Food: Medicine or Menace?

"Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food."   - Hippocrates (460-370 BCE)

Using certain foods as medicine is not a new concept. In fact, Hippocrates, considered by many to be the father of medicine, knew all along about the importance of proper nutrition. So, how have we come to forget this important concept? What will it take to make raw fruits and vegetables become THE staple of our diets? For us, not much from here on out.

We are now coming to the end of our third week with our detoxification diet. The last 14 days of our diet consisted of only fruits and veggies, half of which were consumed raw while the others were either lighted steamed or sauteed in EVOO.


We'd be lying to you if we told you it's been an easy 2 weeks. It has been a struggle to stay satiated on such a limited diet. We have certainly enjoyed all of the seasonal fruits and vegetables, but in the absence of whole grains, nuts and legumes our only complaint is that of growling stomachs. We'd find ourselves completely stuffed after each meal only to be starving an hour later. What we can say with certain validity is that with such limited choices our creativity has increased as we began to treat each meal as if it were a canvas of art.

After a few days the hunger began to subside. Were our stomachs shrinking or was it the fact that we were eating more than three meals each day? Being as hungry as we were our energy levels were not affected at all! In fact, we actually felt like we had more energy than we did prior to this diet.

Week three began the reintroduction phase. We are beginning to reintroduce some of the foods that we omitted in week two along with some of the foods that could pose potential issues with Tia's asthma. As we reintroduce certain foods back into our diet we'll be keeping a diary of any adverse reactions to those foods such as digestion, headaches, skin, energy levels, joint/muscle and nasal/chest congestion. Already we have noticed some abnormalities with Tia after reintroducing Sunbutter and black beans. After eating the Sunbutter she suffered a severe migraine. We'll probably reintroduce it again this week to make sure the migraine wasn't from something else. And after eating the black beans she suffered more bad asthma. She ate black beans a second time and again had another asthma attack. Once we have a new list of possible food allergies Tia will return to her Allergist for additional testing.

And since food origins and quality have been on our mind the last few weeks we've tried to spend a lot of our free time reading and watching documentaries on Netflix. Some of the recent videos/books/articles we've seen, and recommend are: Food Matters, Food Inc., King Corn, Fast Food Nation, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. We have a few more in the queue for our next free evening!