Shifting the Healthcare Paradigm Part II

There are a couple areas of specific interest to me personally. One is nutrition.  Food has medicine-like effects.  Your weight, your muscle levels, your fat levels, your insulin sensitivity, you metabolism, your cholesterol levels, your hormone regulation, just to name a few, are all factors best controlled by good dietary practices: not pharmaceuticals and surgery.

Yes the very institutions which exist ostensibly to help in this area, often betray us. They betray us to personal and political agendas, and most often, they betray us to money.  Take the FDA for example:  the FDA has a long history of making poor nutritional recommendations, starting back in the early part of the 20^th century when it was decided that the US needed an export, a cash crop, and suddenly it became the FDA’s job to make sure Americans were eating producing grains.  More recently, as diabetes was skyrocketing, and Americans were becoming less healthy, they gave us the Food Pyramid: a travesty that, for example, recommends about 70% of calories come from carbohydrates, while relegating essential,  and healthy fats, to the “do not touch” cone at the tip of the pyramid.  Just recently, the FDA did away with our old nemesis the pyramid, and gave us a new one: the FDA food plate. An industry driven absurdity which treats both grains and dairy as their own food groups, abhors dietary fat, and four at of six “food groups” on the plate are carbohydrate sources. So what will change?

An improvement over the traditional food pyramid, but not by much. 

Nothing.  Doctors will continue to tell their patients to each this way, obesity rates will continue to rise, and childhood type II diabetes will continue its march towards normalcy. But there is hope:  and it lies in us, and our ability to seek, find and apply good information which leads to good health. In future posts I will spend a great deal more time and space discussing the importance of good dietary practices, what those practices are, and some specific medicine-like effects of foods..

Another area of particular interest to me, as both a combat athlete and someone who’s been on the receiving end of a couple of pretty bad sport and auto accidents in my time, is injury prevention and treatment, and pain management.  This area, perhaps more than any other, we’ve been told drugs are the best, and often only solution.

A better food pyramid (for non-athletes)

To start, if you have chronic pain, there’s something wrong.  That’s right. It may seem almost too obvious to say, but how many people do you know simply accept some level of constant pain or discomfort as a fact of life? It’s not, and no pain killer is going to treat the root causes of the problem.  However, pain medication does come with a litany of side-effects, often including liver damage and weight gain (so, for example we get a person with chronic back pain who gets put on pain meds, only to gain weight, putting additional stress on their back compounding the problem: happens all the time) just to name a few.

What I would like to focus on instead is the power diet and supplementation can play (especially where inflammation is involved), what exercises can do to strengthen weak links and balance your body, and what alternative pain relief and therapy can do for you.  And when I talk about that I’m talking discussing everything from tried and true, scientifically validated alternatives to pharmaceuticals  such asTENS units and Icy Blue Coolant Gel, to more alternative and holistic approaches, such as acupuncture and massage (which happen to work even better when used in tandem with something like a TENS unit).

Constant or reoccurring pain is not a normal part of life

At the end of the day, we are going to have to put the bulk of the responsibility for our health, and the health of those we love, on ourselves. Yet, we don’t have to do it alone. While we as individuals will be responsible, we as communities of concerned, interested and informed people (online and otherwise) can come together to sort through the muck, and stay on the path to health.

Comments are welcome.