There has been a huge increase in the prevalence of lifestyle diseases in the past few decades. CAD (Coronary artery disease), IS (Ischemic stroke), diabetes, and some specific cancers, had now become the dominant sources of morbidity and mortality globally. When treating any disease or recovering from it, diet & its nutrition plays an important role in all the possible aspects associated with disease management. The food you eat has profound effects on developing and preventing potential risks for diseases. While some foods have preventive & recovering effects, others may result in health decline and other such issues.
Hippocrates, the father of medicine, had also said “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food”. Learn more about “How to plan diet for Patients that will help in Disease Management”.
By reducing the identified, modifiable dietary and lifestyle risk factors the occurrence of CAD, IS, diabetes, and many cancers could be prevented. Preventive nutrition helps a long way in preventing or delaying the onset of disease or reducing the complications of diseases. Much different food and traditional medicine systems like Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, etc.
The movement “Food as Medicine” had been started late back in the ’80s at the grassroots level. The programs were initially & primarily started to make people understand food to manage diseases, not to prevent them. Later, when the prevalence of lifestyle diseases took a rise, food is now understood in both aspects of treatment, i.e. management of disease as well as in disease prevention.
Diet alone cannot treat disease and cannot replace medicine; neither medicine can give you natural & normal health alone. Food and medicine should be used as complementary to each other. This is because food possesses strong therapeutic and medicinal properties, like antiseptic, antifungal, energy-giving, bodybuilding, anti-inflammatory, etc. Due to these properties only food when used in combination with medicine gives better and enhances healing results and speed recovery.
Food nourishes, protects, and energizes your body and keeps it functional. Eating whole nutritious foods nourishes the body better and improves health in better ways. The moment you ingest food in your mouth, its digestion & breakdown start from the very moment, and as it moves further in the body it continues its breakdown. Food undergoes various changes as it passes & travels along the whole digestive tract. Various nutrients break down if different parts of the body majorly digest in the mouth itself, protein digests in mouth, stomach & small intestine and fat digest, though majorly starts in the mouth, but majorly happens in the small intestine. Learn more about “How to plan diet for Patients that will help in Disease Management”.
Regardless of whether or not you are suffering from chronic disease or you are healthy enough, plant-based nutrition and minimally processed foods are always recommended as best. Diets like the Mediterranean diet, DASH diet are considered best for the body. In order to maximize the healing through food one must change the diet at regular intervals and adopt healthy eating patterns, including all food groups and nutrients & non-nutritional healthy dietary components like fiber & water. You can better manage your body with food than with medicine.
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