Take Two Carrots and Call Me in the Morning

You go to see your doctor with a complaint. You cough as the cold stethoscope moves over your back. You gag as you say aaaah and she looks down your throat. A few pokes and prods later and the doctor sits at her computer inputting your prescription.

If you are visiting a traditional doctor, chances are that prescription is for a pharmaceutical medication, maybe for more than one. And that medication is added to what you are already taking (nearly 70% of Americans are currently taking at least one prescription drug). Everything, even systemic conditions are treated, by default, with pills.

This is partly due to the way we assess the effectiveness of medications and think of diseases. We are really good at treating and understanding syndromes that have a single cause and a point solution (usually a pill). But most of what happens to us, and all chronic diseases don’t have a single cause. Instead, they are breakdowns of our systems. We may be missing nutrients or reacting to chemicals or imbalances in our bodies. We may be processing toxins from our environment. We may be turning stress into physical ailments. Generally, if there is something wrong, it’s more complicated than a virus, an infection, or an injury.

Especially over the past few years, we have begun to understand syndromes that aren’t single cause or single effect. Enormous strides have been made in systems biology. And while we are still often looking at single systems or fractions of systems, or single mechanisms in our bodies, we are getting better at knowing we are only seeing part of the picture. We are beginning to have the epistemic modesty to acknowledge that we don’t know it all and need to study systems of systems rather than just single causes. And this modesty should prevent us from looking to a pill for a solution. Instead we need to rebalance systems, repair mechanisms, provide the raw materials for our bodies to work as designed.

One thing we are learning is that our diet is poisoning us. The American grocery store is full of foods that have sugar where sugar is not needed and salt where salt is an additive. Most of our processed foods are full of chemicals that are added to change or preserve color or maintain shelf life. In small amounts, most of these chemicals are likely harmless. But we don’t get small amounts. They are in everything.

Our diet is the source that causes chronic inflammation in our bodies, starting in our gut, but spreading throughout our bodies. This inflammation is a principal cause of many of our chronic diseases like diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. And this inflammation interferes with our body’s natural defenses against other types of diseases, making us vulnerable and much sicker than we should be.

Rather than looking for a pill or drug that fixes the symptoms, we need to look at our lives. It is almost a trope that we need a good diet, exercise, enough sleep, respite from stress – all the things we’ve known for years but discounted in favor of the quick fix pill. And one of those keys is diet.

Even when we get beyond the additives, sugar, salt, preservatives, dyes, and other crap that’s in our food, even the raw food is not as good as it was. Most foods today are grown using farming techniques that destroy the soil and make it harder for the plants to get nutrients. As a result, today’s food has typically 30-50% less of the nutrients that were found in the same foods when the USDA was doing their original tests in the 1930’s.

As we reimagine community, we need to address health in completely different ways than we do today. We need to have health care rather than sick care. And this starts with food. Our reimagined community will restore nutrition to food by restoring the soil it grows in and by growing indoors using highly effective nutrient solutions. We will measure the nutrients in the food so that we know we have accomplished what we set out to do.

While people can and should be able to eat what they want, in our reimagined community we will make it easy to find, purchase, and prepare delicious, healthy meals. And we will provide accurate information about food to the residents. No more food pyramid to misinform the public and get us to overeat grains or avoid healthy fats. Instead of our food making us sick, our food will make us well. Food can be our medicine for many of our chronic diseases.

In our reimagined community, with a doctor well versed in your body’s ecosystem, a doctor that understands how your systems work and interrelate, you won’t get a prescription to take to the pharmacy. Perhaps instead you get a grocery list and some recipes. As you walk out of the examining room, the doctor smiles and says, “Take two carrots and call me in the morning.”