Let Food Be Thy…
“Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
―Hippocrates
This dude, Hippocrates, lived over 2000 years ago and still could prescribe medicine for virtually every preventable modern Western disease. This is even more incredible when you consider that science is only starting to fully understand nutrition and how it correlates to human health.
This brings up a good point. It’s this: Our society needs to have some dude in a lab coat tell us how to live optimally.
What a bunch of bolloxes.
I mean, come on. If you spend some time thinking about this, you see how absurd it is. How many times has “science” had to say “we were wrong”?
The answer is a lot. Hell, at one point, doctors didn’t wash their hands before surgery, and millions died from something preventable. Imagine how many things we still don’t know as a species.
As a society, we are conditioned to need the latest “research” or “study” to help us formulate our opinions. But Hippocrates didn’t have dudes in lab coats, yet he could figure out the most critical aspect of human health through observation.
Was he wrong because he didn’t have some published paper telling him he was right or wrong? No.
Did his patients improve their health by following his advice? Yup.
Do you need a study to tell you what works and doesn’t? Nope. You must look in the mirror and ask yourself, “How do I feel?”
All you have to do is test things for yourself. And this is precisely what you should do because we don’t have all the answers, and it might be a while before we do. (Plus, most “research” is completely controlled and manipulated to reach a predetermined result.)
Listen, I don’t want to rant about biases and groupthink or any of that right now. But I will say this in the hopes that you’ll at least understand how dumb humans can sometimes be.
In simple terms, people yearn for clear, black-and-white answers to questions. This makes things easier for us. We don’t have to find the answers ourselves.
And I shouldn’t have to tell you that the average person is lazy. So when the latest study comes around, people flock to it because it makes the world simpler to understand and live in. It simplifies things.
But here’s the thing: Life is rarely, if ever, black and white. There is always gray.
Now, that said, there is one thing about food that is black and white. It’s this: you have to eat real food.
Until we have the technology to create synthetic food that is “good” for humans, we must stick with real food. It might happen in the future, but we must stick with what nature intended and eat real, unprocessed food.
When you get the “real food” part of the equation down, there’s still a lot of gray out there. Some people do well with fewer carbs, more carbs, less fat, fatter, less protein, more protein, and on and on and on.
You don’t need a study to tell you how to eat. However, you do need to do some self-experimentation. You must gauge your results and how you feel about getting those results.
Here’s a simple gauge you can use to determine if you need to get better at using food as medicine…
If you aren’t under 10% body fat for men or 15% for females, or if you aren’t comfortably “lean,” you need to work on your diet. It’s as simple as that.
There is nothing you can say to refute those claims. Even the most stressed person in the world will be under, or close to, these ranges if they have their nutrition dialed in.
One last thing about the research you should think about. Research costs money, and most of the funds come from corporations.
And here’s the thing about this: there isn’t much money in proving that humans are made to eat real, natural food. Sure, farms and small slow-food manufacturers would benefit, but these organizations don’t have the money to fund research. The corporations selling processed food, subsidized GMOs and grains and corn, and sugar, and the pharmaceutical companies that have the money to fund studies.
Let real food be thy medicine and medicine be thy real food.
