Is Food the Best Medicine?

Or, should we eat what we want and rely on doctors and their pills to save us?
In the early nineties my wife had an illness ( documented here in my book Diagnosis Unknown) that led us inevitably to the conclusion that the medical establishment and big pharma were not making our society healthier. They were, in fact, making us sicker. Actually, they were killing us. Even the Journal of the American Medical Association  reports this: A medical report in 1998 estimated that adverse reactions to prescription drugs are killing about 106,000 Americans each year -- roughly three times as many as are killed by automobiles.[1] This makes prescription drugs the fourth leading killer in the U.S., after heart disease, cancer, and stroke. The report included only drugs that were given properly and under normal circumstances, excluding drugs that were administered in error or taken in attempted suicides. (When errors of administration are included, the death toll may be as high as 140,000 per year.[2] Such errors include prescribing the wrong drug or the wrong dosage; giving medications to the wrong person; giving medications to the right person but in the wrong quantities or the wrong frequencies, and so forth.)
The weak counter to such discussion is: “But think about how many people are helped?” In 2000 the Institute of Medicine estimated that 44,000 to 98,000 die each year as the result of errors during hospitalization. Another 2,000,000 get infections while in hospital and 90,000 more die from those infections. So, the ballpark estimate is that docs and big pharma kill from 300,000-400,000 people each year. These numbers are so astounding that they don’t even register on one’s consciousness. And they certainly don’t make headlines. But here’s the deal: if 300,000 people died in airplane crashes each year we wouldn’t fly. The airplanes would be grounded. The logic of these statistics would lead one  to find a better way to maintain health and cure illness than go to the doctor to get the inevitable prescription. Pharmaceutical medicine is a big business. It’s based on administering chemicals to the patient. They love to talk about their “studies” but they don’t study how a combination of multiple prescriptions affects the user. And they will willingly prescribe awful, debilitating drugs like  lipitor. “Better life through chemistry” has taken over our food supply as well as industrial food producers add chemicals to make foods with long shelf life and pleasing flavors. Read your labels and note how often you will see “sodium benzoate” (used to control bacteria, molds and yeast in acidic foods and also as a corrosion inhibitor in anti-freeze). Perhaps the side effects are minor as noted on this web site but I have to believe that the cumulative affect of ingesting additives, dyes and synthetic flavoring with every meal will be an adverse one. We looked for and found alternative methods of maintaining health and dealing with illness. We thought we were very alternative when it came to our food supply shifting to organic at nearly every opportunity and forsaking foods with chemical additives noted on the label. As I’ve learned from reading Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan, and have written about in several recent posts, our organic food supply is corrupted, hijacked by the same type of folks who run the medical/pharmaceutical establishment.
Food is no doubt the best medicine. But how and where do you find it? What should we eat? Mr. Pollan has some interesting thoughts on this that I will be exploring in subsequent posts. So, I will leave with this question asked by Pollan in his book: Why is it that something so important to our health and well-being is so often bought and sold on the basis of price?