Julie Dudley, one of the rising stars in the Neways' world,
shared this with Laurence Billing (our upline Double Diamond)
after attending the Leverage in Action first Healthy Homes
Meeting, in Sydney on Wednesday night. This gives you a clear
understanding of the type of information that you can benefit
from by attending these events, and/or being associated with
Neways.
Food as fuel...Carole Hungerford says vets have it right.
"Because of the increasing rates of obesity, unhealthy eating habits
and physical inactivity, we may see the first generation that will be
less healthy and have a shorter life expectancy than their parents."
-Richard Carmona, former Surgeon General of the US.
Dr. Carole Hungerford, an integrative general practitioner,
is more than alarmed by Richard Carmona's statement.
She's angry and full of "missionary zeal" to do her bit to turn the tide.
She recently published a revised edition of her book Good Health In
The 21st. Century, which paraphrases Carmona's prediction on its back cover.
Despite Hungerford's personal zeal, her book is not a
prescriptive how-to health guide. Rather, it asks a lot of questions
and suggests, rather than declares, answers.
Are contemporary farming practices, for example, undermining our
health by reducing the nutritional content of our food? Why is there so
much focus on developing drugs to cure diseases, rather than on
disease prevention? Who benefits from this focus?
It also explains how biological systems work, proffers alternative
explanations for the ailments affecting increasing numbers of young
people - such as asthma, allergies and infertility - and quotes
T.S.Eliot and Shakespeare along the way. It lives right up
to its subtitle: "A Family Doctor's Unconventional Guide."
Hungerford, 63, says she dreamed of being a doctor but wound up
focusing on humanities at high school and did an arts degree at
Sydney University before tackling medicine.
Her non-science background has, she believes,
helped her question the status quo.
"Those three years (of arts) were absolutely invaluable because I
learned how to learn....Arts teaches you how to think but medicine is
still fairly didactic, black and white."
And , she says, it's also far too focused on pharmaceuticals.
If Good Health In The 21st Century does have a central theme, it's
the importance of nutrition to human well-being;
that food itself can be medicine.
Doctors, says Hungerford, could learn a
thing or two from vets.
"If you have (livestock) with breathing difficulties,
you don't go putting them all on Ventolin
- you start finding out what is wrong with them
and the first thing the vet will ask is:
'What are you feeding the animal?
Could your soils be depleted?' "
(Her husband is an organic farmer and climate-change activist.)
At medical school, she says, "lip service was paid to nutrition and diet".
Hungerford believes many diseases of the 21st century,
from allergies to obesity and arthritis,
may be the result of,
or at least aggravated by,
low-grade micronutrient deficiencies
that are in turn the result of our narrow,
over-processed diets and depleted soils.
"Between them, meat, milk, wheat, potato and tomato
provide the bulk of the nutritionally significant
part of the Western diet."
Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, by contrast,
ate a diverse range of plants and animals.
What they ate was fresh, ripe
and in season, and the soils everything
depended upon were rich.
Their diet probably provided, she says,
a vast range of nutrients in tiny amounts
and the variety protected them
from allergies and sensitivities.
Hungerford goes so far as to suggest that some of the health benefits
attributed to olive oil in the Mediterranean diet may also be
the result of its breadth.
Ditto the traditional French diet.
"As we move away from the old idea of the five or seven basic food
groups to a more sophisticated understanding of human
biochemistry.... we start to see extraordinary complexity," she writes.
Terms such as phytochemicals, leucopenes, essential fatty acids and
ultra-trace elements are coming into everyday language.
Many of these substances are required
in small amounts or even tiny amounts.
Although they may not be essential for survival,
they may be essential for optimal health."
Hungerford says she used to be a far more
"straight down the middle of the road" doctor
until she spent a few years working in London.
"Iwas in high-rise slums where kids were often
living on Coke and chips. You suddenly started
to see first-hand that your risk of getting sick did seem
to be related to what you eat."
These days, she says: "I rarely put my pen to a script.
I'm not stupid,though. If someone has high blood
pressure I put them on blood pressure pills.
If a child came in here with meningitis.... he would
be mainlining antibiotics and I would be
dialling triple 0. I am still an orthodox doctor in that sense
.... but I refuse to treat asthma as a Ventolin deficiency."
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