(This is Part 3 of a series. Go back to Part 2.)
Supplements were my second big discovery, but not in
the way that I originally thought they would be:
There was a time in my life when I thought that health consisted of basically learning about—and taking, of course—the right mixture of supplements—vit C, vit E, vit A, B6, pantothenic acid, magnesium, chromium, selenium, bee pollen, acidolphilus, spirulina and on and on and on.
In other words, you take some from this jar and some from that jar and some other from this here other jar and—voila!—health.
And I don't want to convey that this did not confer some benefits. It did. In fact, I got quite good at it. For just about any condition, I could tell my friends a terrific combination of supplements to help the body get back
on an even keel.
Perhaps because of that very success, though, it took me a long time to see it: That in the end, supplementation is just more of that fractionation paradigm, where we isolate various substances from whole foods or petroleum or wherever and then try to figure out the right combinations to take to be "healthy".
But you know what?—that's not health. We can't get to the top of this mountain through supplementation, any more than we can get there through any other refined factory product. The same goes for herbs—and I'm not saying that herbs can't be helpful, just like supplements can be—but they can't get you to the top.
Herbs and supplements and "magic foods" and so forth are just, in my opinion, a more subtle version of the drug and procedure paradigm. You know, the paradigm where your "health" depends upon the physician giving you the right combination of drugs and procedures. You know, a stent for your arteries and cholesterol-lowering drugs for your heart disease—that paradigm.
That paradigm rarely if ever gets to the cause of things; rather, it deals in symptomology, that is, the science of dealing with symptoms. We suppress the symptom—for example, high cholesterol—rather than getting to the cause of high cholesterol in the first place, which is diet.
In contrast to this, the wholistic paradigm looks at the body as a whole and says: Only the body can truly heal anything, so let's support it in achieving the highest level of health—and in that process the body will rebalance and rebuild itself to the highest degree possible.
Again, I don't mean to say that drugs or procedures or herbs or supplements or various preparations cannot ever be helpful. In certain circumstances they can be, and there's a place for everything in this world. Nevertheless, we want to take a journey now to a deeper, more vital, more fundamental degree of health.
And that was my third discovery: That this can only really be done through a diet of whole fruits and vegetables. Everybody says to eat more fruits and vegetables, even the government, but that's not what I mean. What I mean is to make one's entire diet out of them. But why?
One of the things that researchers have learned recently is that pesticides are far more dangerous in combination. For example, experiments done with rats show that when one pesticide is added to their diet they suffer no ill effects. When two pesticides are added the rats get pretty sick. However, when three pesticides are added the rats die within two weeks.
In other words, the pesticides work in combination to drastically increase their lethality. Interestingly, the very same principle also works in the opposite direction:
It turns out that fruits and vegetables have thousands of
phytochemicals that play vital roles in the body—from the carotinoids in carrots to the lycopene in tomatoes to the flavanoids in berries and so on. And that just scratches the surface. A tomato, for instance, has over 10,000 different phytochemicals.
Now imagine all of these thousands of phytochemicals working in combination with each other, along with a natural package of vitamins, minerals, fiber and enzymes. That's what we get with a whole food.
Now imagine the various phytochemicals in whole foods interacting with each other—the possibilities very quickly become astronomical, beyond calculation. Science has no idea what most of these phytochemicals are, let alone what's going on with all their combinations in the body. The possibilities are so endless that it may never know.
A number of recent experiments have established now that whereas isolated supplements from foods have no effect upon disease, that whole foods do. For instance, it's been shown that vitamin A from beta-carotene has little or no effect in retarding cancer, but that foods containing various carotinoids do indeed have a profound effect in that direction.
The good news is that we don't need to know about all the thousands of phytochemicals and their combinations since nature has very conveniently packaged it all together for us in whole foods. When we eat a simple peach or plum, for example, we're getting the benefit of all of that deep evolutionary wisdom in a simple, ready-to-eat package.
(This is the end of Part 3. Go to Part 4.)
—jim sloman, 12.2.05
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