Food-Related Diseases are Prevalent

The improvement in the diversity and availability of foods has been a mixed blessing with major problems emerging to negate the potential benefits. Food is the most intimate part of the environment because food is ingested. When something goes wrong, it makes good biological sense to look at the flow of substances through the mouth for the source of the problem. Adverse reactions to food are common and produce many disturbances by a variety of mechanisms. Diagnosing adverse reactions to food is an important task of clinical medicine but is not taught in medical schools.

Many years ago, the American Surgeon General's Report* asserted that at least half of all deaths in the USA are related to faulty diet and described: "... the convergence of similar dietary recommendations that apply to prevention of multiple chronic diseases. Five of the ten leading causes of death in the USA are clearly related to wrong food choices. Diseases of nutritional deficiencies have declined and have been replaced by diseases of dietary excesses and imbalances-problems that now lead rank among the leading causes of illness and death, touch the lives of most Americans, and generate substantial health care costs."

These problems include diseases generally acknowledged to be diet related, such as heart disease, alcoholism, obesity, and diabetes as well as other common disorders not generally acknowledged to be diet-related. Changing patterns of food-related illness are recognized. Food contains both old and new problems; the new food-related illnesses are a consequence of our changing, maladaptive food-production and consumption habits.

In medical practice, rationally designed diets are offered for weight-loss, salt-restriction, fat-restriction or specific illnesses such as diabetes. Medical therapy has in the past included diets for special needs, but no standard method of diet revision had emerged to investigate and treat food-related illnesses. The media and commercial sectors, on the other-hand are prolific with diet advice and schemes for improvised diet revision.

Nutrition can be thought of as an idealized, abstract look at the possible (but not real) outcomes after eating foods. The role of foods themselves, as objects of behavior and regulators of internal body dynamics, are relatively ignored. The possibility of things going wrong with digestion, absorption, metabolism, and with immune surveillance of these processes, while considered in medical science, is seldom a concern in medical practice. The dietitian often assumes that nothing will go wrong with food-body interactions - nutrients that are in the food are available to the body without complications. The physician generally assumes that nothing will go wrong or will consider a small number of adverse effects, ignoring a number of pathological possibilities which may be the keys to enigmatic diseases.

*Surgeon General US Report on Nutrition and Health (1987)