable; we can pack many nutrients into the foods we eat. They are meant to be processed by your stomach and small intestine, and passed on to your liver, where all the impurities are filtered and the vitamins sucked out and plugged into your system where they're needed.

Eating....

• subdues the hypothalamus (relieving it from having to secrete hunger hormones as well as manage the body's stress from its nutritional deficit)
• assimilates essential elements in order to relax muscles, potentiate energy and stabilize emotions
• stimulates the body into releasing powerful feel-good chemicals

 The brain is a great example of an organ that requires a good many exotic substances in order to release and receive its communications with the body. I'm not talking about the "Brain Food" that was marketed in the late 90's; all food is brain food, because the primary substance used by the brain is glucose. Most foods have substantial amounts of glucose, yet we often only provide our bodies with refined sugars, which are more difficult to assimilate than the simple sugars in fruits and vegetables. So how about that banana?