Medicine is Medicine. Food is Life.
Statements involving the idea that ‘food is medicine’ go back to at least 440 BC when Hippocrates uttered the famous line “Let food be thy medicine and let thy medicine be food”. In more modern times, this notion has been championed by the alternative health community and, most recently, even the mainstream media is getting in on the act.
At first glance it seems like a fine idea to promote, directly opposing the typical conventional approach which emphasizes pharmaceutical products as the primary solution to most of what ails us. The idea seems harmless enough; even helpful. But is it?
Should food really be viewed as medicine?
The Oxford Languages definition of medicine is ‘a compound or preparation used for the treatment or prevention of disease, especially a drug or drugs taken by mouth’. A quick review of the scientific literature reveals a steady stream of studies showing foods and dietary approaches can do that too, so what’s the problem?
Focus for a moment on this portion of the Oxford definition above: ‘the treatment or prevention of disease’.
Some foods and approaches to eating can indeed have powerful, medicine-like effects on the body, even to the point of helping prevent or cure certain illnesses. There is no argument there. The problem, one that is apparently as old as Hippocrates himself, lies in the choice to view food as medicine at all, regardless of how potent its effects can be.
In other words, we should always maintain awareness that ‘health’ is far more than the absence of ‘disease’, and in this regard, the term ‘medicine’ is best reserved for a substance whose effects either help eliminate a disease, such as an antibiotic, or the symptoms of a disease, such as an anti-inflammatory medication.
Can the myriad effects various natural foods and dietary approaches have on human health be confined to such simplistic effects? Of course not.
Health is the natural, expected state of a human being who is thriving in life at optimal capacity. While there is no drug on earth that, on its own, can contribute to such a state, healthy food is an absolute prerequisite for it.
Looked at from an even broader perspective, it is more important than ever for people to be clear not only on what it means, but also what it takes, to be truly ‘healthy’. For starters, you were born with the innate tendency and constant drive to be just so.
Simply put, health is your natural state.
There are multiple factors which support your capacity to reside in this natural state, with food sitting at or near the top of the list, but the key things to remember are that none of these things come in a pill, and none of their effects stop at the absence of disease or symptoms.
‘Health’ requires much more than ‘medicine’ and, if properly supported, makes it obsolete in a vast majority of cases. Therefore, ‘food is medicine’ is a concept that actually helps maintain in the subconscious of the general public the fractured paradigm of ‘health’ the pharmaceutical industry continues desperately clinging to in order to sell its ‘medicines’.
As the fog of uncertainty that had us all so socked in these last two years continues to dissipate, one thing has become abundantly clear- No organization, policy, or rollout is capable of or perhaps even designed to make us ‘healthy’. For a majority of us, health is luckily derived from a set of choices we make in life, with one of the first and most important being what we choose to eat.
Food is not medicine. Food is life. Start living it.