Eat to treat

We know that our diet has a huge influence on our health, but is it possible to use food as medicine for a specific disease? Emma Young, who has type 2 diabetes, is sceptical but intrigued.

hat if you could cure all your health problems and lose 10 pounds in just 7 days? That’s an amazing claim, hard to believe for sure, but I have seen this miracle so many times in my practice that even I am starting to believe it!”

Straight away, the words of Dr Mark Hyman, sometime physician to Bill Clinton, talk-show regular and bestselling author, set off alarm bells. He’s promoting an “anti-inflammatory”, “detox” diet. Well, for two decades, I’ve been in the business of writing careful, evidence-based, often hype-busting stories about methods of improving health and treating disease, and I can’t help assuming this will be like every other fad diet destined to crumble in the face of scientific evidence. What if you could cure all your health problems in just 7 days? Yeah, that certainly sounds like a miracle. And I don’t believe in miracles. But the fact is, I could do with one.

Three years ago, I found out I was in the early stages of a chronic, incurable disease. I have followed what advice my specialist could give me, but my test results have only worsened. Without any evidence-based options remaining, I can only sit back and wait until I become reliant first on a daily pill and then on an injectable drug, while my risks of developing a host of other diseases, including various cancers, soar.

Or… I could step outside the world of mainstream medicine.

I’ve been a science and health journalist for a long time. I’m not about to abandon a belief in the importance of randomised controlled trials for separating medicine from quackery. There’s no chance I’ll take up homeopathy or purchase a ‘healing crystal’. But I am seriously considering an approach that, as far as I can tell, has a growing body of evidence behind it.

It involves thinking of food as medicine, and designing a diet that is not just healthy but can actively treat certain forms of illness. I know there are diets that can help with specific diseases, like epilepsy. So what about mine?

Reference:

• The American Diabetes Association and Diabetes UK have information about type 2 diabetes.
• This 2015 paper in the British Journal of Nutrition by Philip Calder and others reviews the links between inflammation, diet and health.