More money to be made managing the ills caused by crappy food.

...who professionally dispatch their talking points, and ridicule any discussions, lest their sponsoring industries be called into question...

...diet can cure anything (HIV, Herpes, Tuberculosis, Influenza, Seizure disorder, Appendicitis, Cancer, aneurysm, syphilis, small pox, hepatitis, ringworm, Amoebiasis,) and basically a shitload of diseases not at all related to diet or exercise.

Diet and exercise can help with things like food allergies, diseases caused by vitamin or mineral deficiency, some metabolic diseases, heart disease, and some other diseases.

It really ain't gonna do much good against Ebola or tuberculosis or Hansen's disease (leprosy).

"Diseases of Civilization" such as heart disease, diabetes type 2, cancer, and autoimmune diseases arose when we changed out diet. Resistance to infectious disease also came with a change in diet.

Modern medicine is very good at dealing with emergencies and trauma, but rather bad at health. It is run by pharma who also has no interest in health as they make their multi-billion dollar profits when people are sick. And many of the things you name such as Ebola, they still don't have a good solution for because they are from a virus and very little works for that.

We have been turned away from lessons that spawned countless generations of healthy people because we have been taught that our diet can be anything that need not resemble food and our lifestyle has nothing to do with our health.

Now present this as a study with a p<0.05 and we'd have something to discuss.

The blanket statement that diseases mysteriously appeared via dietary change is "woo" until proof is given (just as any other statement is). Particularly when deaths weren't as diagnosed in the past, nor as well-categorized as ours are.

Equally of interest is the increased lifespans we enjoy. Sure, medievals probably didn't die of cancer nearly as often. That happens when lifespans are shorter.

Pollution (cars, smog), environmental hazards (radon, asbestos), smoking. That is not to say diet and exercise doesn't impact the rates, but cancer isn't exactly something new to the modern world. We've gotten better at detecting it and people live a lot longer than they did in those "countless generations of healthy people" when 2/3 of children died before reaching adulthood (such as 16th century Britain). Cancer was first named by Hippocrates and likely existed as an illness well before then.

Again, don't misunderstand. I am not saying diet and exercise are not important. The point I was trying to make was that it can be called "woo" if someone recommends diet and exercise as a panacea to the myriad diseases that can affect the human body to the exclusion of medical treatment. If someone has Stage 1 breast cancer, surgery, chemo, or radiation are orders of magnitude more likely to result in a survival than saying "eat this way and get more exercise".

As to big pharma...It has pluses and minuses. I've lived with HIV since 1986. I'd like to think diet and exercise delayed the onset of full blown AIDS (now referred to as Advanced HIV disease) until 1999, but thanks in part to big pharma, I am still alive and kicking 14 years after a diagnosis that would have left me dead and buried by the end of 2000 given the state of my immune system at the time I started treatment had those drugs not existed. I was literally dying quickly in 1999 with 22 t-cells and an uncontrolled viral load (for comparison, the average person has a t-cell count of 500-1500 per cubic milliliter of blood). Do I like the price and some of the patent issues surrounding big pharma? No. On the other side, I'm still here to post this.

Long life to you!

Henry VIII was diabetic. Catherine of Aragon and Queen Mary both had gynecological cancers. And that's just one nuclear family.

If you would like to see a comprehensive study of traditional or native cultures vs. civilized (and all of your examples qualify as they are living off of a heavily agrarian diet with well-known lack of nutrition) then you can read Nutrition & Physical Degeneration by Weston Price. He was a dentist that traveled to find cultures that had not been introduced to modern foods. He found that in a SINGLE generation there was change in bone structure as shown by the teeth, facial development, cavities, resistance to infectious diseases (tuberculosis was a major killer at the time), ease of childbirth, etc. He talked with doctors who treated the native peoples and found that some said in decades, they had never seen heart disease or malignancy. Eskimo males on average were able to carry 100 lbs. in each hand and another in their teeth. If someone who was living on the foods of civilization contracted tuberculosis, one doctor would send them back to their isolated communities because that was the ONLY cure they knew.

Here is an example of the development of teeth in a culture eating traditional foods vs. agrarian foods. Can you tell which one is which?



There are examples of these kinds of changes within the same family. Once the parents adopt the foods of civilization, the problems occur. These two are brothers. The brother on the right was born before his parents adopted modern foods.



The book is truly worth reading and an absolute eye opener. I've read hundreds of books on health and nutrition, it's sort of a hobby, but none is as fascinating and well argued as this one. He studied skulls in burial mounds and found no cavities in any of the teeth. He found the skulls were sometimes three times as thick as modern skulls. He did experiments with people where he added the necessary foods back into their diet to see the results. Things like arthritis or infertility were cured. A woman who almost died in her first labour of 53 hours gave birth easily on her second baby in 3 hours and the child was much healthier throughout his life. He has pictures for all of these cases. It is the pictures that are the most convincing and the book is chock full of them.

Do you know that all animals have a specific diet? Every single one. You would not feed an herbivore meat, nor an obligate carnivore a vegetarian diet. Humans also have a necessary diet, but since we are omnivores, the water is muddier. But that makes the fact no less true that humans require certain nutrients in order to have good health. We are seeing the effects now that we have stripped our soils and moved away from our necessary diet. We are seeing unprecedented rise in chronic diseases. The big clue is now we are also seeing the same surges in children where that has never occurred before.

*throws hands up in disgust*

Obviously, as a student of history, you do know that the people you put up as examples were royals with access to sweets and whitened flours that the commoner was not.

