While neurological diseases and “mental illnesses” appear to be a vast pool of suffering with diverse causes, mostly unknown, I continue to propose a simple and obvious approach to prevention and treatment of disease. I have written about nutritional programming (NP), an ambitious approach to diet design that addresses all the complicated issues of resolving health problems related to food intake, a form of molecular engineering or programming. Good, Fernandes and West stated in their review of Nutrition and Immunity many years ago: “We look forward to the time when the prophylactic and therapeutic potential of scientifically controlled diet, along with cellular, molecular, and hormonal engineering, may be realized and applied. Freedom of many disorders which have historically deprived us of our genetic legacy of a long and healthy life is certainly a worthwhile objective."
The food supply is critically important to brain function. There are many ideas which link food ingestion and the environment to brain dysfunction and disease. We can ask some simple questions to inspire further inquiry, such as: Are mental and neurological diseases diet related? Are the victims deficient in critical nutrients, or poisoned by excesses of nutrients? Are some dementias caused by the toxicity of food additives, pesticides and/or food contaminants? Do these diseases combine food toxicity and food allergy and emerge slowly in complex combinations? Do the most afflicted people drink more alcoholic beverages, tea, and coffee; eat more fast foods, cheese, bread, or meat? Where do they live? What environmental toxins are common in their food, water and air?
These and related questions about diet and disease have never been answered in terms of meaningful research; however, there are a thousand clues in the research literature which point to diverse problems and many potential solutions . My experience with food-related psychopathology suggests that modern diets are probably responsible for cerebrovascular disease, most strokes, all diabetic neuropathies, some learning and behavioral problems in children, some mental illness, some depressions, some dementias and some neurological disease of undefined origin. The mechanisms are of these disorders are multiple and complex.
You can imagine an alternative world. For example, what if no-one ate too much of the wrong food and everyone did physical work every day? What if the consumption of tobacco, caffeine and alcohol disappeared suddenly? Would you expect humans in general would feel and function better? Would babies be born healthier? Would babies’ brains work better?
What if packaged, processed, fast foods disappeared tomorrow and every child ate more fruits and vegetables? What if children took a balanced vitamin-mineral supplement everyday? Would all those children feel and function better? Would their IQ scores be higher? Would they do better in school? What if combustion engines were replaced by fuels cells converting hydrogen to water? There would be no toxic hydrocarbons, less carbon monoxide and less carbon dioxide.
What if vehicular traffic vanished from cities and paved areas were replaced with walking and cycling paths, gardens, orchards, and flowers? What if vegetables were grown in market gardens within cities where parking lots used to be? Would human brains work better? Would urbanites be healthier, happier and more productive? Why not continue imagining how you would construct an ideal world? You cannot imagine an ideal world without imagining an ideal diet and an ideal environment to live in.
Nutrition can be thought of as an idealized, abstract look at the possible (but not real) outcomes of eating food. The role of foods themselves, as objects of behavior and regulators of internal body dynamics, are relatively ignored. The possibility of things going wrong with digestion, absorption, and metabolism and with immune surveillance of these processes, while considered in medical science, is seldom a concern in medical practice. The dietitian often assumes that nothing will go wrong with food-body interactions - nutrients that are in the food are available to the body without complications. A physician generally assumes that nothing will go wrong during the processing of food or will consider a small number of adverse effects ignoring a number of pathological possibilities that may be the key to enigmatic disease.
To pursue a strategy of nutritional therapy, you assume that things routinely go wrong with food-body interactions. Since food ingestion creates dysfunction and disease by a variety of mechanisms, nutritional therapy is based on removing the causes of illness by correcting a faulty food supply. The supreme technique of nutritional therapy is, therefore, diet revision, a strategy of correcting disease by modifying food choices and eating behaviors.
Proper diet revision restores control over a confusing, chaotic set of circumstances and symptoms. A systematic method of diet revision with full participation of the patient in evaluating and selecting foods has never been included in medical practice. Efforts to change a patient’s food supply also encounter the irrational elements of eating behavior. Diet revision often turns into a struggle with fast foods, compulsive eating, emotional issues, family and societal issues.
The Alpha Nutrition Program evolved as a standard method of diet revision. The program should be viewed as a prototype that encourages the development of nutritional therapy as a systematic study. Since resolving delayed patterns of food allergy in common disorders such as eczema, migraine, asthma, and irritable bowel were priorities, this method of diet revision was influenced by allergy practice. The basic idea is to reduce or eliminate problem foods first. Once a patient clears their original symptoms, they have heightened reactivity and food challenges are more unpleasant, risky, and obvious.
Human Brain in Health and Disease by Stephen Gislason MD
