Understanding Food Borne Illness

By Dr. Nana Kwaku Opare, MD, MPH, CA

Bet you didn’t know that despite decades of advances in sanitation and hygiene and food “safety” regulation that the rate of food borne illness has skyrocketed in the US and throughout the world. In the US it has gotten to the point that the majority of citizens are suffering from one food borne illness or another.

The majority of people, who die, perish from a food borne illness. The vast majority of the national medical care budget goes to treating food borne illness. This is a crying shame because these diseases are almost completely preventable and in almost all cases reversible by a change in the diet.

What are these diseases? Diabetes, hypertension, cancer, atherosclerotic vascular disease (the cause of heart attack and stroke), arthritis and others are caused directly by and most prominently by food. Surprised? We have been led to believe that all of these diseases are a result of bad genes, pollution, lack of exercise, or bad luck.

Yes we know that cigarettes cause cancer and heart attacks but did we know that the more of certain classes of food you eat the more likely you are to contract one of these killer diseases? Did you know that despite what your family suffers from or died from you can change your risk of contracting one of these diseases dramatically, lowering your risk, despite your family history to nearly none?

If it could be made very clear in no uncertain terms what classes of food causes these problems would you be interested in seeing for yourself and trying out avoiding these classes of food and seeing if your disease got better? If your doctor were to tell you in no uncertain terms that if you change the way you eat you will get better and likely be able to get off of most if not all of your medicines within a couple of weeks would it be worth it to you to make a serious effort to look into changing your diet? I bet it would.

Would you be interested in exploring the option of changing the way you eat if your doctor assured you that you would not only reduce or eliminate your dependency on medications but you would also lose weight, sleep better, have less pain, get stronger erections (or get your functioning back), have more energy, and look much better?

What if you could be shown how to change your diet swearing off the disease causing foods yet enjoy eating more and have no need to count calories ever again? Would you consider that as an option?

What if the changes in diet that would revere your chronic disease also make a huge contribution to improving the environment while it increased your life expectancy by up to 12 years, would you consider it a reasonable and prudent thing to look into?

Would you consider changing your diet if doing so would prevent or reverse the diseases we are discussing and would very likely save you from financial ruin and preserve your assets to enjoy, as opposed to paying them out to hospitals drug companies and over priced doctors when your insurance balks to cover ridiculously expensive high tech care?

Would you consider it a wise and prudent discussion to invest a relatively small portion of your savings or cash on hand into making changes that could do all the above?

If you could put a dollar value to your life on the changes I just outlined above what would that value be? Priceless!?

Remember the wisdom of the age-old sayings:

An once of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

and

Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.