I believe that nutrition, and more aptly, lack of good nutrition, is the number one cause of chronic disease today. Food is hormonally regulated which was a process that literally took tens of thousands of years to develop. Over that same time span, humans ate very similar diets that were largely regulated by what was available. In short, depending on our ancestral homeland, we ate the same foods. With the advent of industrialization, refrigeration, and the ability to process foods, we radically changed out diets in what amounts to an evolutionary blink of the eye. Hormonally, we could not keep up.

Not only has the content of our diets changed, but what those foods are exposed to has also radically changed. The diets fed to our livestock, growth hormone, anti-biotics, and processed grains, and chemicals used in agriculture such as pesticides and fertilizers, have all increased the chemical soups that are bodies need to process and detoxify on a daily basis. The end result, I believe, are the prevalence of chronic diseases (cancers, heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, et al.) that were virtually unknown at the turn of the last century.

In my own quest for health diet is the area that I have most radically changed. By no means do I have a perfect diet. I do however have my own personal philosophy towards food and what I should be putting into my body and this is tremendously empowering. In short I know when I am eating right and when I am not. I work with my patients to help develop their own philosophies and stress that good diet, like good health, is a process. A process that we should seek to improve and incorporate over a lifetime.

My influences on nutrition are many and varied but they include the works of Drs. Price and Pottenger in the 30’s, Drs. Eades and Eades, Barry Sears, Ann Louise Gittelman, Dr. Peter D’Adamo, and Dr. Thomas Rau. I know that there is no one panacea, we all must work to find what is best for us as individuals. I find that the best place to start is with a food intake log. Frequently I will prescribe various therapeutic diets to start but my goal is always to educate my patients so that they may come up with their own philosophies.