Julie Dudley, one of the rising stars in the Neways world, shared this with me tonight after attending our first Healthy Homes Meeting Last Night at Newington. This gives you a clear understanding of the type of information that you can benefit from by attending these events, and/or by being associated with Neways.
Lissa Christopher
January 29, 2009
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 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. "I was 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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