FOOD FOR THOUGHT
‘You are what we eat’ may be a hoary old adage but, as author Louise Stephen found out from first-hand experience, it rings true now more than ever
EATING OURSELVES SICK and producing blood-coloured urine which, she told her concerned doctor, she had developed after she’d picked up a bug that swept through her workplace.
The tests showed irreversible kidney damage. The specialist warned this would eventually lead to renal failure, dialysis and a kidney transplant. In time that did occur.
Whenever she asked what caused this, the casual responses from a line of doctors were mostly along the lines of “It’s an autoimmune disease where your body attacks itself’’.
“Really? Bodies just go around attacking themselves for no reason?’’ Stephen asked. “Surely there must be a little more to it.’’
Stephen was not going to take this lying down and whether the results of her research and the direction she points us in as a result are correct, she deserves plaudits for her investigations and her determination to set out all she learned for readers to share.
“How could my body just attack itself? Knowing how hyperintelligent the human body is and the extraordinary lengths it will go to in order to survive, this casual explanation just didn’t add up,’’ she writes.
“I remember one doctor telling me my condition was genetic, that I was born this way.
“Other unhelpful offerings from strangers included I was probably being punished by God for something I’d done wrong; that I merely needed to ‘think’ myself well again; that I’d done something bad in another life and I was being punished in this one; and that because kidney beans are red and shaped like kidneys, I just needed to eat large amounts of them and I would be cured.’’
Stephen’s inquiries led her to a book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston A. Price (1870-1948), who had surveyed the physical differences between isolated and modernised indigenous peoples in the 1930s.
Price had found that isolated groups still on traditional diets were physically and mentally healthy, resistant to disease and were free of tooth decay (Price had a dental background).
But he said his studies showed that for any who consumed the refined wheat, sugar and oil seed products taken to them through trade with the outside world, the negative health impact was “quite profound’’. Subsequent generations were susceptible to infections, behavioural problems, inflammatory conditions such as arthritis, dental diseases and fertility problems.
“Almost 80 years later, the worst fears of many of Price’s research subjects have been well and truly realised,’’ Stephen writes.
“According to the World Health Organisation, up to 40 per cent of Pacific Islanders have been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease, diabetes or hypertension (high blood pressure), which account for three-quarters of all deaths across the region.
“Indigenous Australians are three times more likely than nonindigenous to have type 2 diabetes and 38 times more likely to require a lower limb amputation as a result.’’ DANGEROUS GAMES Author: Danielle Steel Publisher: Macmillan RRP: $29.99 WITH nearly a billion copies of her novels sold, who can blame Danielle Steel for going for broke and hitting the keyboard to reach that magic number? Steel is known for emotional and inspirational stories about family, life and love, so we shouldn’t be surprised that this time around she turns her sights on the First Family in the White House and the complexities of family life for Alix Phillips, the journalist at the heart of this book about power and ambition. After a great loss in her early life, Alix doesn’t want people to get too close, although she trusts her mum Isabelle, daughter Faye and her cameraman friend Ben. With the whiff of scandal in the White House corridors, Alix’s boss sends her to uncover the truth and the tough-girl reporter begins to feel the heat.