Food as Medicine - Under the Microscope #2

For years, we have been using the term “Food as Medicine.” But what exactly is a Food as Medicine?

This update, will be putting “Food as Medicine” under the microscope to help you better understand the foundation of proactive healthcare.

“Food as Medicine” is the concept developing food that contains the nutrition we need to be able to manage chronic disease. For someone to be completely healthy, they need to have a suitable diet. The problem is the current food system is focussed on safety, not ensuring that food is sufficiently healthy for us to treat conditions.

A question we get often asked about a healthy diet is “Would it be as simple as eating your fruits and vegetables?”

The simple answer is, it should be! For centuries, foods like spices and vegetables have been used for therapeutic purposes. Many cultures learned to cultivate the land, finding natural remedies for everyday ailments, and passing the knowledge down, generation after generation.

Unfortunately, in our modern world, we cannot trust the source of many foods. By the time food enters our bodies, it has either been overly processed or has taken a substantial amount of time to reach us. This means the food is often lacking the nutrients that were there at the time of harvesting. “Food as medicine” ensures that the food you’re eating is nutritious enough to meet your nutritional needs.

Recently, medical foods have undergone a concept revolution and is now taking a serious place in the Australian health industry. The core of “Food as Medicine” is to take a more active role in what nutrients are in foods. By using techniques that lock the nutrition into ingredients, and making sure that the correct combination of complex, highly nutritious foods is available, we can manage, better understand, and even improve the state of our health. The medical world is now realising that “diet and lifestyle” are legitimate methods of improving our health as an effective way to complement pharmaceutical medications. A recent example of this is the acknowledgement by Diabetes Australia that lifestyle interventions (through highly controlled diets) can allow certain people living with Type 2 Diabetes to enter remission.

One thing is still certain, food will always form the foundation of health and if we can find a way to use that to benefit those with life-long illnesses, then medical foods will lay the groundwork for continued innovation in healthcare and treatment.

One of the major issues with Lifestyle diseases, such as Type 2 diabetes or chronic inflammation, is that as far as the body is concerned everything is normal. This is why medications tend to only mask the symptoms and get less effective over time. What is needed is to “reset” the bodies inflammatory state to a normal baseline. NutriKane D is one of the very first “food as medicine” products that was designed specifically to re-educate your biochemistry. As an active prebiotic it increases the probiotic bacteria, reduces the inflammatory bacteria and allows the microbiome to produce molecules essential to reducing inflammation and improving metabolism (sometimes called postbiotics). The foods in NutriKane D also provide minerals essential to Glucose Homeostasis (controlling high blood sugar). By providing comprehensive benefits the results are clear and proven – NutriKane D makes us all more healthy.

Over the coming updates we will explain more about “Food as Medicine” and key components to help our customers.