Let me share with you the medical school experience. There is at least 20 minutes over 4 years of the medical school experience dedicated to nutrition for our nation’s physicians-and most of it is disguised as rickets and scurvy. There is abysmally little nutrition training going on in our medical schools. There is a movement to incorporate more integrative and functional medicine concepts of nutrition into the curriculum and much of this should be credited to Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona. Dr. Weil really believes in integrative medicine approach and recognized how little nutrition training was going on the medical school curriculum. He and his team committed to changing the way we teach our next generation of physicians. Because of his efforts there are several medical schools that are now incorporating functional medicine curriculums on nutrition into the medical school experience. This hopefully will breed a new generation of physicians that does not look for the pill for the ill but looks to provide their patients with information to help empower them with knowledge to change their behaviors and make good food and lifestyle choices. The key is information and the correct information.

It seems everywhere I turn I see kids and adults with food sensitivities and food intolerances. There is a common misconception that these are food allergies-that is not what we’re talking about. These are food sensitivities as opposed to food allergy. This is not the histamine driven hives with full-blown allergic reaction we think of with kids that have a peanut allergy. This is the sensitivity or food intolerance that can lead to fatigue, mood issues, ADD and ADHD, eczema and skin conditions, and also become the precursor to autoimmune disease. There are several good books out there including Wheat Belly by William Davis as well as Grain Brain by David Perlmutter that really look at the indictment of the wheat molecule as becoming a precursor to many ills.

There are several new concepts coming out about how the quality your food has changed. We now know that a glass of fruit juice has the same sugar or glycemic load as a can of soda pop. We also know that the new hybridized wheat molecule is causing a slice of 12 grain nutritious wheat bread to have the same sugar load as a can of soda pop. We are all becoming more familiar with the toxins and xeno-estrogens in our environment. For example, farm raised salmon was shown to have 11 different toxins in the meat when it was produced for grocery store consumption. It was found that 10 of the 11 toxins were provided to those fish by the feed that they were fed. So not only are you what you eat, as the author Michael Pollan says-you are now what you eat eats. He has several good books including In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and I highly recommend you get a copy of each.

In the past we used to think of food as medicine. But now we must consider that food is information. You are not your genetic makeup only-our future has very little to do with our nature it’s more about our nurture. So even though our genes do have some determination in our health and our genetic destiny, is what we do to the genes that determine our fate. Whether you turn on good genes or turn on bad genes as well as turn off good genes or turn off bad genes can be determined by the foods that you eat and the information that those foods bathe over your genes. This is a concept called epi-genetics and is at the foundation of personalized medicine delivered in a functional way. The real key here is to let food truly be nutrition and provide information to prime your genetic code to allow the body to have its innate ability to heal itself. Every day we read a newspaper and hear the news with dubious nutrition tidbits that come out of the research lab yet are transformed by our media into a message that’s less than ideal. I spend a great deal of my time discussing with patients the items they are reading about or hearing about on television in regards to their health and nutrition concerns.

At the end of the day, we want our families to have the nutrition they need provided in a non-toxic manner that has all of the nutrients we need to provide optimal health. Targeted high quality nutraceuticals are part of the solution due to lack of optimal nutrients in our current food supply. The key is to use pharmaceutical quality supplements like the ones you find here at the Meno Clinic to be sure you get what you need and none of what you don’t!

Mark Menolascino MD, MS, ABIHM, ABAARM, IFMCP