Ajit Karn
How Does Food Impact Health: Food provides our bodies with the “materials” and “information” they need to function correctly. If we do not receive accurate information, our metabolic processes and health will suffer.
If we consume too much food or food that gives our bodies the incorrect instructions, we run the risk of becoming overweight, malnourished, and developing diseases and conditions such as arthritis, diabetes, and heart disease.
Diet plays a central role in our health. Consider this in light of Webster’s definition of medicine: “The science and art dealing with the maintenance of health and the prevention, alleviation, or cure of disease.”
Food acts as medicine–to maintain, prevent, and treat disease.
How Does Food Impact Health?
What does food do in our bodies?
The nutrients in sustenance enable the body’s cells to execute their essential functions. This excerpt from a popular textbook describes the importance of nutrients to our physical health.
“Nutrients are the substances in diet necessary for growth, development, and maintenance of body functions. Essential denotes that in the absence of a nutrient, aspects of function and consequently human health decline. When nutrient intake does not consistently satisfy the nutrient requirements dictated by cellular activity, metabolic processes stall or even stop.”
In other terms, nutrients provide our bodies with operating instructions. In this regard, food is a source of “information” for the body.
This perspective expands our understanding of nutrition beyond calories or grams, healthy foods or poor foods. This perspective leads us to concentrate on foods we should include rather than foods we should avoid.
Instead of viewing food as the adversary, we view it as a means of promoting health and preventing disease by maintaining the body’s function.
Here are defining How Does Food Impact Health?
What is the connection between food and disease?
As a society we are facing significant health problems.
- The United States ranks ninth in life expectancy among nations in the developed world.
- We have a workforce plagued with absenteeism and reduced productivity because of chronic health problems, including depression.
- 78 percent of healthcare expenditures are for the treatment of chronic disease.
Many researchers now believe that diet may play a role in these conditions. In the past, scientists believed that diseases such as type II diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, stroke, and certain malignancies were caused by a single gene mutation. However, they now attribute these conditions to a network of biological dysfunction. And the food we consume is a significant contributor to this dysfunction, in part because our diets lack the requisite nutritional balance (Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 2004).
According to the Nutrition Society, Europe’s largest nutritional organization, to prevent the onset of these diseases, it is necessary to understand how numerous nutrients in a diet interact and influence the body’s functions. Functional Medicine is a dynamic approach to assessing, preventing, and treating chronic and complex diseases with the aid of nutrition. This sector of healthcare also conducts research on the impact of nutrition on health.
The Functional Medicine Perspective
A component of Functional Medicine emphasizes on the relationship between diet and health and function. Due to the interdependencies between these systems, Functional Medicine practitioners assess multiple systems, including the digestive system, the immune system, and the detoxification system, when examining the role of nutrition in chronic disease. Due to the fact that 80% of the immune system resides in the gastrointestinal system, a person’s immunity problems may be caused by poor digestion.
According to Functional Medicine, chronic disease is almost always preceded by a period of deteriorating health in one or more body systems. Consequently, these practitioners endeavor to recognize early the symptoms that indicate underlying dysfunction, which could contribute to disease.
Functional Medicine seeks to address deteriorating health in part by supplying the foods and nutrients necessary to restore function. This is a cost-effective, non-invasive intervention designed to prevent disease progression.
Also read: Health benefits of eating well
Example of Cardiovascular Disease
When adopting a nutritional approach to health and disease, it is essential to recognize that a single disease may have multiple causes and that a single underlying dysfunction may result in multiple diseases. Cardiovascular disease may be one of the most prominent illustrations of this concept.
Multiple factors can contribute to the development of cardiac disease, as demonstrated by research. Insulin resistance, elevated homocysteine, oxidative stress, high cholesterol, hypertension, heavy metal toxicity, stress, and inflammation are among these factors. Each of these factors can be influenced by nutrition, and each of these factors affects our nutritional requirements. This holds true for both the prevention and treatment of these factors.
