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Resurrecting Hippocrates: Food as Medicine Meets Modern Science. “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” ― Hippocrates . What Is Food? . That without which we can not live (the molecular fabric and embedded Intelligence of our body is w oven from food)
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Resurrecting Hippocrates: Food as Medicine Meets Modern Science “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food” ― Hippocrates
What Is Food? • That without which we can not live(the molecular fabric and embedded Intelligence of our body is woven from food) • Sacred/sacren (to make holy) • Holy/whole/health/heal • Etymology: Latin arsmedicina, meaning the art of healing. What Is Medicine? Asclepius, Greek god of medicine.
Are pharmaceuticalsmedicine? • Etymology: "Pharmaceutical" derives from the Greek The term "pharmakos" later became the term "pharmakeus" which refers to "a drug, spell-giving potion, druggist, poisoner, by extension a magician or a sorcerer."
Food As Information “to put form into” • Calories • Macro/Micronutrients “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are” ~ Brillat-Savarin
The Protein Folding Mystery • Levinthal Paradox: There is not enough time in the universe to allow for a polypeptide to pass through all the degrees of freedom available to it to reach its native folded state.
Whole Food vs. Isolate • Vitamin C is not reducible to Its chemical backbone • Vs. whole food (food state) • Whole food is bound to lipids, sugars and proteins
The “nutraceutical” model • Monochemical/isolated • Palliative • Modeled after similar economics and placebo dynamic. • Reductionism/positivism/myopia
Food As Information • Epigenetics/nutrigenomics • Conformational diseases • E.g. Cystic fibrosis; CFTR gene product misfolded; corrected/rescued with Curcumin/Genistein/Resveratrol
Food Farmacy • The body dialogs between food, producing metabolites, and widely orchestrated chemistries, enabling it to absorb or neglect to absorb a wide range of compounds, as needed. • SNPs are not a ‘death sentence.’ E.g. gluten-digesting bacteria and 5-MTHF is produced via bacteria in gut. • Angiosperm-mammal coevolution
Food As Information: Dialog • Gut Brain Axis • Co-Evolutionary (broccoli/intestine) • Food ‘pharmacy’ • 5-MTHF via biotransformation • The metabolome
Food As Information: Dialog • Gut Brain Axis • Co-Evolutionary (broccoli/intestine) • Food ‘pharmacy’ • 5-MTHF via biotransformation • The metabolome
Tissue Regeneration via Nutrition • Heart • Brain • Skin • Lung • Liver Germline Immortality/LUCA
Cephalic (Placebo-Nocebo) • Commensalism • Taste/Oral/Cortical Band • Deficiency/Plenitude • Phenomological • Orthorexia vs. Being Present (the nutritional value of pleasure and guiltlessness)