The Tao Of Nutrition - Why Healing Diets Can Help
by Rebecca
Prescott
zone3
Annemarie Colbin, in her book, Food and Healing, presents a chapter on
altering diet to combat specific conditions. Her recommendations are based
on her own experience as a student of macrobiotics and health food, and a
teacher of natural healing and balanced eating. As well as her
observations of those whom she treated in consultations, and the
transformations of her students over the years. Despite her background in
macrobiotics and vegetarianism, Annemarie isn't dogmatic about food - she
recognizes that what is healing for one person, during a particular period
of their life, may not be healing for others, or even for that same person
at different stages of their life.
She takes as her cue the fact that regular foods have been used for
their medicinal value in most traditional cultures. The underlying
principle is one of restoring balance. Illness is considered a state of
imbalance within the body. And like in homeopathy, she believes that
remedies can cause similar symptoms to that which they cure - if the
symptoms they can cure are not present, and they are taken in sufficient
quantity. So, the remedy should no longer be taken once the symptoms of
imbalance, the illness or condition, disappears. Otherwise, the remedy may
in fact cause similar symptoms to reappear. If this is the case, the
remedy should not be taken again, as the remedies are (according to this
principle), causing the new symptoms. Serious medical conditions she does
not rely on food cures for. She recognizes that Western medicine also has
its place. But food being what it is, can also be a useful healing adjunct
in those situations.
One thing that impressed her was food's ability to alter our metabolism
quickly. She described this epiphany after cooking a meal for some South
American friends, who were used to a diet that was high in protein and
fats. When they ate the meal prepared by her, which was high in complex
carbohydrates like whole grains and legumes, and low in fat, sugar (for
dessert), and low in protein, they found alcohol affected them in a way it
usually didn't. The same amount they normally drank, which did not make
them drunk with their usual fare, got them quite tipsy on hers. She
observed from this that alcohol, being expansive in nature, balanced out
the highly contractive protein and fat they normally ate. These ideas, of
particular foods having an expansive or contractive nature, is one that
she learnt from the Oriental healing systems she studied.
This approach touches on a core difference between Western
understanding of both food, and medicine, and traditional Chinese
medicine's (TCM). TCM has as its conceptual underpinning, the study of
relationships between things. Western approaches, to both nutrition and
medicine, are based on a reductionist approach. They explore isolated
nutrients, diseases that are studied under the microscope, with a symptom
that then suggests possible causes, defined within a narrow and static
frame. Ted Kaptchuk illustrates this when he describes how, when he was
studying TCM in Macao, one of his teachers was talking about shingles. His
teacher described how shingles on the face was different to shingles
elsewhere, say, on the trunk. The reason behind this was that "the Chinese
view demanded another perspective - seeing the relationship of the symptom
to the whole body". (Kaptchuk) he goes on to say: "The question of cause
and effect is always secondary to the overall pattern...The total
configurations, the patterns of disharmony, provide the framework for
treatment." (Kaptchuk)
References: Ted Kaptchuk, Chinese Medicine, The Web That Has No Weaver
(Rider Books, London)
Annemarie Colbin, Food As Healing (Ballantine
Books, New York)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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