How is advocating that people eat the diet they have evolved to eat being a crank? You mean the lists of pharmaceuticals that most people take today is making them healthy? I guess you have never seen the transformation of a person who cleans up their diet, because that's just woo. Diseases like Crohn's, anxiety, blood pressure, depression, all things the doctors could only medicate with little to no success are safely in remission with proper nutrition. I've personally witnessed in my own family and friends. If you think that eating as the human body evolved, the largest exposure the organism has on a daily basis, is being a crank, then there's nothing more to say.

with him and made some fantastic discoveries. my uncle ended up running the School of Dentistry for UCLA. I cant imagine you'd be considered a crank if you ran a whole department for major university. whatever a crank is?

more than they die from the cancer, itself. it's called cachexia and is really starvation as the body tries to control the tumor's growth by not feeding it. It doesn't work and the skeletal patient has nothing left with which to fight off even a mild cold.

That's one reason pot is such a great drug for cancer patients, it stimulates the appetite along with controlling nausea and buys them some time.

Other than that, forget it. Our bodies are designed to handle a lot of rubbish.

Kidney & liver disease, diabetes. It always surprises me when people discount the original medicine, food.

Then again, when I walk around in crowds today I am AMAZED at the state of health in America today. I guess the conditioning to eat whatever is put in front of you has seeped into everyone's minds and taken hold. It defies logic that by putting crap into your body you can be healthy. That is not true for any other animal or plant, even filter feeders that are the garbage collectors of the ocean are still eating their intended diet.

The rise of human diseases in pets is further proof. Diabetic, arthritic, overweight dogs & cats with asthma and allergies are skyrocketing. It's because we are basically feeding them our diet.

We have cancerous/deformed cells within our own bodies at all times. But sometimes it overloads a weak immune system. New therapies are harnessing the power of the immune system instead of the traditional cancer treatments of slash/burn/poison which truly only have high success rates on fast growing cancers. But medicine has no answer for why, when the tumor has shrunk and the doctor has announced "remission", some people will grow cancer again. Instead of building up the immune system to fight cancer, we decimate it.

But I'm done speaking about this. People can eat how they choose. People I guess are also free to choose the level of health they live with. I have always seen the healthiest, most vibrant people are those that create a very healthy diet and find an exercise they love and ditch many of the prescriptions they thought they needed.

He merely reported that people ate what was fresh and local to their region. And that people, given they had enough good stuff in their diet, including the fat soluble vitamins and minerals which we all are very deficient in, could be healthy overall. Not that controversial I thought, but even that is considered quackery. Obviously from this thread it is apparent that that idea has been completely lost. I'm actually shocked because I know only one person who doesn't acknowledge the link between diet and health and he is the most unhealthy person I know.

Our daughter showed us a documentary "Forks over Knives" when we visited them. Been eating only fresh veggies since.
Hope I am not too late.

I have forever tried to diet and so easily slipped down a slippery hill of "I need protein" or "I must eat some dairy" on and on.

In 2 weeks I feel so much better it is unbelievable.

A beautiful truth.

read some on Gerson - much of which said he was a crackpot.

I had a friend who was diagnosed with stage 4 brain cancer. Diagnosed by two independent clinics. That was back @1998. Last time I had contact with her was @ 2006. The cancer had disappeared in about 6 months. She was given a clean bill of health and doctors were baffled. Far as I know she is still kicking.

She went to Mexico to what I think was a Gerson place. Somehow she beat it and beat a real killer.

too but here in the states she can't use anything to do with the word cancer in it. So most people think
it's just a spa. A Beautiful Truth is also about many other issues too. e.g. Monsanto It's actually a sweet film with a young adult kid just out in the world exploring a lot of different concepts.

....her eyes glazed over for a moment, and she asked me why.

I got a new Dr.

This one understands the health benefits of a healthy diet.

Along with uncooked meat and fish.

rant on/ You spouted a shotgun term and your former doctor probably was tired of people spouting it at her but was too nice to call you on it.

GMO - All fruits, vegetables, meat, fish, and poultry have been genetically modified in some way. You may object to the newer methods of genetic modification. But, do you object to cross polinating or cross breeding?

Organic - Far as I know only limited amounts of fruit and vegetables are grown in hydroponic greenhouses. All other fruits and vegetables are organic, i.e. grown in soil. What you want to avoid is s fruit and vegetables grown using pesticides to protect them from pests and disease.

/rant off

I have spent a few years getting my Environmental Horticulture degree.

Not ALL fruits and veggies are GMO ... if you believe that I don't know what to say....

Cross pollinating is COMPLETELY different from inserting genes from one species into another....

Your concept of 'Organic' is so far off base I won't even waste the 12 paragraphs it would take to explain it to you.

You are responsible for your food choces.

The food industry does not want our food labeled.

for hiding what is put into it and misleading people. Lots of folks can't afford to eat right. Pizza sauce is a vegetable too (fruit).

and hide things that shouldn't even BE in foods in the first place like artificial sweeteners, and then there are the phony "all natural" labels for marketing purposes. It's a myth to believe there's a "free market" when companies spin things for marketing purposes.

my own food.

mine, mackerel.

don't seem to garnish much attention. They both found that high fiber diets protect form the most serious diseases that afflict most Americans. Interesting how Europeans and Asians don't seem to have as many health problems or obesity problems as Americans.

I'll go a step further and say that I also believe that a diet full of red meat and other animal proteins make Americans a much more angry and violent culture. You just don't seem to run into as many angry plant based diet people in the world. Just sayin'...