Excerpt
Food and Healing
One:
Health Today
HOW ARE WE?
Unfortunately, not so well. Official reports on the condition of our health proclaim loudly that “Americans today are healthier than ever,”1 but even a perfunctory glance at the statistics tables tells us differently. Although life-expectancy rates appear to have increased, that increase is deceptive: The child born today can expect to live twenty-six years longer than a child born in 1900, but the person who has already reached forty-five today can expect to live only four or five years longer than his counterpart did at the start of the century.2 Moreover, during the past thirty years, mortality for the fifteen-to-twenty-four age group has increased fivefold, mostly because of traffic accidents, homicide, and suicide; it is still, unfortunately, on the rise.
And is a long life necessarily a healthier life? Childhood problems that were rare a generation ago are now so prevalent that they are called “the new morbidity”3: learning difficulties, behavioral disturbances, speech and hearing difficulties, faulty vision, serious dental misalignment. The average child loses three permanent teeth to decay by age eleven, eight or nine by age seventeen; and 94 percent of adolescents have cavities in their permanent teeth.
Dental diseases, especially caries and periodontal disease, constitute the most prevalent health problem in the nation. Ninety-eight percent of the population is affected, and over 19 million adults have lost all their teeth. Familiarity breeds contempt, so dental problems are generally considered “normal.” Yet at least one dentist refers to tooth decay as a degenerative disease that may possibly be a precursor to diabetes.
Equally severe is the incidence of acute respiratory illnesses: Each year, there are an estimated 200 to 250 million cases, and some 2.4 million people (10 percent of the population) contract pneumonia.
A few more facts: Acute gastroenteritis—inflammation of the stomach and intestines—follows colds in frequency of appearance; women are diagnosed and treated for 850,000 cases of pelvic inflammatory diseases yearly; and every year there may be as many as one million new cases of genital herpes, plus several million recurrences, as well as 120,000 cases of hepatitis and 18,000 of bacterial meningitis.
Tuberculosis may have long relinquished its place as one of the leading causes of death, but there were still over 27,000 cases in 1981, 1,900 of which were fatal. Among children, TB is on the rise. Other infectious diseases may take as many as 300,000 lives yearly. The most publicized and feared disorder of all, cancer, now takes an estimated one out of every five lives, or 20 percent of all deaths, up from a 5 percent mortality rate in 1900. In the mid-1980s it trails only accidents and violence as a killer of children and adolescents, a statistic not often noted. Major cardiovascular diseases are now the cause of 48 percent of all deaths, whereas in 1900 they caused only 18 percent. At least one quarter of the population suffers from elevated or high blood pressure.
Poor health does not manifest itself only in strictly physical illnesses. There are also close to 2 million admissions to mental hospitals each year. The Veterans’ Administration estimates that in 1981 close to 2.5 million people sought out-patient treatment for mental and emotional problems. An additional 1.7 million were admitted as in-patients during the same year. At any given time, as much as a quarter of the population is estimated to suffer from depression, anxiety, or other emotional disorders. Manicdepressive conditions handicap an estimated 2 to 4 percent of adults at any given time. Suicide is the ninth leading cause of death for all age groups, and more than 80 percent of all suicide cases may be due to depression.
Violence, directed toward self or others, is a major component of life in the United States and a cause of much fear and trauma. Hundreds of thousands of violent nonfatal assaults occur yearly, including instances of spouse abuse and rape. The homicide rate in this country is much higher than that of any other industrialized nation: 10.2 cases for every 100,000 people (England’s is 1.0, Japan’s 1.3). And there may be as many as 4 million cases of child abuse every year, at least two thousand of which result in death. All this violence is no longer viewed as purely psychological. A growing body of research links mood, violent behavior, and even criminal behavior with various physiological imbalances: an overactive thyroid, an excess of testosterone (male hormones), allergies, low blood sugar. Lead poisoning, vitamin deficiencies, and of course alcohol and drugs all alter physiology as well as mood. Behavioral problems have even been associated with a lack of natural light, insofar as light plays a vital role in the metabolism of calcium, a mineral widely regarded as “nature’s tranquilizer.”
