Nutrition

Dr Barry Durrant-Peatfield and Nikki Tovell.

Nutrition. What do you think of when you see that word ? For most people, "nutrition" conjures up some vague ideas about eating a balanced diet comprising something of each of the four main food groups, and maybe sticking to low-fat, low-sugar, low-salt foods. "Eating Healthily" is commonly associated with lettuce leaves and raw carrots - rabbit food, to most people. But nutrition isn't so much about what we eat, as what our bodies do with the foods we eat.

Linus Pauling, Nobel Prize winner for chemistry, and widely considered to be the father of molecular biology, stated that "the use of nutritional supplements, in the treatment as well as the prevention of disease, is clearly the future of medicine." What he meant by that was that every single degenerative disease and every single case of "natural death" in humans can be traced to a nutritional deficiency. This apparently controversial statement is borne out by extensive amounts of research done in this field; research papers, clinical trials, double blind trials, and scientific evidence beyond dispute all demonstrate quite categorically that this is indeed the truth. In the early 1970's Dr Joel Wallach, reknowned nutritionalist, medical doctor, and former veterinary surgeon, found it to be true after spending twelve years completing 17,500 autopsies on more than 454 different species of animals for American zoos, and more than 3,000 autopsies on humans. Literally thousands upon thousands of articles, papers and books have been published confirming the scientific validity of this theory. Inadequate nutrition causes disease and death. It's a scientific fact. And yet orthodox doctors will disagree most vehemently. This is simply because they are not taught about this in medical school.

What they are taught in medical school is that disease is an invader to be beaten off with the big sticks of pharmaceutical drugs and surgery. What we teach at Foxley Lane is that disease is a sign of an imbalance in the body, and can be rectified without necessarily bombarding an already weakened system with heavy drugs or surgery. Full and active health can be restored and maintained simply by providing the body with the basic tools it needs to achieve this. This means that we have to look at the body as a whole, and not at individual systems in isolation from each other. Everything within the body is designed to work in harmony with the other parts, and if one part is not working optimally it will naturally have a knock-on effect on other parts. Some of you will be aware of this already; low back pain can lead to headaches, a bad hip can lead to back pain, PMS leads to mood swings and depression, and so on. The majority of degenerative illnesses (arthritis, fibromyalgia, rheumatism, heart conditions, diabetes, osteoporosis, multiple allergies, etc etc) are linked to hypometabolic disorders, and those of you with hypothyroidism or hypoadrenalism will be only too familiar with the enormous range and ferocity of symptoms that these conditions can bring about. Yet if you go to an orthodox doctor, they will try to treat all the symptoms individually, never once addressing the underlying cause. And of course, you never really feel well, despite the amount of pain killers, diuretics, antifungals, antibiotics, antihistamines or other drugs you are taking to relieve your myriad of symptoms. Hardly seems fair, does it ?

Metabolism is the term used to describe the rate at which your body performs each and every one of it's billions and billions of functions. At it's most basic, it can be described as energy. If you have low energy, you have a low, or hypoactive, metabolism; if you have excessive energy, you have a hyper or overactive metabolism. Humans are no different from any other living organism in that they must ingest certain substances to provide this energy; plants pull minerals from the soil, animals eat plants and other animals. Even viruses and bacteria "feed", on whichever human, plant or animal they are currently hitching a ride on. No form of life exists without getting nutrition suitable to its' needs. Any gardeners out there will be familiar with the fact that alkaline-loving plants do badly in acid soil, and vice versa. Any dog owners will know that you can't really give your hound cattle feed and expect him to do well on it.

Studies show that humans need no fewer than NINETY-ONE nutrients every day in order to meet your body's essential needs. Please note the use of the word "essential" - there are other nutrients which can further improve health. This is merely the very basic number needed to exist at a functional level. These are:

SIXTY minerals, SIXTEEN vitamins, TWELVE amino acids, and THREE essential fatty acids.

And this, of course, assumes that you have good health to begin with. If you have any history of ill- health whatsoever, you will be deficient in some of these nutrients. Chronic ill-health causes all sorts of problems of absorption too, so even if you think you are taking in the right amounts of all these ninety-one nutrients, there's a high probability that you won't actually be utilising them and will therefore still be deficient. It isn't enough to be putting the right things in - you need to be absorbing and using them too.