226 THE (HINA STUDY- beat arthritis
- and more ...
These are only some of the benefits, and all of them can be yours. The
price? Simply changing your diet. I don't know that it has ever been so
easy or so relatively effortless to achieve such profound benefits.
I have given you a sampling of the evidence and told you the journey
that I have taken to come to my conclusions. Now I want to summarize
the lessons about food, health and disease that I have learned along the
way in the following eight principles. These principles should inform the
way we do science, the way we treat the sick, the way we feed ourselves,
the way we think about health and the way we perceive the world.
PRINCIPLE # 1Nutrition represents the combined activities of
countless food substances. The whole is
greater than the sum of its parts.To illustrate this principle I only need to take you through the biochem-
ical perspective of a meal. Let's say you prepare sauteed spinach with
ginger and whole grain ravioli shells stuffed with butternut squash and
spices, topped with a walnut tomato sauce.
The spinach alone is a cornucopia of various chemical components.
Chart Il.l is only a partial list of what you might find in your mouth
after a bite of spinach.
As you can see, you've just introduced a bundle of nutrients into your
body. In addition to this extremely complex mix, when you take a bite
of that ravioli with its tomato sauce and squash filling, you get thou-
sands and thousands of additional chemicals, all connected in different
ways in each different food-truly a biochemical bonanza.
As soon as this food hits your saliva, your body begins working its
magic, and the process of digestion starts. Each of these food chemicals
interacts with the other food chemicals and your body's chemicals in
very specific ways. It is an infinitely complex process, and it is literally
impossible to understand precisely how each chemical interacts with
every other chemical. We will never discover exactly how it all fits to-
gether.