To me, the way western medicine operates is it is one pill for every ill. They treat the symptoms with pharmaceutical plasters and just send you on your way. I had a lot of respect for medicine so I was not going in as a sceptic, but most doctors do not address diet or lifestyle once they send you on your way with prescriptions. So we go to them scared and confused expecting them to be experts in all things health and wellness but not when it comes to nutrition. A skin condition, a mental condition or a degenerative disease they say diet has no effect. I think science literacy is so important and I like to remind people that it is good to be a sceptic but what is not good is to be a cynic. So many doctors have been put through the medical school ringer and there is not that there is a malevolent thing where doctors are trained to dismiss alternative approaches. I realised that a lot of drugs have no disease modifying effect, they are of limited efficacy and they are basically dopamine or neurotransmitter boosters.
I looked at Pub Med and looked at potential dietary and lifestyle interventions and I realised that when it comes to a lot of degenerative diseases they start in the brain decades before the first symptom so almost in tandem with my quest to see if there was anything out there I also got interested in the notion of prevention. It was also a window of opportunity for me to change my diet and lifestyle to protect my body and my brain from ever having to go through this myself. I had also seen a TED talk by Terry Wahls, it was funny how foreshadowing it was that I really had loved that Ted talk when I had watched it. But it is something that I had remembered seeing when I thought about where it might go, clues as to how diet and lifestyle will effect your function as she talks about diet and lifestyle in multiple sclerosis. I stumbled upon a link that in some cases Alzheimer was related to diabetes.
Working for the Priory and in health and wellness has exposed me to a different side of health care that I had previously seen. Service and organization were not assets of the county and yet its role in the public health "ecosystem" was and is critical.
To this day I still receive push back when consulting people about their diet choices, one of the main ones is bread, bread to me is the ultimate processed food masquerading as a health staple. People do not realise that wheat needs to be extremely processed for us to be able to eat it. And for one I notice the decline in movement. I started to think with scepticism over food and products that have been in the human food supply for shorter periods of time so rather than look at fairly new food products and dietary constructs as being innocent until proven guilty I realised we should start seeing these products as guilty until proven innocent. I realised that some of these foods we are literally 'fed' as a modern construct that has no basis in scientific evidence. Most of our dietary requirements stem from epidemiology and nutrition science in humans is very difficult to do this sort of research. When I looked into studies I started to see how you can look at populations and their health span and how they eat, free of chronic disease. And putting into practice all of the things I was learning from an evolutionary lens the kind f diet that we might want to consume to help our brains not only survive but thrive and putting them into practice in my own life and I noticed that my brain started working better as well. I struggled with grades growing up these are aspects of ones cognitive abilities called executive function. This is thought to be more important than ones IQ. This includes abilities like focus and being able to tune out distractions, planning, decision making as I started putting these practices into play in my own life. For example, leafy greens, which contain carotenoids, in particular lutein and zeaxanthin which are found in vegetables (kale, spinach, rocket) and egg yolks.