The Fear of Food

The fear of food is very common. Consumers, already damaged by ill-advised and destructive government health campaigns (1, 2), worry about the rising tide of cancer, heart disease, dementia, allergy, IBS … and they know that something is very wrong with the food we eat. We push the sugar, salt, trans fats and gluten to the side of our plates and run, screaming, to macrobiotic, organic, clean. But the public health stats reveal that we continue to get fatter and sicker, and that we are right to be afraid of our food. Hence the huge demand for nutritional supplements, the holy relics of our age.

Big Pharma fears healthy food for a different reason; they see it as a substantial threat to their profits. This is why they collaborate with Big Phood, who make so many of us ill with their ultra-processed malware and produce a constant stream of clients for Big Pharma.

Doctors are generally untrained in nutrition, but they too understand that the modern diet is dangerous. Most of them, however, dislike nutritional supplements. They see the market as unscientific and dishonest, and rightly so.

Fish oil, the single largest sector of the supplement industry, is no more than modern snake oil (3); multivitamins, the second largest, are another waste of money (ie 4).

Doctors’ fear of food is a higher form than ours, being altogether more focussed and more ‘scientific’. It is called brumotactillophobia. This refers to the fear of different foods touching, and is usually considered to be a mild variant of OCD. They are very selective about it, however. They are mostly happy to eat the slop served up in the typical hospital canteen, and ultra-processed snack foods from the vending machines in the hallway, but they draw the line when it comes to pharmaconutrition.

Pharma-trained doctors and scientists get very hot and bothered about the idea of combinatorial nutritional formulations. They argue that if you take a broad-spectrum nutritional support program (such as Xtend), or even a simple combination of nutrients (such as Balance oil), and you then get better, how can you tell which nutrient made the difference? This, they say, is not science.

Of course, this position is absurd. It is an unthinking hangover from their pharma training, where medics are trained to shoot a magic bullet at a patient and measure the outcome in terms of reduced symptoms. This monotherapeutic approach may be appropriate when dealing with xenomolecules (drugs) which attempt to target a single receptor, enzyme or gene, but it is absolute nonsense when it comes to nutrition.

Because urban and metropolitan humans now live at around 2000 Kcalories / day, and consume large amounts of ultra-processed foods, most people today have Type B malnutrition; that is, they are depleted in most micro- and phytonutrients. This causes obesity, chronic inflammation, dysbiosis, immune dysfunction and impaired healing (5-9), which in turn drive the pandemics of chronic degenerative disease that disfigure our public health (10-14).

Given that most people today are multiply depleted, and given that the degenerative diseases are driven by multiple metabolic imbalances largely due to those multiple nutritional weaknesses, it is profoundly illogical to think that a single nutritional input – such as fish oil, vitamin C or selenium – could have any significant effect. The metaphor I often use when I teach doctors is that typical patients (and certainly older patients) are like chronically under-maintained cars, and when you examine them you inevitably find multiple pathologies (15-19). They have worn or flat tires, their air and oil filters are clogged, the spark plugs are worn out, the shocks are failing and the electrical system is on the blink (20-21). Does it seem likely that performance will change significantly if you top up the wiper wash? Of course not. That car needs a long-overdue overhaul, with a comprehensive check list of items to measure, monitor and probably replace. And that patient requires multiple nutritional inputs to damp chronic inflammation, to rectify dysbiosis and to provide all the many co-factors needed for tissue repair and regeneration.

This is why drugs don’t work, other than to treat symptoms; and why diet is the most effective way by far to reduce the risk of disease (ie 22, 23).

And yet, and yet … 

I was involved in the design of an interesting nutritional support program used by the rich and famous to enhance mood, appearance and performance. It contains an assortment of validated food and plant extracts that have been individually shown to reduce stress, damp inflammation, improve skin and hair appearance and enhance mood. 

This formulation was attacked by well-known scientists who said that while the individual ingredients might have been shown to be effective, this did not mean that they were effective when given together; and that this would have to be proven in a separate research program (24).

I disagree. The actives in this formulation include carotenoids, a 1-3, 1-6 beta glucan, a sterol, a polyphenol, a menaquinone, amino acids and a choline derivative, all of which are taken up from the gut in different ways which do not interact with each other. After absorption they are distributed into different tissues, where they perform different functions which do not interact with each other either. 

To make this point clearer, I would simply point out that all the actives listed above and many more beside are found at low concentrations in ratatouille. When you consume ratatouille, a staple of the healthy Mediterranean diet, do you eat the aubergines for breakfast, the onions for lunch and the tomatoes for supper in order to benefit from all the health-promoting compounds in this delicious dish? I think not.

The human gut is designed to deal with foods containing complex combinations of nutrients, from proteins, fats and carbs to vitamins, minerals and phytonutrients.

There are many different uptake mechanisms designed to deal with these different dietary compounds and they do not overlap or compete in any significant way. Two areas of possible competition have been identified (cationic trace elements, phytates) but the evidence is hardly compelling (25-27).

If we turn to an simpler combination of fish oil and pre-harvest olive oil, it is easy to show that the combination of two sets of actives (omega 3 HUFA’s and lipid-soluble polyphenols) is wildly synergistic (28, 29). We see this in the resulting shifts in erythrocyte membrane lipid profiles and the parallel reduction in the diverse symptoms of inflammation (30), neither of which occur with either active when used on its own.

Oddly, the very same doctors who cry out to the heavens against multi-component pharmaconutrition have little to say about the multi-component ultra-processed foods that are now killing them and so many of their patients (31-34); and they are perfectly willing to practise polypharmacy in their medical practices. Attend the drug round in any long-stay hospital ward and you will see patients treated as drug disposal units, given plastic cups full of differently coloured tablets and capsules. The percentage of Americans taking more than five prescription medications has nearly tripled in the past 20 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Outpatients are not much better off; over a third of people 55 and older are now taking 5 or more drugs, and 9 percent are taking more than 10 drugs (35).

This is one reason why drug interactions, adverse effects and iatrogenic illness are so very commonplace (36); and this, together with our rapidly degrading diet, is why are approaching the limits of synthetic (pharmaceutical) pharmacology. It is also why the next age of medicine will be the age of natural pharmacology, aka pharmaconutrition.

On his deathbed the great Louis Pasteur said “Bernard was correct, I was wrong. The microbe (germ) is nothing. The terrain (milieu) is everything.” We will not forget Louis Pasteur, but Pasteurian hegemony is dead. Louis will be rightfully joined at the top table with the shade of his compatriot, collaborator and friend Claude Bernard.

 

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