“Oft it may chance that old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

“All my life I have researched and applied nutrition as a solution to health and prevention of diseases. Thirty years ago [1972] I became convinced that nutrition was the foundation of health, which encourages the metabolic system to operate optimally.”

So wrote Dr. Michael Kiriac in his foreward to the eBook, Awakening the Genius Within: The Culmination in Cellular Nutrition (get it free here). Dr. Kiriac is one of the world’s leading authorities in algae nutrition and Earth ecology and the inventor of BioSuperfood bio-algae concentrates. He states later on in his foreward that, “Mother Nature will ultimately sentence anyone who consistently breaks the laws of nature to chronic disease and premature death. The number of people in their 40s, 50s, and 60s with serious health problems that lead to heart attacks, cancers, and strokes is staggering, augmenting, and unnecessary.”

Sixteen years later, can we describe Dr. Kiriac’s words as anything other than prophetic?

Despite the tireless efforts of the mainstream press and its financial backers in the conventional medical profession and pharmaceutical industry, the word is getting out that the rampant chronic diseases devastating society are caused, not by a dearth of “medicine” or lack of sufficient “health care,” but simply by the lack of basic nutrition.

My mother-in-law, a conventionally-trained-MD-turned-holistic-health-practitioner, is wont to say, “Owen, everybody is sick!” Why? Because nutrient absorption is greatly diminished by poor health, stress, and by what we consume. And what do most Americans consume? Processed foods loaded with fillers and devoid of nutrition; fish contaminated with environmental toxins; fruits and vegetables grown with pesticides; meat raised with growth hormones and treated with antibiotics; and yes — isolated dietary supplements created in laboratories that lack the necessary components the body requires for assimilation. As many have noted before, Americans may be the best fed and least nourished people on the planet. While our bellies may be full, our bodies are starving, and without the proper nutrition we fall prey to decay, disease, and death. But it’s not as if we haven’t been warned of the connection between poor nutrition and chronic disease.

In 1982, T. Colin Campbell, PhD, currently Jacob Gould Schurman Professor Emeritus of Nutritional Biochemistry at Cornell University, co-authored (along with twelve other U.S. National Academy of Science NAS Committee members) a 482-page report on “Diet, Nutrition, and Cancer”, the first institution-based report to suggest that diet and nutrition was impressively connected to human cancer. For his efforts challenging the conventional wisdom regarding the American diet, he was expelled from his professional society, the American Institute of Nutrition, even though its executive council had just nominated him as their choice to be president! Dr. Campbell eventually published in 2002 the work for which he is best known, The China Study. Considered to be “the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted,” The China Study emerged from Dr. Campbell’s partnership with researchers at Oxford University and the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine. The study concluded, with much controversy, that the closer people came to an all plant-based diet, the lower was their risk for chronic disease.

Since 1999 the Weston A. Price Foundation has been disseminating the research of nutrition pioneer Dr. Weston Price (1870-1948), who has been called the “Isaac Newton of Nutrition.” Dr. Price’s studies of isolated, non-industrialized “primitives” “established the parameters of human health and determined the optimum characteristics of human diets. Dr. Price’s research demonstrated that humans achieve perfect physical form and perfect health generation after generation only when they consume nutrient-dense whole foods and the vital fat-soluble activators found exclusively in animal fats.” As you no doubt have noticed, the conclusions of Drs. Price and Campbell differ notably, indeed they’re in nearly complete opposition, yet both doctors draw the same conclusion as Dr. Kiriac: proper nutrition is the best defense against chronic disease.

Thomas N. Seyfried, PhD, a professor of biology at Boston College, is a biochemical geneticist who has been investigating the lipid biochemistry of cancer for thirty years. His groundbreaking 2012 book, Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer, argues against the current dogma that says cancer is “out of control,” genetically mutated cells and instead that cancer is a disease of defective metabolism in cellular mitochondria. Dr. Seyfried explores the defects in tumor cell energy metabolism and concludes (as German biochemist Otto Warburg discovered in 1931) that cancer arises from damage to cellular respiration: oxygen-deprived cells compensate for insufficient respiration by using fermentation (sugar consumption in the absence of oxygen) as a means of producing a smaller amount of energy to reproduce more oxygen-deprived cells like themselves. These defective, abnormal cells continue to feast on glucose to reproduce abnormal cells like itself and eventually form cancerous tumors. Dr. Seyfried investigates alternative treatment strategies that target tumor cell energy metabolism including the ketogenic diet, which focuses on replacing glucose with healthy fats. Recall not only Dr. Kiriac’s words above: “I became convinced that nutrition was the foundation of health, which encourages the metabolic system to operate optimally,” but also his astounding success in reversing cancer and radiation poisoning in thousands of victims of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

Interestingly, the idea that nutrition can prevent disease is moving beyond such fields as cardiology, endocrinology, and gastroenterology and into the realm of psychiatry. In a study published in 2015 in the Lancet, Nutritional medicine as mainstream in psychiatry, 18 doctors and scientists on behalf of the International Society for Psychiatry Research noted the modest benefits of the pharmacologically-focused model of psychiatry and concluded that, “[T]he emerging and compelling evidence for nutrition as a crucial factor in the high prevalence and incidence of mental disorders suggests that diet is as important to psychiatry as it is to cardiology, endocrinology, and gastroenterology. Evidence is steadily growing for the relation between dietary quality (and potential nutritional deficiencies) and mental health, and for the select use of nutrient-based supplements to address deficiencies, or as monotherapies or augmentation therapies.” [Emphases mine.]

Though still sadly absent from most conventional medical thinking, the consensus that nutrition is the foundation of health and disease prevention continues to grow — or perhaps “catch up” to some of those old wives’ tales. Next time we’ll investigate how BioSuperfood actually triggers cellular awakening and metabolic healing to reverse the downward spiral towards disease into an upward spiral back to health and vitality.

~ Owen Sweeney