HOW EFFECTIVE ARE OUR REMEDIES?
The general public has a one-sided impression of the effectiveness of modern medicine and its germ warfare. The popular belief, encouraged by the media, is that we owe the disappearance of major epidemics of infectious diseases to medical breakthroughs, whereas in fact, the death rate from infection had already begun to drop several decades before control measures inspired by the germ theory were put into effect, and almost a century before the introduction of antimicrobial drugs.6 The incidence of cholera, diphtheria, dysentery, and typhoid declined after the introduction of clean water supplies, sewage control, general sanitation, and the pasteurization of milk. According to Thomas McKeown, professor emeritus of social medicine at the University of Birmingham, England, another reason for that downtrend was an increase in food supplies and the consequent host resistance as a result of better nutrition.
Almost 90 percent of the total decline in children’s mortality from diseases such as scarlet fever, diphtheria, whooping cough, and measles occurred before widespread use of antibiotics and compulsory immunizations. Diphtheria, for example, took the lives of 900 out of every million children in 1900, but only 220 by 1938—and national immunization didn’t start until 1942. Scarlet fever declined from over 2,300 deaths per million children in 1860 to about 100 in 1918; but sulfa drugs didn’t become available until the early thirties, and immunization didn’t begin until the late sixties, by which time there were barely a dozen or so cases per million. Polio vaccine appears to be the only one to have effectively lowered the incidence of a disease: The year before the introduction of the vaccine, 1954, there were 38,476 cases of polio; the year after, 1956, there were 15,140, and the year after that, only 5,485.8 However, a similar decrease of the incidence of this disease was observed in Europe, where no mass immunizations took place. Most of the current polio cases occur in people who have been immunized. Admittedly, this a highly controversial issue. Parents who immunize their children do so in the belief that they’re protecting them; most scientists believe just that. It will be a while before history sorts out the facts from the myths. Meanwhile, it behooves us to keep an open mind and to explore more fully the role of nutrition in disease prevention.
It’s a sad fact that despite the full-fledged war on cancer with drastic remedies such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, survival rates for 90 percent of the cancer cases have riot improved during the past twenty-five years. Survival rates for breast cancer, for example, were at 50 percent in a 1963 study regardless of therapies, treatments, or checkups; untreated women, interestingly enough, fared no worse than treated women. In 1979, Maurice Fot, Ph.D., of MIT, determined that 40 percent of breast cancer victims died regardless of treatment; 60 percent showed a mortality rate “only modestly different from that of women of a similar age without evidence of disease.”
Technically, modern medical practice is of a sophistication unequaled in history, and modern medicine’s greatest accomplishments are technical ones, involving the manipulation of the mechanics of the body: orthopedics, treatment of burns, cesarean section in cases of fibroids or faulty pelvic structure, resuscitation, microsurgery to attach severed limbs, heart-valve replacements, and similar extraordinary feats. Keeping someone alive through open-heart surgery is little short of working a miracle.
Yet there is another side to the coin, and even the tremendous advances in science carry a high price. “Above all, do no harm” was the earnest humanitarian injunction given to doctors by Hippocrates; unfortunately, with the best of intentions, things have turned out so that modern technical medical intervention produces an astonishing amount of pain, dysfunction, disability, and anguish. Iatrogenic (doctor-caused) disease is the most rapidly spreading epidemic of the twentieth century; its victims are more numerous than those of traffic and industrial accidents, and perhaps even those of war-related activities. As a final irony, it costs money to be made sick by medicine.
Consider: Over 2 million infections a year develop in patient-care institutions (hospitals), resulting in sixty to eighty thousand deaths. An estimated 2.5 million operations a year are performed without real medical need, resulting in some twelve thousand needless deaths under the surgeon’s knife.12 Hospitals can be dangerous places: Nearly everybody has a friends or relatives who went in for “tests” and came out much sicker than when they went in.
