Understanding the politics of food

By Julia Oyefunke Fortune

Hippocrates, the father of medicine, stated, “Let food be thy medicine  and medicine be thy food”.  I find it amazing that even as far back as  400 BC (and most certainly even farther back) ancient healers, like  Hippocrates, clearly understood the importance and even potency of food and its direct relationship to our health.

Yet today, with all of our medical advancements and supposed knowledge of the complexities of disease and the human body, we all too often ignore the most powerful and natural drug before us — food. God has provided us with the  largest medicine cabinet on earth. It is full of everything we need to keep our bodies healthy.

A quick look at the majority of modern  medications will reveal that each contains (or at least started from) a  natural plant or herb that was utilized for its amazing and powerful  healing properties.

Instead, modern medicine has “improved” upon nature by adding  chemicals and other additives to produce often exorbitantly priced  and even deadly drugs to relieve our “symptoms” as though they, themselves, are the disease. Then, when the symptoms subside,  traditional medicine proclaims to have “cured” whatever ails us when  in reality, these symptoms were just that, an expression of something  that is wrong or unbalanced within the body, a warning sign if you will.

Simply removing a symptom does not address the underlying cause  of the disease and although it may appear to “cure” or even lessen the  problem, without addressing the fundamental imbalance, there can be  no cure as the disease will only reappear or manifest in some other  form.

While I am certainly not a doctor, nor would I ever claim to be, I do understand common sense and I think modern medicine has been complicated and even transformed by the ever growing pharmaceutical companies that survive on our “symptoms.”

Again, common sense  dictates that as long as medicine remains symptom driven, this billion-dollar industry will fl ourish.

If something as simple as diet (food every person has access to,) were to become the answer to all that ails us there  would be no need for the majority of prescription medications.

And it  doesn’t take common sense to realize this scenario won’t sit well with the pharmaceutical giants who essentially need us to remain diseased  in order for them to survive.

To me, this is the epitome of irony – companies whose entire mission statement is based on finding cures for  and treating disease, can actually only survive when the very diseases they pledge to eradicate, flourish and spread. This, in itself, should ultimately speak volumes about the medications they produce.