Saturday, January 23, 2010

The Dos and Don'ts of Food Cures

I’m currently reading Food: Your Miracle Medicine by Jean Carper. It’s a thick paperback packed with interesting tidbits about how foods have effect in both healing and preventing disease.

It’s interesting stuff but not as easy to understand as one might think. The main message of course seems to be that eating healthy food will help make you healthy. No problem there. Eating certain foods in larger quantities can ease symptoms of certain diseases and even stop them completely. Avoiding certain foods can also help prevent and cure certain common disorders.

The problem I’m finding with the book, though, lies in the need to cross reference each food…if you take more of something to prevent or cure a certain condition, you may be causing yourself another problem.

Tea is a perfect example – it seems to have lots of healing properties and has effect in numerous medical conditions. The take home message in a lot of health related literature I’ve read lately is drink more tea. But tea is also listed as a culprit in the formation of kidney stones [been there, done that, don’t want to go back.] So, do I continue to drink large amounts of tea because of the anti-oxidants and other healing properties or do I give it up in order to prevent a recurrence of my kidney stones?

Sweet potatoes are another suspect on the kidney stone list – and they’re likewise a superfood reported to have numerous health benefits. Another dilemma. By changing my diet to include more sweet potatoes and more tea for their healthful effects, I seem to be putting myself at greater risk for a recurrence of kidney stones.

{Insert big sigh here}. I won’t even mention all the bad things chocolate is supposed to cause because I haven’t started reading this book yet. Of course, I would never give up chocolate, even if it caused sudden, irreversible, flatulent death. Maybe my love of chocolate means I’ll never be fully healthy – or maybe it means I’ll never die. I don’t know, and I don’t care…but I do want to know how I can cure with food and not cause some other ailment in the process.

Any suggestions?

2 comments:

  1. Eat what tastes good?

    (I'm sure the cake I made was terrible for us, but it did release feel good endorphins, lol)

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  2. That sounds like a plan...LOL. I don't think forcing yourself to eat things you don't like just because they're good for you is a workable diet - too bad the stuff that tastes the best is usually on the no-no list. Homemade cake is definitely an exception to the no-no rule.

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