Was Hippocrates correct? Can we cure diseases simply by eating the right foods? More importantly, can we reverse some of the most serious diseases of our time by changing our diet? To many doctors, this idea seems preposterous.
But the answer is unequivocal: it can be done and it has been done, time and time again. In fact, this is the most common strategy used by survivors. Food really can act like a medicine, and sometimes it can even make the difference between life and death.
The best place to start looking for answers is with cancer, for this is where most research has been done.
Doctors using food as medicine
Perhaps the best known of doctors to discover that serious diseases could be cured by nothing more than a return to healthy food was Dr Max Gerson. He developed the Gerson Therapy, a diet-based alternative cancer treatment featuring fresh organic juices and extremely low protein, fat and sodium.
As a young man, he had suffered from severe migraines and had been unable to obtain relief with medication. He changed his diet to fruit and vegetables and noticed that his migraines went away.
He began experimenting, treating people with this diet free of charge. Many migraine patients did equally well. But to his surprise, a friend of a patient, using Gerson's methods, cured himself of lupus vulgaris. This is TB of the skin and was considered incurable at the time.
Gerson later successfully treated the wife of the writer and philosopher Albert Schweitzer, who had severe TB, and Albert Schweitzer himself, who suffered from diabetes.
In spite of his successes, Gerson was wary of taking on a woman who asked for help with cancer. She had cancer of the bile duct, which was already too advanced for surgery He told her he did not want to treat her because other doctors were already opposed to him and his unorthodox methods.
However, this lady
