9 Ways to Skip the Pharmacy and Use Superfoods As Your Medicine

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The most powerful tool you have to change your brain and your health is your fork. Food is not just calories or energy. Food contains information that talks to your genes, turning them on or off and affecting their function moment to moment.

An optimal diet includes plenty of fruits and vegetables.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Food is the fastest acting and most powerful medicine you can take to change your life. We call this nutrigenomics. Think of your genes as the software that runs everything in your body. Just like your computer software, your genes only do what you instruct them to do with the stroke of your keyboard.

The foods you eat are the keystrokes that send messages to your genes telling them what to do—creating health or disease.

Imagine what messages you are sending with a double cheeseburger, large fries and a 48-ounce cola. Then consider what messages you might send instead with deep red wild salmon, braised greens and brown rice.

The science of nutrigenomics allows us to personalize medicine. Not everyone with the same problems needs the same prescription. Your individual genetic makeup determines what you need to be optimally healthy.

Consider that you only have about 30,000 genes, but those genes contain about 3 million tiny variations called single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that make up who you are. These variations make your individual needs slightly different from my individual needs.

Put another way, we all have different needs for food, vitamins, rest, exercise, stress tolerance or ability to handle toxins.

The key, then, becomes personalizing a program based on your strengths and vulnerabilities—your individual needs. By analyzing where you are out of balance and then applying the science of nutrigenomics to help reestablish balance, you can design a treatment matched to your individual needs.

 Personalization, Simplified

Personalizing doesn’t have to be complicated. The first step is to take out the bad stuff, or the things that create imbalance. Those imbalances include a nutrient-poor, processed diet, toxins, allergens, infections and stress.

Think of it this way. If you have 10 tacks in your foot, you can’t take out one, pop an aspirin and hope to feel better. You need to find and take out all the tacks; taking out just one of them won’t make you better.

The second step is to add the good stuff, including high-quality whole foods, nutrients, water, oxygen, light, movement, sleep, relaxation, community, connection, love, meaning and purpose. When you add those good things, the body’s natural intelligence and healing system will take care of the rest.

Using this simple yet comprehensive method—removing the bad things and replacing them with good things—allows me to treat virtually all diseases, whether they are “in the brain” or “in the body.” This strategy works for one simple reason: the body and the brain are one system.

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