Welcome to the October Newsletter. It continues on the topic of beneficial and harmful foods and hopefully provides you with some useful information to make your own choice. Yours in health Marion Volk

Foods that Heal � Foods that Kill

Hardly any subject in medicine creates more controversy, superstition, confusion and near religious responses than the subject of food allergy and illness. Conventional allergists and immunologists generally confine all interactions between food and the immune system to the Type 1 hypersensitivity, IgE-mediated response.

While practitioners of integrative and alternative medicine have long recognized the limitations of this point of view, there is no standard alternative clinical model with which to test and assess interventions based on complex dietary manipulations.

However, an increasing body of literature illuminates the potential for more subtle interactions between the gut, food and illness.

Certainly conventional medicine has recognized that food can harm. Doctors have recommended avoiding certain foods to treat common conditions. The resulting low-fat diets for the prevention of cardiovascular disease, bland diets to treat ulcers, low-salt diets to treat hypertension, once medical dogma failed to work and now are relegated to the pile of unnecessary or harmful advice.

Using food as a therapeutic tool in illness is a vast unexplored area of medical science. The power of food as medicine lies in the exact domain where current medical practice is weakest--in the chronic immune, endocrine and degenerative diseases that afflict modern civilization.

The old idea that food is simply a vehicle for delivering energy in the form of calories is giving way to a new model of food--food as information. Nutrients are able of altering endocrine, immune and metabolic responses that regulate the subtle balance between health and illness. As a species, we once ate a complex unrefined wild diet consisting of a wide variety of plant and animal foods rich in phyto-nutrients, fibre and omega-3 fatty acids. Now, our processed, grain and dairy based monotonous diet triggers different and diseased patterns of gene expression.

Dairy and gluten are two generally well accepted food antigens responsible for an array of complex disorders including autoimmune diseases, digestive disorders, endocrine disturbances and neurologic and behavioural disorders. (4,5) Food is our greatest ally in helping to prevent and treat illness, and to help build awareness to create and maintain health. The role of food as medicine, particularly in chronic illness like IBS, psoriasis, eczema, cystitis, arthritis, migraines and autoimmune diseases, where current pharmacologic approaches fall short, becomes a topic of ever increasing importance.

More than just a dressing�.

The health benefits of the Mediterranean style of eating are well known. Besides plenty of fish and vegetables, red wine and fruit, it contains considerable amounts of olive oil. In Crete a recent study showed that even though 90% of Cretans consume an average of 60-70 pounds of olive oil a year per person, the incidence of coronary disease is very low compared to other countries.

• Unlike other oils, it won't upset your critical omega 6:3 ratio and most of the fatty acids in olive oil are actually an omega-9 oil that is monounsaturated.
• No other naturally produced oil has as large an amount of monounsaturated fatty acids (mainly oleic acid) as olive oil.
• Monounsaturated fatty acids, like olive oil, control your LDL (bad) cholesterol levels while raising your HDL (good) levels.
• Oleates in the oil have been proven to promote bone formation in children and protect the bones of the elderly.
• Olive oil also contains vitamins E and K, and polyphenols, which provide you with a defence mechanism that delays aging and helps protect against carcinogenesis, atherosclerosis, liver disorders, and inflammations.

Mediterranean cooking uses another �secret� for ongoing health: balsamic vinegar. Vinegar, an old time home remedy, is a weak acid that has been used as an antiseptic medicine for thousands of years. True balsamic vinegar in style of Modena comes traditionally from the northern part of Italy, near the gulf of Genoa. It is made from unfermented juice from white grapes known as "must" which has natural high sugar content and is typically found in trebbiano grapes. True balsamic vinegar is very Ttrue balsamic vinegar is not easily found in supermarkets. About 75 percent of commercial grade balsamic vinegar is pure red wine vinegar with no must. It is much lighter in colour and has a strong acidity taste and smell to it.

Taking prior to a meal - perhaps as part of an oil and vinegar salad dressing - can be very beneficial to people with diabetes or anyone at high risk of developing the disease. According to the results of a study, two tablespoons of vinegar taken prior to eating dramatically reduced insulin and glucose spikes in the blood that occur after meals. In people with type 2 diabetes, these spikes can cause major complications, like heart disease.

Since ancient times, balsamic vinegar has been used as a tasty seasoning and a healthy tonic. When you make vinegar a regular part of your diet, here's what you get:

• Disease fighting antioxidants
• A natural appetite suppressant
• Amino acids that slow the effects of aging
• A pain reliever for headaches
• Enzymes that aid your digestion and improve your metabolism
• Minerals to support bone health and combat fatigue and anaemia

So, why not combine health with taste and dress your salad with extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar in place of processed bottle dressings.

1. Lindqvist U, Rudsander A IgA antibodies to gliadin and coeliac disease in psoriatic arthritis, Rheumatology (Oxford). 2002 Jan;41(1):31-7.
2. Hafstrom I, Ringertz B, Spangberg A , A vegan diet free of gluten improves the signs and symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis: the effects on arthritis correlate with a reduction in antibodies to food antigens. Rheumatology (Oxford). 2001 Oct;40(10):1175-9.
3. Riordan AM, Rucker JT, Kirby GA, Hunter JO, Food intolerance and Crohn's disease, Gut. 1994 Apr;35(4):571-2.
4. Saukkonen T, Virtanen SM, Karppinen M, Significance of cow's milk protein antibodies as risk factor for childhood IDDM: interactions with dietary cow's milk intake and HLA-DQB1 genotype. Childhood Diabetes in Finland Study Group. Diabetologia. 1998 Jan;41(1):72-8.
5. Farrell, RJ, Kelly C, Celiac Sprue, NEJM 2002 346 (3):180-188.

Legal Disclaimer: All information, data and material contained, presented or provided herein is for general information purposes only and is not to be construed as reflecting the knowledge or opinion of Cambridge Health Centre and cannot be used in place of medical advice