Month: February 2018

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Your food (Part II)

Foods to eat:
(A general overview)

By and large, a simple diet is the best: meat, fish, vegetables, unpasteurised foods and saturated fats.

As long as what you are eating are ingredients and don’t have ingredients in them (unless specially made for you), you are safe enough.  For example, a sauce  has ingredients in it (including sugar), but pickles, onions or beetroots are ingredients.

Make sure that everything is as organic and free-range as possible, due to the toxic effects of sprays and the stress on and toxins put into animals.  Remember: what goes into them, goes into you.

Cook your food in a simple way: grilling, frying with a saturated fat of some kind, steaming, boiling or any other straightforward way you can think of.  Above all, do not use the microwave!

Saturated fats include: duck fat, lamb fat, beef fat (known as tallow), pig fat (known as lard), unpasteurised butter and coconut oil.  However, with coconut oil, some people can’t handle it, so be careful.  With all these fats, you can use them a few times, before needing to renew them.  They do not go off very easily, so you can keep them a long time (years even).

The best salt to use is Maldon Sea salt rather than any other type.  This is the only one I have found that everyone can tolerate.  A lot of people can’t handle the newly popular Himalayan pink, though they don’t realise it.  Just because it is popular does not mean it is necessarily good for you.  There is no such thing as ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to diet.  And just because you can’t feel any immediate negative effects from something, doesn’t mean it isn’t bad for you.

If you really want some bread of some kind, go for the gluten-free ones.  Although I would not normally promote them, they are an alternative.  Otherwise, eat brown bread or seeded bread.  However, if you can avoid it altogether, that would be best.

Make fruit a treat, rather than a staple.  Nuts are alright as long as you eat them within a short period after having bought them as they can go rancid very quickly.  Naturally, be careful about allergies.

And lastly, of course, make sure to drink plenty of water every day, a minimum of one and a half litres, as long as it is not tap water.  Even with our wonderful modern day technology that provides clean water, it still contains chemicals that are bad for the body.

If you eat cheap food, you will have cheap health, but if you eat good food, you are more likely to have good health.

Good health to you.

 

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‘Ask the Doctor’ with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee

Hosted by Nutrilink Ltd

On Friday, 19 January 2018, Nutrilink hosted an event called ‘Ask the Doctor’ in which three doctors (Dr Rangan Chatterjee (author of The four pillar plan), Dr Ayan Panja and Dr Sarah Davies ) who currently work for the NHS gave their views, mainly, on how to approach a doctor when you need to see one, but they also touched on a number of other subjects.

I do not trust doctors as a general rule because I believe them to be brainwashed by pharmaceuticals.  I have been told by enlightened doctors who have lectured at Nutrilink in the past, that they are not taught to think, but rather to regurgitate.   This is true of our entire school system.  Nevertheless, I found it interesting to see the other side at this event.

All the doctors at ‘Ask the Doctor’ portrayed a different image: overworked (but not underpaid) people who have their own personal worries which include a fear of malpractice accusations, which means  they are reluctant to go outside the bounds of what they have been taught.

They are taught in a certain way, which makes it difficult for them to think of things in any other way.  Therefore, the moment you present them with a symptom, they start going through their personal protocols and experience to figure out what the problem could be, after which, they go through their own list of medicines that they are familiar with.  Allowing the doctor time to think reduces pressure on them and helps create a better rapport for the future.

The best way to approach a doctor, it would seem, would be to make your own suggestions as to what may be the matter thus providing the doctor with alternative routes to go down (after all, the doctor does not know the intricacies of your lifestyle and can not be expected to think of everything).   This promotes patient empowerment (which he is very keen on) whereby the patient takes responsibility for their own health.  After all, asking someone to change a habit is far harder than asking them to take a pill, but with patient empowerment, the patient is more inclined to take control of their well-being and cooperate.

It is also advisable to request tests. However, be aware that, as with most specialists, if you ask three doctors for a diagnosis, you will generally get three different answers because each doctor interprets results differently.

What I liked most about Dr. Chatterjee was his acknowledgement that as everyone is different, there is no single diet that can fit everyone, therefore each individual must have their own diet.  I touch on this in my article entitled ‘metabolic typing’.  He also pointed out that sickness takes time to accumulate, so it will naturally take time to eliminate.

Dr. Chatterjee highlighted the peculiarity of how a high carbohydrate diet is causing Westerners to become overweight whilst in Japan, and other countries, a high carb diet has no negative effect (again see my article).

He also advises using ‘root cause medicine’.  In other words, finding out what is causing the problem rather than just treating the symptoms.  For example, instead of simply treating a bloated stomach, find out what is causing it in the first place and eliminate the cause, thereby eliminating the problem.  This also means considering whether or not two or more symptoms could be connected rather than separate problems, which is a very holistic approach.

The Gerson therapy was mentioned  as well, but I am unable to remember in what respect.

Thanks to Dr. Chatterjee and all those like him, the tide is gradually turning in favour of treating patients as individuals and in a holistic manner.

At the end of the session, there was a Q&A opportunity in which I asked the single question I have been longing to ask a doctor for quite some time:  How much nutritional education do doctors get?  The answer was unsurprising to me: about 6 hours!

I have heard this before, but I wanted it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

 

Below is the description given of each doctor as taken from Eventbrite’s site:

“Dr Rangan Chatterjee BSc (Hons) MRCP MRCGP – Rangan initially trained as a renal physician before moving into general practice. He lectures internationally about lifestyle medicine which he believes should be personalised, participatory and progressive. He is a passionate advocate of preventative medicine and recognised as a leader in his field, implementing effective lifestyle interventions in Medical Practice.

Dr Ayan Panja MRCGP – Ayan has been a NHS GP partner since 2003, initially in North London and more recently in Hertfordshire. He has longstanding interests in lifestyle and preventive medicine as well as science communication. He is a clinical assurance adviser for NHS Choices.

Dr Sarah Davies – Dr Davies is a GP working one day in the NHS in Stockport and also in private practice as a Functional Medicine specialist. A graduate of the University of Manchester, she began her medical career in hospitals in the North West of England and has been working as an NHS doctor for the past 14 years. Sarah is passionate about empowering patients to take control of their own health through diet and lifestyle changes and uses Functional Medicine approaches in both her private and NHS work.”